From the moment of conception until you present your work to the market, every decision you make — whether conscious or not, whether active or passive — is a marketing decision. This relationship is inherent in the process, not an affectation. People who study marketing with seriousness are not attempting to impose a theory on the process of production and sales, they are attempting to reveal how each decision at each step in the production process relates to sales.

The biggest problem with marketing theory and practice is in proving the causality of a particular choice or decision. As with stock prices it’s always easier to draw compelling conclusions from results than it is to make profitable predictions. In publishing such past-performance generalizations are useful to the marketing department and critic, but to the creator they have limited utility.

Why? Because at the molecular level every key press is a marketing decision. Every verb you use (or don’t), every comma you use (or don’t), every paragraph you write (or don’t), has a theoretical impact on the market’s acceptance of your work. At the same time it should be obvious that trying to understand and control these causal relationships can lead only to madness. As a practicing writer you must accept that there’s only so far marketing can take you, even if you devote yourself to it completely.  [ Read more ]

The rolling premise in this series of posts is that marketing and selling should prompt internal as well as external debate. Unless you give your entire brain over to the demands and preferences of the market I believe you have a responsibility to protect the part of you that cares about what you write, because it’s your authorial neck on the line. If you don’t want to accept that kind of risk, or you’d like to have others to blame for any failure while you share the credit for any success, then you should quit writing and become an agent, editor or publisher.

Marketing and Selling: a Case Study
The forces at work when taking a book to market are intrinsically complicated. Managing motives and expectations can be as important to the reception of a title as the work itself, and it’s always beneficial if the author, publisher and audience are on the same page. Quite often, however, they are not.

As an unknown author you’re not going to be able to dictate terms to anyone. But even celebrated writers can have trouble avoiding the machinations of those who are determined to profit from their labor. To see what I mean, consider the case of Steve Martin, who appeared in person late last year at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to discuss his new novel, An Object of Beauty.

As a famous celebrity in his own right, the draw on that evening was not so much Martin’s book as Martin himself. That’s one of the advantages of celebrity, and the main reason publishers are willing to sign almost any D-list notable to a book deal. Celebrity can always be repurposed to draw attention to other things, including worthy charities, thigh-building exercise devices, or books you’ve written or had written for you. From a marketing and sales perspective celebrity is a product in its own right apart from whatever product a celebrity might be hawking, and the 92nd Street Y certainly understood that when they sold tickets to Martin’s appearance.  [ Read more ]

Because you can never, ever have perfect knowledge of a market, and because as an author you have a limited amount of time to write, and because people with more market experience than you obviously exist, it can be tempting to look to others for help with your marketing decisions. Not surprisingly, those others have identified you as a potential market for their services, whether they have anything useful to sell or not.

The Publishing Establishment
Publishing talks a good game about cultural stewardship and the importance of literature, but what it cares about is profit. If you can make the publishing industry money as a cultural steward or literary star, that’s great. On the other hand, if you can make the publishing industry money as a cultural cancer or illiterate moron, that’s great too.

While speaking in generalizations is usually a bad idea, and there are plenty of wonderful agents, editors and publishers who would love you even if you weren’t the root source of their livelihoods, the following statement cannot be disputed. Agents, editors and publishers don’t eat if they can’t sell your book. On an individual basis they may recognize good writing when they see it, and there may be limits to what they’re personally willing to do to make a buck, but their jobs are premised on making that buck over and over and over.

As a writer you may share that objective in whole or in part. But you’re also the primary (if not sole) custodian of whatever artistic or craft standards you believe in. If you don’t protect the integrity of the book you’re writing it’s likely nobody will. That doesn’t mean you should be a diva or insist on getting your way every time, or that your instincts will always be correct, or even that artistry is antagonistic to sales. It simply means you’re going to have to assume and commit to the responsibility of mediating between everybody’s profit motives, including your own. And that’s true whether you’re an independent author or a professional writing in the belly of the beast.

The publishing industry’s default position is that it knows everything there is to know about marketing books, including how books should be written to best take advantage of any market. And it’s hard to argue against that premise. Unfortunately, all of that comprehensive data and institutional knowledge is of dubious predictive value in any particular instance, (That’s something you won’t be told.)

Even if every agent, editor and publisher who expresses an opinion about your work does so with both eyes on the market, and even if you yourself have one eye on the market, there’s still room to advocate for making the work the best it can be apart from any sales metric, and for realizing your personal authorial vision. But you have to be willing to fight for those things.  [ Read more ]

Whatever you make or write, there will be a moment when you finish production and ready your product for sale. You may intend to make a new version in a year or a month or a week. You may already know that you’ll be changing the product in the future. You may even know that what you’re selling is broken or incomplete. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Mr. Software Developer.) But the moment you decide you’re no longer going to make changes to a particular product is the moment you transition from marketing to selling — even if you plan to track the product’s sales data and reception in the market in order to modify the product in the future.

