Episode 106 - The Sixth Process of Publishing: Promotion with Orna Ross
November 16, 2021
Orna Ross of the Alliance of Independent Authors joins me to discuss the sixth of the Seven Processes of Publishing: PROMOTION. ALLi defines promotion as specific activities designed to sell a particular book during a particular time period, as distinct from marketing, which we discussed in episode 105 and which comprises ongoing positioning of your work in the world. In our discussion of promotion, Orna addresses whether it's worthwhile for a career author’s first book; the importance of having a goal in mind so you can assess a promotion’s performance; the importance for an indy author of having profit, not just exposure, as a goal; the value of endorsements versus reader reviews; and whether investing in a publicist is a good use of your promotion budget.
Orna Ross is the founder and head of The Alliance of Independent Authors, a non-profit professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. ALLi provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.
"Indy authors are pricing too low. We're pricing too low to make a living. We're not allowing for the expenses of marketing. We're pricing based on just the cost of the production of the book. And not even that sometimes." —Orna Ross
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, Orna. How are you doing?
[00:00:02] Orna: Hi, Matty, how are you? I'm very well thanks.
[00:00:06] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. So Orna Ross is back for the sixth of our series of the seven processes of publishing, and in this episode, we're going to be looking at promotion. So Orna, in the previous episode, which was about marketing, I asked you to talk a little bit about what the difference was between marketing and promotion, and just in case anybody missed that, can you just give kind of the Reader's Digest condensed version of how you're making the distinction between those two activities?
[00:00:32] Orna: Sure. So, marketing is essentially your promise to the reader. It's your positioning within the book world, it tells the reader what to expect from your books, through your covers, through your book descriptions, through your author website and your general presentation of yourself as the author. It positions you in the marketplace. So marketing's long-term and ongoing and constantly being kind of tweaked and put out there, and each new book adds to the whole mix, your marketing mix and your author platform.
[00:01:05] Promotion contributes to your marketing, but book promotion is a specific activity designed to sell a particular book across a particular time period. So promotion is like a campaign which has a start date and an end date, and you can say, I want this promotion to sell X number of books and you can actually look at it and see, did it achieve that goal?
[00:01:27] With marketing, it's all a little bit more nebulous. You have to do these things, your website, your book covers, your book descriptions, you cannot get away without them, but you can tweak them and change them as time goes on if something is not working. You've never really failed, and you've never really succeeded at marketing. You could always do something else that would kind of tweak it and sharpen up your message. But promotion, you can very easily say, well, that did not work, and we're not doing that again, let's try a different promotional tactic this time.
[00:01:57] Matty: I definitely want to loop back to that idea of setting the goal, but I want to ask a couple of questions before we do that so people have a little bit of context. And I'm just going to throw out the very general question, how does a first-time author get into the promotional world most successfully? What approaches should they be using to promote a first book?
[00:02:17] Orna: So this question is so frustrating. So many questions that we ask about the different processes of publishing, the answer is, it depends, and this is one of those. So it's going to depend on your genre, it's going to depend on what else you've set up and so many other things, but one of the easiest ways, there are promotional sites that have email addresses of readers who like to read particular kinds of books, and for a small fee you can organize the promotion with those sites and they will send news about your book out to the readers, and the readers would choose to buy or to not buy.
[00:02:59] And I'm thinking of services like Freebooksy or Bargain Booksy and there are many, many others. And rather than kind of listing off a whole load of things, we do have some information about this on our self-publishing advice site, SelfPublishingAdvice.org, you can just search for the promotional posts, and they will give you some very specific information. But that's one way, so you get on one of those lists and see how you get on.
[00:03:29] For some authors they work really well, for others, they don't, and I think this is something important to say to the first-time author, have a bit of a budget for this. Promotion requires you to spend either time or money, and the money can be the easier thing, if you have some, never easy if you don't. But if you have some money, it can be the easier way because of what we spent so much time talking about in the last episode, Matty, that need to balance your time between letting the reader know the book exists and writing the next one. So, you can put some money towards the issue, and I'm not saying throw money at it mindlessly at all, I really think it's very important to research the type of promotion that you do.
