How I Got the Marketing of My Books All Wrong

Looking for readers in all the wrong places

I got the marketing of my books all wrong.

Most writers get marketing wrong. They think marketing means advertising and publicity. My business career was marketing-adjacent, so I should know better. Marketing means finding an audience, figuring out what they need, and designing a product to meet that need. Only once you have done all that do you start thinking about advertising and publicity. In the business world, marketing’s job is not to take whatever junk falls off the end of engineering’s conveyer belt and try to flog it to random people on the street. Its job is to figure out what the product should be and who is going to buy it before the engineers even start sharpening their pencils.

Writers like to say that publishers don’t do marketing anymore. Not true. Publishers do marketing. They find audiences, they understand their appetites, and they notify agents of the kinds of books that they need to satisfy those appetites. Agents then publish lists of the specific kinds of books they are looking for — the kinds that they know publishers are looking for. Authors then scour the agent’s lists, write exactly the books the agents are asking for …

No wait, that last part is wrong. Writers don’t do that. Writers write whatever the heck they want to write and then send it to every single agent listed on Query Tracker regardless of what they say they want. To part the waters of this flood, interns read the first three sentences of each query letter and click delete because they don’t match the specific things they have been told to look for. Once in a while, they actually find a query that delivers what the agency is asking for, and from there the industry rolls on.

Despite all this wasted effort, the system works, in a clunky sort of way, because (unlike the engineering department of a typical company) all the product development is done for free on spec by writers, most of whom will end up significantly out of pocket on the whole project. More than enough writers write the things that the agents and publishers are actually looking for, either because they did actually do marketing, or because they like to read the kind of books that are popular and are writing the same kind of books. An adequate supply of salable books is therefore maintained, despite the vast number of unsalable manuscripts that are submitted.

Marketing is really all about information. It is about finding a signal in the noise. If you are wise and businesslike, you will find the signal in the noise before you commit your resources to product development. That way you will be confident that, when the product is ready, you will know exactly how and where to sell it. If you are blithe and artsy, however, you will create your product first, out of pure love for the setting and the story and the characters, and only then try to find a signal in the noise that will tell you how and where to sell it. This is where I am right now in my publishing journey. It is where I have been for quite some time. Seeking a signal in the noise.

The first couple of years of seeking that signal in the noise consisted of submitting to agents. Agents are bombarded by signal-seeking writers every day and rarely return any signal at all unless it is yes. If you are very lucky you might get a line or two of personal comments from an agent occasionally, which may contain a signal, if you have the wit to recognize it. The clearest signal I ever received from an agent was “You can’t sell a novel about the Anglo-Saxons unless your name is Bernard Cornwell.” At that point, I had already written two such novels. I went on to write two more. When it comes to reading signals from the market, I’m apparently not very bright.

There are actually four pieces of information in that signal.

1. The Anglo-Saxon period is not popular with historical fiction readers.

2. Popular writers can carry their audience with them to unpopular periods.

3. This does not automatically create an audience for unknown writers working in the same period.

4. Historical fiction readers have an historical interest in particular periods, meaning that books sell largely based on the interest in the periods they are set in.

This is a useful signal to have received, once I finally decoded it. But it presents a problem because, as far as I know, not one single person has so far bought my books because they are fascinated by the Anglo-Saxon period. In fact, I often have people say to me, “I don’t usually read about this period, but….” My current readers are reading the books in spite of the period, not because of it. That is a signal I have not yet managed to decode.

Agents and publishers pay close attention to the signals the market is giving them and act accordingly. What publishers don’t do much of is advertising and publicity. While they do have a pretty good idea of what kinds of books sell, they generally have no clue which specific titles are going to break out and sell enough copies to pay for all the rest. It follows that spending a ton on advertising and publicity for every book is not likely to pay off. Rather, they leave the advertising and publicity to the writers and wait to see which books rise from the general mire and become promising enough to invest in. Writers end up doing a lot of advertising and publicity. They are not paid to do this, and they pay out of pocket for all the associated costs. This is part of the general pattern that everyone in publishing is making money except the writers.

The thing about advertising and publicity is, if you didn’t do your marketing correctly up front, it will be difficult to get much ROI from your advertising and publicity. The first rule of advertising and publicity is to know who you are talking to. If you have not tuned in to the signal, you don’t know who you are advertising to. You are using your advertising and publicity budget not to sell books to a willing and eager audience, but to probe for a signal that there is an audience out there for your books. Most of the time, you will be fishing in the wrong pond using the wrong bait hoping to catch any fish at all. This is what most writers do, particularly writers who publish independently. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last twelve months. I’ve yet to find the signal I am looking for by this method.

