Book Marketing: Buyer Beware!

I want you to be really careful if you are going to put serious money into a book marketing campaign. There are some awesome book marketing people out there. I know who they are, so drop me an email, and I will let you know who is great, depending on what you are trying to accomplish. The most important thing I can say about spending money on book marketing is proceed with caution.

There is more disappointment around book marketing than practically any other aspect of getting a book done. Some of it is just plain silly. If you spend $10 on book marketing, you will not be sitting next to Oprah next Tuesday on a special. Let’s get real. But it is more than that. As I say elsewhere in these pages, one of the hardest things to do in the world is sell copies of your book to strangers. Authors can spend tens of thousands of dollars on book marketing, but if they don’t do it carefully and intentionally, they may have very little to show for their investment of time, money, and hope.

The criteria for choosing book marketers are fairly similar to what I suggested regarding choosing a ghostwriter. Is the website professional? Are there blurbs from happy clients whose goals were achieved by the campaigns the book marketer created? Do they do tons of different kinds of marketing, and also happen to do book marketing, or do they specialize? (Go with a specialist.)

If you are going to spend money on a campaign, understand there is often a fundamental mismatch between what you want (book sales, the cash register ringing, speaking engagements, what have you) and what the book marketer views as success.

Many book marketers use what are called “impressions” as their measuring stick. Let’s say they get an opinion piece you wrote, or that they wrote for you, in USA Today. And let’s say, for the sake of argument, that USA Today has a circulation of one million. This means the book marketer will proudly tell you that you received one million impressions.What does that mean, exactly? Did a million people read your article?

Doubtful. Of the people who did read your article, how many people noticed at the bottom that you are the author of a particular book and then went to Amazon to buy it? Maybe none. So, don’t be seduced by how many impressions you get. Instead, have a conversation with the book marketer before you write a check and ask, “How do you measure success? Is it impressions? Because I can’t put impressions on a deposit slip.”

Next, while there are some outstanding, high-integrity book marketers in the world, by and large, and I hate saying anything negative, there are a whole lot of scoundrels in this field. They see first-time authors coming and they take full advantage. They promise the moon, cash, or check, and then you never see them or hear from them again until it is time for them to collect the next installment. Recently, a book marketer I have known and trusted for decades went to a client I had referred to her behind my back and sold him a $25,000 virtual book tour, which sold exactly zero books. I was shocked and outraged that she had done this. It was an unscrupulous, immoral thing to do, compounded by the fact that she didn’t even mention it to me first, and I was paying her for the client’s book marketing. If you can’t trust the people you have known forever, then whom can you trust?

I referred a different client who was working on a series of children’s books to one of the top brand-name marketing companies in New York. The person they assigned to the campaign botched it. The owner of the company did practically nothing to make things up to the client and then, somehow, decided to blame me. She hasn’t taken my calls since.

Sigh.

The short of it is that if you aren’t going to thoroughly vet a book marketer, don’t hire them. Ask if you can speak with past clients who have books in your genre. If you wrote a novel, don’t speak to their nonfiction clients. Nonfiction is a million times easier to market than fiction. A nonfiction author goes on Oprah. Oprah says, “Tell the audience why you wrote the book.” The author says, “I wanted to share my three-step process to finding the right partner, raising kids, whatever.”

Oprah asks the same question to a novelist: “Tell the audience why you wrote the book.” The novelist goes wide-eyed, scratches his chin, and says, “Wow! I never thought of that! That’s a really great question!”

And Oprah cuts in, saying, “We will be back after this commercial but with a different guest.”

If you try to promote a novel, make sure that your book marketer has successfully promoted other novels prior to yours. Don’t be the guinea pig. And if the book marketer cannot or will not share names and contact information of happy past clients in your genre, move on. I frequently advise my clients to skip the book marketing expense initially and do things in a cheap and dirty, yet highly effective, manner. I owe the concept to the late Chet Holmes, a leading sales trainer and author who counseled his followers to create a “Dream 100.” Your Dream 100 consists of the 100 people you would most like to work with. Identify them. Get their physical addresses. Mail them a book with a personal, handwritten note explaining why you are sending them the book and how you would like to serve them, partner with them, or whatever you have in mind. You can put 100 books in 100 envelopes with handwritten notes for under $1,000. You won’t get all your Dream 100 … but you will get some. And then, peel off some of the money you make because of those relationships and invest it in a book marketing campaign with a marketer you have carefully vetted, as above.

The Dream 100 is a really exciting and fun way to expand your horizons because you have to start thinking about all the people out there in the world with whom you would like to work. Aim high! If you are thinking of them, they just might be thinking about a gap that only you can fill. Where is the harm? This is why I suggest you start with a Dream 100 instead of doing a major book marketing campaign from the start.

The movie studios say that it takes eight impressions before someone is ready to go see or download a particular movie. An impression, in this case, might be a bus ad, an ad they see on a website, a favorable mention from a friend, a review they read somewhere, and so on. If it takes a movie eight impressions before you are willing to see it, how many impressions do you think it will take before someone is ready to buy your book? Are you prepared to spend all the money it takes to have your ad on buses, to garner reviews, to do podcasts, and so on, to get to that magic figure of eight impressions? Doesn’t that sound like a huge lift? That is what you are up against. And remember, when you are trying to sell books to strangers, you are competing with all the uses of their discretionary income and time. They could buy some other book or no book at all. They could just watch some Seinfeld reruns or get lost on social media. They could take a nap. People could do a thousand things with their time that, unfortunately, have nothing to do with buying and reading your book.

Cutting through the clutter and getting people to focus on your specific offering … and then getting them to putdown their credit card to buy your book? I don’t mean any disrespect to you or to your book. You are awesome, and your book is fantastic!It is just that getting other people to recognize that is difficult and expensive. And all too often, for first-time authors, as my mother would have said, it ends in tears. Start with the Dream 100. Put your book on your website front and center so the first thing people see is your smiling face on the cover of your book. Let people download it for free as a PDF in exchange for an email address. Put it in the signature line of your emails so people can download the PDF just by clicking. The important thing is to get your ideas out there. Selling copies is secondary.

The only exception to this rule is that when you speak, you can sell tons of copies at the back of the room. You will just have somebody there with a credit card thingamabob attached to an iPhone, or people can Venmo or Zelle the money. Modern times! Very exciting! In this case, you are printing the book for $3 and selling it for $30. That is good math. No book publicist necessary.

If you are still interested in finding a top book publicist to get attention for your book, I’ll recommend 3. First, Keith Gainsboro and his outstanding firm Elevate (Elevate.com). For promoting fiction, Javier Perez at Page-Turner Publicity (pgturnerpub@aol. com), and for television coverage, Mike Levenstein (no relation!) at Levensteinmedia.com.

So now you know pretty much everything I know about creating, publishing, and marketing books. Now let me tell you some stories about some of the books I’ve helped bring into the world.