Shortly before Thanksgiving, I swallowed hard, put on my big boy pants and offered to purchase from my publisher the rights to all seven of my novels. They weren’t selling as well as I believed they could and I was frustrated with the publishing company’s method of marketing them. I watched indie publishers, saw how nimble they were in promotion and pricing and came to believe that would be more effective. To my stunned amazement, my publisher agreed to sell. Six weeks of negotiations, contract back-and-forth and (gulp!) money later, I moved in, a card-carrying citizen of Indie Publishingdom.

I decided at that point to take a break from writing my weekly writing tips blog posts. (For those of you who’ve missed them, that’s where they went!) I determined to set aside my eighth novel as well, and for the first part of 2014 concentrate on figuring out how to effectively sell the other seven. Well, now it’s March. And I am here to report that book-marketing is NOT a dragon you can train in eight weeks.

In the beginning, I felt like a flea on the floor at a dog show. There were way too many choices, they were all huge and they wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to jump on. I tired quickly of the claxon cry from all sides that I HAD TO effectively market my books only to discover that nobody seemed to have any idea how to do it. No, that’s not true. EVERYBODY seemed to have an idea, but none of them agreed.

And in order to understand all those Everybodies, I had to learn a whole new language called MarketingSpeak. Knowbies use it to prattle on to newbies about such things as SEO (search engine optimization), KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), TA (Target Audience), AB (Also Bought) and IHT (I hate this!) So far, I’ve read 11 different how-to-market-your-novel books.

I decided to start with John Locke, who was the first author to sell a million ebooks on Kindle. Bad decision. The man actually bragged in an interview about buying 300 reviews! I determined right then that if the road to success led into the Enchanted Forest of Scammed Readers, I’d grind my laptop into metal shavings and go into real estate!

Finally, though, I located ethical advice. Ethical but contradictory. Amanda Luedeke says you absolutely, positively have to have a big platform, and Jonathan Gunson has a plan to build one with blogs and Twitter. But Michael Alvea says that’s baloney—on dry toast with catsup—that platform is a colossal waste of time.

Some tell you to concentrate on Goodreads—duh, that’s where the readers are.

Others tell you to concentrate on Amazon—duh, that’s where the customers are.

And still others advise you to put all your social media, book reviews, Facebook pages, social karma, blog tours, Twitter interviews, webinars and candy bars into the top of a big funnel and badda boom, badda bing, out the bottom will drop customers. Plop. Plop. Plop.

After two full months of doing nothing but studying marketing, I have gleaned only one timeless truth which I shall pass on to you (listen up, this part will be on the mid-term): At least fifty percent of what is touted out there as expert advice on how to sell books is nothing more than a pile of the warm, sticky substance you find on the south side of a horse going north. Unfortunately, the truth I didn’t discover was which fifty percent.

Frantically treading water to keep from drowning in an bottomless sea of information, I spotted a piece of driftwood and I’ve managed to keep my head above the waves by clinging to it with all my strength. The driftwood of my metaphor here is not an epiphany in which all marketing secrets have been revealed to me. My driftwood is a way for an amateur to look at marketing. My methodology is crude, with lumps, bumps and splinters—just what you’d expect from a piece of driftwood. There’s no new information here, nothing particularly astute that involved profound critical thinking. It is not a thing of beauty, but it works for me.

You’ve heard me say many times about writing a novel that you can eat an elephant—one bite at a time. Well, my driftwood is an ax to chop the elephant into bite-sized chunks. (Ok, the metaphor’s wearing a little thin here.) After two months of struggle, I’ve managed to whack the mammoth marketing elephant into four parts: Product, Store, Promotion and Sales. Each one of those parts is HUGE. So’s an elephant’s leg, but it’s not as big as the whole elephant.

Product:

Duh. My books.

Do you know what constitutes a great title from a marketing perspective? There are useful tips out there for how to pick one. Do you know what a good cover looks like? The criteria is not whether it appeals to you, three readers and Uncle Hurl in Omaha. The criteria is a huge checklist of elements that stand for excellence from a marketing perspective.

For example: if you’re strictly an indie publisher, you’re likely not selling paperbacks readers hold in their hands where they can examine the finer points of your cover design. An ebook cover has to POP when it’s only the size of a postage stamp! Chances are the beautiful, delicate script font you picked won’t be legible that small.

What about live links in your books to your other books? Do you have a request for reviews? A link to an author video? A link to a trailer?

Have you moved all the extraneous material to the back of the book. A reader can only sample about ten pages. Do you want to waste four of those on Acknowledgements, Dedication, Copyright and About the Author? You need a one-two punch of the title and your name, then page one of Chapter One.

Oh, and about Chapter One. Does it end with a cliff-hanger to make the reader click “buy” to find out what happens?

Speaking of cliff-hangers, I’m going to take my own advice here and leave this post dangling. In succeeding posts, I’ll talk in more detail about Product, Store, Promotion and Sales. Explaining it to you helps me clarify it in my own mind.

I’ll return to my how-to-use-foreshadowing-to-create-suspense series eventually, but right now I’m struggling not to drown. If you are, too, grab hold of my driftwood. I’ve got Band-Aids if you get splinters.

Write on!

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