Actually, that is not entirely true. I have in fact been getting a signal, and it has come through reviews. I haven’t got a lot of reviews, but I have been very gratified by the ones I have got, not simply because they are favorable, but because many of them are so perceptive. Praise is cheap. Inciteful appreciation is like gold. Even if it comes from just a handful of people so far, it makes me feel my time was not wasted writing the books. I have also just received a notification that St. Agnes and the Selkie will be getting an “Editor’s Choice” review in the August issue of the Historical Novels Review. I haven’t seen the review itself yet, but for an indy book to land an editor’s choice and have its cover printed in the HNR seems pretty special.

The problem with these highly gratifying signals, though, is that they don’t contain any directional data. They don’t tell me where to focus any promotional efforts I may do in the future. That is a signal I am still seeking.

There are writers who do their marketing properly. Elizabeth R Anderson, who I was seated next to at a rather lonely book signing table for “Medieval and Ancient” books at the recent Historical Novel Society Conference, suggested I join a Facebook group called 20BooksTo50K. Those folks know their marketing. But as I have said, good marketing begins before you start engineering your product. These folks talk about how to exactly tailor your book to the market and how to then present it to the market in a way that will make sure it is recognized in the particular market niche it was designed for.

For example, one post asked for detailed advice on how to present an RH romance in such a way that it is clear that it is not an MF romance. I had the same questions you do about the acronyms. An MF romance is “Male Female,” meaning one couple committed to each other at the end. An RH romance is a “Reverse Harem,” meaning one woman with several men and not committing to any of them. Apparently, there are readers who want a steady diet of RH romances and want to be able to find and identify them quickly.

This desire for familiar types of books should not be surprising. We seek the familiar in most things. Our tastes do not automatically ascend from better to best as our resources allow us access to better things. Donald Trump eats MacDonalds. It’s not because it is all he can afford. It’s what he is used to. Our tastes tend to solidify around the things we know. We do not crave the most piquant. We crave the most familiar.

There are fundamental evolutionary reasons for this. The familiar is safe. And I don’t just mean that sticking to the familiar allows us to avoid disappointment, though that is true enough. I mean that if a hunter-gatherer learns that the berries on one tree are safe, but the berries on the second tree give him a belly ache, he grows reluctant to try the berries on the third tree. As long as there are any familiar berries still to be found, he will be reluctant to try something different. We prefer the people we know, the places we know, the stores we know, the brands we know, the streets we know, and the types of books we know, because we are deeply programmed that the familiar is safe. Publishers know this just as well as Coca-Cola and McDonalds know it.

An author who is planning on making a living writing fiction, therefore, does their marketing up front, figures out what sells, and writes that. This is not what the industry tends to tell writers, though. When an agent at a conference is asked what book a writer should write next to have the best chance of publication, they will usually say, “Write the book you want to write.” It is not what they will say to their clients when they ask the same question. It is not what publishers say to their contracted writers either. They will tell them to write the thing they think they have the best chance of selling. Telling unagented writers to write what they want to write certainly helps avoid bruised feelings at a conference, and I suppose with so many writers out there that agents are never short of submissions that do meet current requirements, so it costs them nothing to say, “Write what you like.” And writers writing things they don’t like probably won’t be very good at it anyway.

I write the kinds of books I like. Indeed, as I have said before, echoing C.S. Lewis, I write the books I want to read because no one else is writing them. In other words, I do the exact opposite of good marketing. And I’d happily keep doing it, because people really are not writing the kinds of books I want to read. Perhaps if I had several projects in mind and one of them was closer to what the mainstream wants to read, I would choose that one to write. But I’m following my own signal, not the market’s signal, and hoping to hear my own signal echoed back to me through the fog.

Not that writing the books you want to read never pays off. It paid off for Lewis, and for Tolkien. More recently it paid off for J.K. Rowling. Sometimes the book from left field touches something the audience discovers they want but didn’t know to ask for. I don’t have the statistics to prove it, but I suspect that this sort of thing is becoming more and more rare in these days of pinched margins, increasing ideological loyalty tests, and data-driven marketing. But that doesn’t mean it can’t still happen.

I’m quite certain that there are still people in the industry who want to find those books that break the mold and change the industry. Publishing is, after all, not the most lucrative of professions. Most people in it could make more money doing something else. They are in publishing because they have a genuine love of books. But precisely because they don’t make a lot of money, they have to be conscious of the need to pay the bills. They can’t afford to devote much time to unmarketable passion projects. The number of opportunities for that kind of breakthrough, therefore, are few and far between. And they depend entirely on the particular class of people who become literary agents falling in love with a particular book, and then finding a member of the particular class of people who become acquisition editors falling in love with it too. Most books that don’t fit the mold perforce go indy.