It should be dawning on you by now that marketing isn’t a specific task or checklist, but an over-arching philosophy. Where selling means offering a product as it exists, marketing says listen, learn and adapt the product in perpetuity.

That’s the demarcation between the two. Marketing is endless: sales is terminal.

Marketing as Business Principle
Recognizing the omnipresent opportunity of marketing is important. If you are one hundred percent committed to writing your book your way, that says nothing useful about how you will try to sell that book. But even if you aren’t interested in marketing as a means of tailoring your title for the intended audience, there’s no end to the ways marketing can still be useful on the sales end.

Marketing isn’t making your product available, it’s designing your product for the market. Marketing isn’t advertising, it’s designing your ads for the market. Marketing isn’t pricing, it’s pricing your product for the market. Marketing isn’t customer service, it’s designing your customer service to understand, protect and expand your market.

In the end your authorial marketing efforts will be a mix of gut instinct, educated guesses and actual data, all blended in proportions defined by your personal goals and tolerance for risk. If you care passionately about what you have to say you’re probably going to listen to the market less. If you care passionately about being published, you’re probably going to listen to the market more.

What’s important is that your decisions be as fully informed as possible. Ignorance is ignorance, not courage.  [ Read more ]

Identifying a profitable market niche says nothing useful about whether you yourself should write for that particular market. Even assuming you have the talent and drive to compete, any number of external factors will probably keep you from making a sale or attracting an audience. If you’re the kind of writer who loves the fruits of your own imagination, all the obstacles and uncertainties inherent in writing for a market may convince you to trust your gut and go your own way. After all, if you’re going to gamble on anything, you might as well gamble on yourself, right?

Playing the Odds
Because you’re such a nice person I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The odds of striking it rich as a writer by writing to a particular market are a million to one. Yes, there are plenty of people who get published, and a few who make a passable living as writers, but the number of writers who really cash in is extremely small. (By writer I mean writer-only. If you’ve exploited your celebrity for economic gain in the publishing industry, congratulations, but that has nothing to do with writing.)

By comparison, the odds of striking it rich doing your own thing are a billion to one — a thousand times worse. If that isn’t depressing enough, note too that success as a rebel doesn’t scale proportionately. You won’t be gambling on billion-to-one odds in order to make a billion, you’ll be gambling on billion-to-one odds to make a million or less.

If you’re the rational sort and determined to be smart about your writing career, you should definitely write for an extant market. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of cocky, self-directed nut who thinks you actually have something worthwhile or entertaining to say outside the well-worn industry ruts, then by all means do your own thing. Just remember that you’re trading million-to-one odds writing for the man for billion-to-one odds writing for yourself. But the choice is still yours.   [ Read more ]

Whatever your art, craft or business, and whatever your interest in reaching customers, core aspects of your products or services are probably not going to change no matter what you learn about audience or customer preferences. Even when cash-rich corporations like Microsoft or Google decide to enter new markets, they still tend to favor businesses that reflect core interests, leverage strengths or offer an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

Microsoft doesn’t make a ToastBox because there’s nothing to be gained by entering the toaster market — or at least nothing to be gained that can’t be gained by other, more synergistic means. Google doesn’t make a Fish Finder because there’s no way to tie Google’s advertising and search business to the echolocation of catfish or crappies. Both companies have the muscle to enter any market they want to enter, but even if an exec proved a profit could be made it’s unlikely they would pull the trigger.

Why? Because somewhere along the line a simple question would be asked: How does Product X fit with our goals as a company? If it couldn’t be shown that the ToastBox or Fish Finder was part of the company’s mission, the product would be shelved and resources devoted to something else.  [ Read more ]

There’s no right answer to whether you should view writing as a business or not. It’s a personal choice dependent on myriad factors. Knowing the answer, however, allows you to effectively navigate choices you’ll face in marketing and/or selling your work. While you should always control your costs, there’s a big difference between the expense of a print-on-demand book intended for friends and family and the effort you may need to embrace in order to take a work to the competitive retail market.

Inextricably Bound
In the previous post I said that marketing and sales were two ends of the same spectrum. The desire to resolve uncertainties about potential consumer interest is the glue by which marketing and sales are inextricably bound.

Exploring market uncertainties may involve advertising or promotional events or other common marketing and sales strategies. The results of those tests will be measured in pageviews, conversions, purchases or other metrics. As a writer, I think you should constantly remind yourself that marketing and sales are most useful when they are used to answer questions relevant to your personal objectives. Treating marketing and sales as gauges rather than goads means you will be less likely to sink cash into marketing and sales ‘solutions’ that are, at best, speculative, or be led astray by people who will gladly take your money in exchange for promises they can’t possibly keep. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. SEO Evangelist.)  [ Read more ]