Continuing my last post: let’s talk about marketing self-published works, and why hybrid authors may have advantages that self-pub-only authors might not have.
The hard, cold truth? Most unknown, first-time self-published and indie-published books don’t sell very well. Their authors have a rough time reaching enough of a buying audience to make the equivalent of a living wage. E-books have been the great equalizer, opening up new genres and opportunities for many authors – but they still fall into the visibility trap.
How do readers find new books? Word-of-mouth is one of the most effective methods, when it works well enough to go viral. Large-scale advertising to book-industry buyers (not end readers) is another possibility. Great reviews from reader-trusted sources help, too.
There’s a whole ‘support’ industry built around display sites and organizations who claim to boost indie authors’ visibility. Some are better at it than others. Here as everywhere else, research pays off.
Be skeptical of all claims. Ask for proof. Independently verify that proof as best you can. Learn how to verify information, and how to detect the weasel-words that might indicate a less-than-professional guru, mentor, public relations agent, literary agent, or publisher. This is your career, if you want it to be. Put in at least as much effort as you would researching college choice, your home loan, or your next car purchase.
Self-publishing gurus and cheerleaders (and the vanity publishers who follow them like remoras, hoping to pick up disillusioned or naive self-pub authors) have long played off commercial publishing’s scorn to advance their own causes. And they’ve been right. In the past, commercial publishers and commercial authors have sneered at their self-published peers.
What many self-pub champions either don’t know – or don’t want to say – is that the industry they love to vilify largely died off or changed half a decade ago.
It’s still changing. What they describe is more of a straw-man travesty of the current situation in commercial publishing. Self-publishing is here to stay and it’s only going to grow. The Big Five publishers wouldn’t have set up shameful deals with vanity publishers, unless they wanted to court the best of those self-published authors. Best-selling authors wouldn’t be making waves as they moved from commercial contracts to informed self-publishing.
The key word here is ‘informed’. While it can be easy, cheap, or good, self-publishing is rarely all three. Like any business decision, quality self-publishing requires some serious research and effort. Some gung-ho self-publishing advocates may not like to hear more objective information, and may even reflexively equate it with criticism.
Marketing 101: make other people do it for you, until you learn how.
Yes, all authors should do some basic promotions themselves. Have a relatively informative and/or entertaining website, FB page, Tumblr account, whatever. Participate in online and realtime discussions about your genre with authors, editors, and agents in your genre. Join useful and respected professional associations when you can. Go to genre conventions if you can afford them.
Please, please don’t run off and post eighteen variations of ‘Buy my book!’ on Twitter every day. That tends to make people like me NOT buy your book. If this is what your ‘publisher’ thinks is author marketing, your publisher is either ignorant, incompetent, or making bank off you in other ways. Social media marketing is an intricate ballet of associated and peripheral content hopefully leading to increased reader engagement. Most of the time, the best social media interactions are probably not about your books at all.
This is where hybrid authors have a real advantage. A commercial publisher’s backing is a great incentive for choosing a commercial contract first. Corporate publicity machines are much bigger and far-reaching than most single authors’ best efforts. Especially for very shy authors who aren’t used to relentless-but-savvy self-promotion. Using a publisher’s marketing departments for a few years is a great way to build a known market presence, before you either strike out completely on your own or blend careers as a hybrid author.
A commonsense warning: please don’t forget your publisher(s) on the way up and out, unless they’ve been utterly reprehensible business partners. Good publishers want to keep your profitable backlist. You want to expand your market reach. These don’t have to be contradictory goals. Be an adult, make compromises that benefit you both.
Many hybrid authors have already built up a backlist in well-received commercial fiction. They can self-publish older works as the contracts expire, and bring new self-published works to their readership. I’ve seen several romance and SFF authors who are doing this right now with commercially-abandoned projects. Backlists and orphan works no longer have to die on the vine – they can reach new readers! I know two older SFF authors who admit they were circling the lower midlist drain in 2000, and have now reinvented their careers via self-publishing as well as commercial expansion into new genres. I know many younger romance and SFF authors getting into self-publishing on the ground floor, even while they are writing separately for commercial publishers.
Most of us won’t make Patterson, Rowling, or E.L. James sorts of revenue off our writing. We’re nowhere near the 1% who have actually come out of this recession with higher earnings off capital income in the form of stocks, bonds, and corporate dividends.
But we have something that wage-slaves likely don’t: access to the possibility of royalty income. The last six years have taught us to never have all our financial eggs in one basket. It makes sense to diversify, and look at all publication methods with enlightened self-interest.