[00:04:16] There are free things you can do, and one of the things that can work really, really well is, a swap with another author who's in your genre, so they can tell their readers about you in some way, and you can tell you a redress about them in some way. This works best, obviously, when you pick somebody who has roughly the same number of readers as you, and when I say readers here, I'm talking about on your signup list. But if it is your first book, you may not have a lot of people, and so you're not a hugely attractive prospect in that regard, so that's not going to work for you unless you have already been marketing and amassing sign ups while you were writing the book.
[00:04:57] Do remember that each of the platforms has its own promotional tools that you may want to explore. Kobo, Apple, Amazon, all have really good promo tools, and again, they work to varying degrees for different books and for different authors. So, I've had authors who've said it really worked well, my Kobo promotions, for example, worked really well on my last book but they're not working on this book. And to some degree, book marketing and promotion is more art than science. It's not always predictable.
[00:05:32] And I think that's probably the most important thing I'd like to say at this point. You approach your book promotion, especially when you're starting out, very much in the spirit of experiment and exploration. You don't have huge high hopes. Don't have high expectations. Have the lowest possible expectations and base your budget and your time allocation on that. And then, some fine day you'll be surprised, but most authors go about it the other way around. They think, okay, if I'm going to spend some money, and I've got to pay, I expect to really shift books.
[00:06:05] If it's your first book and you've only got one book, you may not even want to spend any money or time on promotion just yet. Focus on getting your marketing right, getting your messages right, getting your infrastructure right, and then when you have three books begin to spend some money on promotion, because at that point you're likely to see some sort of return from that, whereas with one book, it can be done, it has been done, I've seen it done brilliantly. I've been actually in awe sometimes of what I've seen to be possible, but I would say nine times out of ten or ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it's very, very, very tough. And the sooner you can get beyond one book anyway, the better for you as an author, and I think probably your time is best spent in writing rather than promoting. ...
[00:00:02] Orna: Hi, Matty, how are you? I'm very well thanks.
[00:00:06] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. So Orna Ross is back for the sixth of our series of the seven processes of publishing, and in this episode, we're going to be looking at promotion. So Orna, in the previous episode, which was about marketing, I asked you to talk a little bit about what the difference was between marketing and promotion, and just in case anybody missed that, can you just give kind of the Reader's Digest condensed version of how you're making the distinction between those two activities?
[00:00:32] Orna: Sure. So, marketing is essentially your promise to the reader. It's your positioning within the book world, it tells the reader what to expect from your books, through your covers, through your book descriptions, through your author website and your general presentation of yourself as the author. It positions you in the marketplace. So marketing's long-term and ongoing and constantly being kind of tweaked and put out there, and each new book adds to the whole mix, your marketing mix and your author platform.
[00:01:05] Promotion contributes to your marketing, but book promotion is a specific activity designed to sell a particular book across a particular time period. So promotion is like a campaign which has a start date and an end date, and you can say, I want this promotion to sell X number of books and you can actually look at it and see, did it achieve that goal?
[00:01:27] With marketing, it's all a little bit more nebulous. You have to do these things, your website, your book covers, your book descriptions, you cannot get away without them, but you can tweak them and change them as time goes on if something is not working. You've never really failed, and you've never really succeeded at marketing. You could always do something else that would kind of tweak it and sharpen up your message. But promotion, you can very easily say, well, that did not work, and we're not doing that again, let's try a different promotional tactic this time.
[00:01:57] Matty: I definitely want to loop back to that idea of setting the goal, but I want to ask a couple of questions before we do that so people have a little bit of context. And I'm just going to throw out the very general question, how does a first-time author get into the promotional world most successfully? What approaches should they be using to promote a first book?
[00:02:17] Orna: So this question is so frustrating. So many questions that we ask about the different processes of publishing, the answer is, it depends, and this is one of those. So it's going to depend on your genre, it's going to depend on what else you've set up and so many other things, but one of the easiest ways, there are promotional sites that have email addresses of readers who like to read particular kinds of books, and for a small fee you can organize the promotion with those sites and they will send news about your book out to the readers, and the readers would choose to buy or to not buy.