Take The Wistful and the Good for example. It is a story about a young woman in a place and time (8th Century Northumbria) in which most stories are about men who are warriors, either Vikings or the enemies of Vikings. Stories about young women are usually popular in historical fiction, but not in this era. In this era, it is warrior stories that sell. And Wistful is not a feminist story either. Obviously, I think the stories of women are as much worth telling as those of men. All my published books have female protagonists. But The Wistful and the Good does not conform to the usual feminist themes. Elswyth is neither oppressed nor possessed of extraordinary ambition, talent, or virtue. She is the daughter of a minor Anglo-Saxon thegn, a small landholder, which is to say that she is an ordinary middle-class teenager, as far as those terms make sense when applied to the society of her time. She is well-meaning and affectionate but relies far too much on her beauty, her status, her gift for entertainment, and her father’s indulgence. She is entirely the author of her own misfortunes. The ending is, I hope, morally satisfying, in that it displays a degree of growth and understanding and willingness to take responsibility on Elswyth’s part, but it is not a conventional happily ever after (HAE, if you are keeping track of romance genre acronyms). It is told in the much-maligned, mischaracterized, and unpopular omniscient point of view (more on that in a later post). It contains scenes that explore the thoughts of more than one character (a cardinal sin in the new literary dispensation, though common enough in the old).

Elswyth is not a “strong woman” with a few “flaws” thrown in as character marks. Nor is she abused or persecuted or in any other way put upon. She is a well-meaning but spoiled teenage girl, both delighted and somewhat cowed by the male attention that has recently come her way, and with no conception of the potential consequences of her actions. She is, as far as it is in my power to make her so, a real young woman, a real human being. I hope that at the end of her story you will say to yourself, “Yes, that is what it is like to be human, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to look with horror on the fruits of your own follies and try, however hopelessly, to make amends.”

Covers are another issue. People have generally praised my covers, which I find very gratifying. But they are not typical historical fiction covers. Indeed, they are not the style of covers popular today, in part because that style of cover is expensive to create, and in part because it’s a style I am not fond of. Cover design is one of the many things that independent authors are told they have to pay for, and if you paid for everything on that list, you could easily spend $5000 to bring out a single novel. That’s a lot of investment to recoup. I may not know much about marketing but I know enough to know that “successful people do X” does not mean that all who do X will be successful. You should have good marketing data to support a sales plan that will recoup your production costs and more before you go spending that kind of money. Netting $5000 on an independently published book is something not many people do. If you can get a clear signal from the marketplace then it is worth investing to follow it up. Without that signal, you are probably just throwing money away. I’m still seeking a signal. This post is part of my efforts to locate one.

Another way in which I get the marketing wrong is this newsletter. Newsletters, we are assured, are the number one marketing tool for novelists. It’s how novelists keep in touch with their readers, and how they announce their next book to their biggest fans. But what I have found is that rather than my newsletter developing a readership for my novels, it has developed a readership for the newsletter itself, which is, at this point, considerably larger than the readership for the novels.

That’s okay with me. I have always been an essayist, and I love the blog/newsletter format. I am delighted to have you all as subscribers, whether you read my novels or not. But insofar as a newsletter is supposed to be a marketing tool for selling novels, I have got it wrong once again. I should be doing what other historical novelists do and making my newsletter about the period in which my books are set, like this one by Octavia Randolph, whose books are set in a period similar to mine. (There’s that signal again that historical fiction readers are fascinated by particular periods.) But I am not so much in love with the period as to want to do that.

At the heart of this, I believe, lies the business of branding. Branding is essentially about understanding what your audience wants from you and then making sure that you are that thing all the time. If you make sugary caffeine drinks or overpriced cell phones or RH romance novels, that is your brand and that is what you should show to the world in everything you do. If I wanted to be the author of 8th-century Anglo-Saxon novels then everything I put out into the world should be about the Anglo-Saxons of the 8th century and their world. I should be making that my brand in the same way that Octavia Randolph has made her 9th-century Saxons and Vikings her brand.

I keep coming up with new brands. There is Stories All the Way Down, which has ended up, rather confusingly, as both the name of this newsletter and the imprint under which I issue my books. There is Serious Popular Fiction. There are also my other newsletters, Ordinary Eccentricity and Why I Am Still Catholic. There is my ongoing series, The Anomalous Now, about how it is the present, not the past, that is weird. In my previous career, there was Every Page is Page One, which is really the only branding I have ever made work and by which I am still known in the technical communication world. In other words, I am pretty good at coming up with brands and their catchphrases. I’m just lousy at sticking to them. As an author, you have to live your brand. I can’t make myself do that.

