I’ve been spending a lot of time over at Kindleboards in the Writer’s Cafe section. This is where writers come and talk about the business of publishing books online. It’s a great forum and I’m learning a lot every time I go there. Check it out if you’re an author.
But one thing I’ve noticed about a lot of the authors that go there is that they are writing snobs.
I’m finding out how the mind of a professional author works for the first time and it’s fascinating to me. Mostly because I’m a marketer, who wants to be a writer. So I think differently. I think first about marketing and sales, and they think first about “craft” and grammar.
Nothing wrong with that. It’s ok to be snobbish. I’m a marketing snob.
I’m just wondering though how many writers have never found success because of their hangups on good marketing and sales? Every time a marketing tactic is brought up there there’s a string of angry authors yelling about “spam” and “scammers” and whatnot.
I have a message for writers. Not every marketing tactic is spammy. Not every marketing idea is a “deceitful ruse to get someone to buy their book”.
Lighten up, you’ll sell more books.
The role of good marketing is to educate people about a product/service. Not to lie to get them to buy something they don’t need.
Artists, in my experience, are worse. About four years ago I was going to write a book (self published, you'd be proud) about a certain print on demand company. After I introduced myself to their community and told them what I would be doing, they treated me like a sub-human. I was accused of trying to profit off of them (somehow) and I was called, most memorably, a snake oil salesman. Why?
Because the book was to be called "Success with Imagekind.com", a follow-up to my moderately successful (and also self-published!) "Success with CafePress.com" and these artists decided that I was more interested in sales than in the high cultural value of art. It never occurred to them that they were part of the Imagekind community and Imagekind was a venue for *selling art*. It's not like I went to a community of artists that had no interest in making money (so I thought) because ostensibly, these cats were there to make money!
The times that I offered advice for maximizing sales in their forums… anytime I even came close to suggesting that someone's art wouldn't sell, I was assaulted with "IT'S ART AND ALL ART IS VALID!!!!!" – which is true. But not all art is salable. Their snobbery about the craft got in the way of sales. Not everything needs to be sold, but when you're trying to sell art, it helps not to shoot yourself in the foot by calling the marketers trying to help you rotten snake oil salesmen.
Oh yeah, for sure. I don't even bother talking biz to artists. It's so hard because I have some amazing friends who are amazing artists. I'm looking at their art and thinking to myself with the right website and marketing they could be selling a million a year. But I learned my lesson. It's about the craft, not the profit.
Waste of time, you're right.
The thing to remember is that everybody engaged in a business has no end of people who see them as prey. This is particularly true of artist and authors. I think anybody who has any kind of commercial activity on the web gets at least three emails a day for somebody who has the magic bullet for marketing, or the perfect process for SEO, or at least wants to print your business cards.
That's old school marketing. Broadcast marketing. Most people engaged in business have been burned enough by that to tell anybody who even sniffs of it to piss off.
You're right about writers who have great books but no platform. They've completely failed at marketing and their sales suffer. Few of those are on kindleboards, tho. At least few that I've found.
What I've observed in the marketing community as a whole is that – with very few exceptions – marketing conversations haven't changed much in the last two decades even though the platforms and tools have undergone a sea change in terms of efficacy and efficiency.
As an author, I'm very interested in maximizing my profit. Key to that is not maximizing sales. It's maximizing my revenue while minimizing my expenses. As a single person business, it also means I need to be focused on my primary goals and very efficient in everything I do. Even taking time out to comment on this post is taking time away from my business. (and by the way, your intensedebate plug in costs you comments. you really should cut that out.)
So, I guess my question back to you would be, what are you bringing to the table? And how/what are your credentials that establish you as a credible source of marketing?
What about intense debate is costing me comments? I find it easy to use and log in to? No?
I bring over 15-years of marketing experience to the table, as well as now book marketing. My credibility is solid and that's how I get business. So I already have a platform.
Intense debate is a third party plug in that my browser screens out as spam. I use Chrome w/Ghostery and I have to shut it off to even see half this page. I debated whether or not I wanted to bother but curiosity got the better of me and I enabled it so I could read your comments and leave one in return. So, no. It's not easy to find and log into.
It also scrapes out all the other third party connection software you have installed here including the Digg Widget, Google Analytics widget, Media6Degrees, and Quantcast. I understand why you might want those on your blog, but you probably need to be aware that there's at least some portion of the browsing public that blocks those applications. I happen to be one of them.
That might not be an obstacle if your market does not include savvy surfers.
Congrats on your platform and good luck with your foray into this market.
I grabbed a sample of your crowdsourcing book, but I don't think I'm in your market demographic.
You're one of those "browser blocking snobs". hehe. I'm in the biz and I don't block anything. I'll have to re-evaluate this plugin though then.
Yeah. I'm one of those.
I have the same problem with Discus and a couple of the others. I understand the rationale for customer management. I'm also not one that subscribes to the broadcast models of internet marketing and do what I can to keep my feet out of that world.
We wish to thank you just as before for the beautiful ideas you gave Janet when preparing her post-graduate research plus, most importantly, for providing every one of the ideas in a blog post. Provided that we had known of your blog a year ago, i’d have been saved the useless measures we were taking. Thank you very much.