[00:02:59] And I'm thinking of services like Freebooksy or Bargain Booksy and there are many, many others. And rather than kind of listing off a whole load of things, we do have some information about this on our self-publishing advice site, SelfPublishingAdvice.org, you can just search for the promotional posts, and they will give you some very specific information. But that's one way, so you get on one of those lists and see how you get on.
[00:03:29] For some authors they work really well, for others, they don't, and I think this is something important to say to the first-time author, have a bit of a budget for this. Promotion requires you to spend either time or money, and the money can be the easier thing, if you have some, never easy if you don't. But if you have some money, it can be the easier way because of what we spent so much time talking about in the last episode, Matty, that need to balance your time between letting the reader know the book exists and writing the next one. So, you can put some money towards the issue, and I'm not saying throw money at it mindlessly at all, I really think it's very important to research the type of promotion that you do.
[00:04:16] There are free things you can do, and one of the things that can work really, really well is, a swap with another author who's in your genre, so they can tell their readers about you in some way, and you can tell you a redress about them in some way. This works best, obviously, when you pick somebody who has roughly the same number of readers as you, and when I say readers here, I'm talking about on your signup list. But if it is your first book, you may not have a lot of people, and so you're not a hugely attractive prospect in that regard, so that's not going to work for you unless you have already been marketing and amassing sign ups while you were writing the book.
[00:04:57] Do remember that each of the platforms has its own promotional tools that you may want to explore. Kobo, Apple, Amazon, all have really good promo tools, and again, they work to varying degrees for different books and for different authors. So, I've had authors who've said it really worked well, my Kobo promotions, for example, worked really well on my last book but they're not working on this book. And to some degree, book marketing and promotion is more art than science. It's not always predictable.
[00:05:32] And I think that's probably the most important thing I'd like to say at this point. You approach your book promotion, especially when you're starting out, very much in the spirit of experiment and exploration. You don't have huge high hopes. Don't have high expectations. Have the lowest possible expectations and base your budget and your time allocation on that. And then, some fine day you'll be surprised, but most authors go about it the other way around. They think, okay, if I'm going to spend some money, and I've got to pay, I expect to really shift books.
[00:06:05] If it's your first book and you've only got one book, you may not even want to spend any money or time on promotion just yet. Focus on getting your marketing right, getting your messages right, getting your infrastructure right, and then when you have three books begin to spend some money on promotion, because at that point you're likely to see some sort of return from that, whereas with one book, it can be done, it has been done, I've seen it done brilliantly. I've been actually in awe sometimes of what I've seen to be possible, but I would say nine times out of ten or ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it's very, very, very tough. And the sooner you can get beyond one book anyway, the better for you as an author, and I think probably your time is best spent in writing rather than promoting. ...
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[00:06:53] Matty: There were two episodes I wanted to point people to with regard to the newsletter swap. Episode 59 was AUTHOR NEWLETTER SWAPS AND STORY ORIGIN with Evan Gow and then Episode 76 was BOOKFUNNEL with Damon Courtney and part of our conversation was about newsletter swaps, so those are our two good resources.
[00:07:13] Orna: And two great services or two that will facilitate you to do so, you can just reach out yourself, individually, just to an author and set it up with somebody you like and admire, but the danger is you don't know how many, how their signup is, and you could be putting yourself in an awkward situation. And Story Origin and BookFunnel have two fantastic services for that, and for many other things, too.
[00:07:38] Matty: I wanted to use the conversation about the promotions as an opportunity to loop back on what you were saying earlier about having a goal in mind. So, if we look at promo sites like Bargain Booksy or Freebooksy or BookBub being the big one, I've often heard the advice that if you get a BookBub, which is difficult to do, but if you get a BookBub, then there's this whole strategy about stacking promos, and then see if you can get placement on all these other similar kinds of sites that you were mentioning.
[00:08:10] But I think the problem with that is that it's then very difficult to distinguish what you're getting from each platform. And so, if you have a BookBub on the first of the month, and then you have something else on the third, then it's hard to know where it's coming from. Do you have any advice about that, or even more generally, how can you then look back at something like an email promo, BookBub or similar, and decide if it was worth it or not?