What I have done instead in this newsletter is to write posts on subjects as diverse as fiction, writing, history, grammar, economics, death, worldbuilding, historical fiction, free speech, genre classification, book reviews, short stories, YouTube, language, beauty, marketing, the meaning of life, book covers, travel, Catholicism, and my own literary career.

This is not quite the miscellany it might seem. I seem to have one of those minds that works sideways rather than up and down. It makes me hopeless at things like planning and scheduling or any kind of administration, and most definitely hopeless at branding. But insofar as I have ever been able to make myself useful to an employer or to the world in general, it has been because I see recurrent patterns and themes in apparently unconnected subjects. This is certainly not a unique trait, and I have known people who had far more facility with this kind of pattern finding than I do, but it is relatively uncommon. The world needs a few of us, but not many.

What it means, though, is that my writing is unified around themes much more than subjects. I find it useful and interesting to find the same theme in different subject areas because it allows me to examine the theme in different lights. I set up separate newsletters for my travel writing and my essays on Catholicism to try to avoid interfering with my novelist brand in the main newsletter. But I haven’t done much with either of those newsletters, mainly because the things I want to say in them cross over into the themes in each other and in this newsletter, so I am always wanting the essays to be in two or three places at once, which would obviously defeat the purpose of separating them. Since I have also realized that this newsletter does not actually align with my novelist brand particularly well, the whole exercise in separation has come to seem pointless and I will probably merge the three newsletters into one soon. Most of the subscribers to the other newsletters also subscribe to Stories All the Way Down anyway.

I’m not terribly analytical or deliberate about the unity of themes across the varying subjects I write about. I observe the connections and parallels without analyzing them to death. I think my fiction participates in the same thematic threads as my essays and it is death to fiction to analyze it too closely. Fiction is about getting at the inexpressible itness of lived experience. It is not supposed to be deconstructed into the answer to an essay question.

Can I sum it up? Probably not, but maybe this gets somewhere close. Life is a hard problem. Whether we talk about the conduct of economies or the wayward emotions of a 15-year-old girl in the 8th century, there is no simple solution, no clear way, and nothing that can be done without cost. Life is a hard problem not just because working out what to do is hard, but because doing whatever you have decided on is hard, and living with the consequences of it is hard. On politics and social issues, I tend to describe myself as belonging to the Party of Mercutio, who famously said, “A plague on both your houses.” Even when I largely agree with someone on an issue, I hate how combative and adversarial everyone has become. It is a style that seems calculated to win friends but not to influence people. I prefer to acknowledge the difficulty of the problem. If it were really as easy as everyone makes out, it wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

Much of the evil and foolishness in the world comes from the failure to acknowledge that one is dealing with hard problems. Ideologies and demagoguery of every stripe feed on the refusal to accept that the world is full of hard problems. If history teaches us anything, it should be this, that life is full of hard problems and easy solutions will always prove hard to implement and still harder to live with. This is an idea, I think, that crosses the boundary between essay and fiction. Essays can explicate the hardness of the problems, but fiction can present the experience of facing hard problems, making hard choices, and living with the consequences.

This is not a counsel of either darkness or light, for there is much of both in the course of human life. A religious way of expressing the same idea would be the doctrine of original sin, and that is a doctrine of love as much as a doctrine of folly. Were it not for the love that is shot through all things, life’s problems would not be hard. The lion is not troubled in his soul as he eats the buffalo calf that got separated from the herd. You have to be human for that.

Is there a brand to be found in that? If there is, I don’t think I am the man to find it. I may have to content myself with being a person rather than a brand, with all the messiness and rough edges that come with that. Life is a hard problem. Marketing books is a hard problem too.

What I am realizing is that there is little to be gained by throwing good promotion after bad marketing. I have been trying a variety of promotional venues and methods in the hope of finding one that would connect strongly with my natural audience. So far I have not seen much correlation between those efforts and my book sales. The books are selling, slowly. So far, though, I have not found a promotional channel that seems to create a blip in the trend line. I will keep looking though, and I appreciate any hints people can throw my way.

How can you all help with my marketing efforts and my search for a signal? If you have read and enjoyed my books, please leave a review, especially on Amazon. If you picked one up but were disappointed by it, please let me know what didn’t work for you. Knowing that would help me greatly. If you have enjoyed my novels, could you send me a list of the other novels you have read this year, and of your favorite books of all time? Knowing that would make it much easier for me to figure out who my natural audience is. And if you like the essays in this newsletter, please share the ones you like. It all helps. Thank you all so much.