[00:08:39] Orna: Yeah, great question. So just first, on BookBub just to say, when we're talking about "getting a BookBub" here and that's the way all of us describe it to each other, did you get a BookBub? Oh, you got a BookBub, yay! And what we mean is a BookBub Featured Deal. So BookBub also runs an advertising platform, which is a different opportunity. This is specifically the Featured Deal. And yes, it's also important I think, contextually to just say that the people who are doing this and who are recommending this as a strategy, it's algorithm marketing, really.
[00:09:13] So what you're trying to do here with your BookBub deal, if you're doing this stacking of buying other services around it, what you're trying to do is create, and it's usually Amazon that people are looking at, Amazon doesn't particularly reward spikes, it rewards consistency. The algorithms reward consistency, sales building over time is kind of what their algorithms really like and will pick up and amplify. So what you're trying to do is knowing that with a BookBub Featured Deal, you will get a big spike in sales. You're trying to build up to that and also not have this huge fall away straight afterwards, in order for the Amazon algorithm to pick you up and start giving you some organic sales, that's what it's all about.
[00:10:03] So it's important to recognize it's within that context, so you wouldn't do all this unless you actually have an algorithm marketing plan, promotional plan around this. You're doing it in order to achieve that goal. That's your outcome, otherwise, there's not really a lot of point in doing that. You don't need to do that at all, just be happy that you got your Featured Deal and bring them to wherever you want to sell it and away you go.
[00:10:28] So, in terms of knowing then, you're absolutely right, it's going to mush up a bit, you're not going to know exactly, but I will say this, the research shows that on such deals, the sales are pretty immediate. So if I have my BookBub on the first and I have something else I would sell on the first and the second, then by the third, I be picking up a few, definitely, but they won't be half, much, much less than half. We'll be down at about one 10th of the sales that we've been getting when it was at its peak two days ago.
[00:11:04] So if you're bringing something else in, you won't know exactly how many of those sales can be attributed, you're absolutely right. And that is the way it is, there's no way to know more, to be sure about that, you just have to kind of take that one on the chin and you can get a general sense and a general idea, but you can't know for sure.
[00:11:24] Matty: To use an example, if you get a listing or purchase listing, and let's say it costs a hundred dollars and it's the only one you're running, so you're avoiding this problem we're talking about, identifying where the sales came from, and let's say you make $80 in royalties in the days following that promotion. Is there a way that you can weigh whether that was worthwhile in terms of either quantifiable things like follow on sales to other books or in less quantifiable things like well, my name got out there, my name was seen by a bunch of people that might not otherwise have seen it?
[00:11:59] Orna: Yeah. So first of all, I think it's important to say better to have done it and to have fallen short a little bit probably than not to have done it at all. Better still to have done something that would've made a profit. So that's what you're trying So I hear a lot of authors saying oh well, at least my book got out there, or, oh well, hopefully it generated some organic sales as well, if they're talking about Amazon ads or something.
[00:12:27] I don't think that's a healthy way to look at it, it's not a very business-like way to look at it. I think the goal should be profit. And then you can fail, you can fall short of that and that's fine and you can fail better next time. But, you know, those kinds of consolations to ourselves can very easily lead us into vanity metrics and vanity spend. If we're not keeping ourselves, if I'm speaking now to people who are obviously in this to run a business and to make a living as an author, if money is not that important to you and you just want to sell books and get your name out there and so on, that's a different situation.
[00:13:03] But speaking to the main bulk of your listeners, which I know are the same as the main bulk of ALLi members, they want to actually make a successful business out of this, then profit has to be your motive. And as I said, you can fall short of that and you can console yourself a little bit, but it's important that you see you didn't make a profit. And so profit should be your aim, and you should judge your success or failure on profit and not on, oh, well, it was better than nothing kind of thing.
[00:13:34] Matty: That brings up the interesting question of the scenario where someone has written one book and doesn't intend to write another one. They have one book, they finished it, they worked on it for 20 years, whatever, and let's say they have a day job, so they're not relying on the sales of the books to pay their mortgage. But they're very interested in getting that book into the hands of as many people as possible. And for the purposes of this example, let's say it's a novel, not a how to, nonfiction book. Does ALLi even bother to give advice about promotion in that scenario, or is that so specialized and so different than what most of your members and followers are looking for that there's not the same pool of advice to offer?
[00:14:14] Orna: Again, it's a very good question. So it comes back to that idea of your goal and your definition of success, doesn't it? So what is your goal when you're setting out and why and knowing yourself and all that kind of stuff. What they will actually do won't be that different. It's the same thing to push one book as it is push all of your books. The only thing is that when you've got lots of books, it gets easier. So each book that you promote will have probably you get some people who really like your books and buy another one of your books. It's getting your name out there, it's building your author platform, it's got all sorts of ancillary benefits. If you've only got one book, everything is harder because everything is folded into that one book.
[00:14:58] It doesn't mean it can't be done, it absolutely can be done, and you'll use the very same techniques as the author who wants to make a living from their writing. But the thing is that it will be, A, it will be harder for you to be focused in just on that one book and success or failure will be quite stark. It'll just, you'll see it, you will see it very clearly, but on the plus side, you're not actually there to try and make a profit. So in a way you can kind of see it maybe as a paying hobby. And it might take a while, if this is what you like doing, marketing your one book that you wrote and getting it into the hands of as many readers as possible, and you're not exercised by profit, you just want to get the book out there, then in that way, it's a lot easier.
[00:15:47] Matty: I always thought that a distinction that would need to be made between that kind of scenario and a scenario where an author has a whole set of books that they're trying to lead people to is, for me, so I'm of that second type and I'm focusing on Facebook and my email newsletters, let's say, and so that's great, because I'm going to have, one hopes, a whole series of books to point those followers to, but if you have just one book, it's always going to be new to somebody, but you'd have to keep changing your approach because you're quickly going to exhaust your Facebook followers.
[00:16:21] So then you're going to have to either switch to a different platform, or maybe you decide you want to pitch yourself for articles and newspapers, so you would have pitch yourself to every newspaper in every geographic area that you're interested in. It's good that you only have one because then the effort needed to get it in front of people who haven't heard about it before is more intensive because you have to keep thinking of new ways to do that and new places to do it.
[00:16:47] Orna: But the great thing, and the reason why people can do well now with one book, whereas they never could before, is that we have this wonderful thing called digital publishing on the internet. So, there are lots and lots of territories that are open to us once we're selling. And presumably, this mythical person has their book in three or at least two formats, so ebook and print, maybe audio as well. So, between the three different formats and all the different territories that you can get your book out into and all the people in each of those territories that can be approached through different social media, all the different ways to get at people, you can actually keep going with one book for years.
[00:17:31] There are lots and lots of ways in which you can constantly keep growing that following. And of course, for those of us with more than one book, you want a bit of that, we were talking about this in the last episode, you want a bit of that going on, where you're reaching out to new people and new people, as well as selling more, which is easier, selling more stuff to your already warm people.
[00:17:57] Matty: Another topic under promotions is endorsements. It's always a little bit of a depressing topic. Not depressing, but intimidating, I think. So, can you talk about what an endorsement is and what your advice is, especially for first time authors for getting that?
[00:18:15] Orna: So I'm assuming by endorsements, you mean somebody well-known and kind of giving them a bit of a blurb that they can use to say that this is a good book, yeah. So I have a bit of a personal sort of observation on this, which not everybody will agree with. I think endorsements are much more useful for nonfiction than for fiction and poetry. I think we're in endorsement and blurb fatigue now, as readers of fiction and poetry, because every book appears with hyperbolic sort of praise, and I'm not sure that has value. However, having this discussion publicly with somebody recently, they were saying, that hyperbole is becoming the base. If you don't have those hyperbolic endorsements, then people think there's something wrong. So yeah, you can't win.
[00:19:10] So, let's just assume that people who are listening want to get endorsements. So this is something that takes a lot of time. You've got to do a lot of work upfront to get good endorsements from good people. And you've got to put yourself in the position of writing to people and asking them to read your book, which is a huge thing to ask somebody to do, please read my book. You're basically saying to somebody, please give over maybe 10, maybe more hours of your life and then give me a blurb.
[00:19:37] So, A, a lot of people are not very successful. They just can't get the people that they want to do the endorsements because they never heard of them and their inbox is full and they're really busy and they're probably looking for endorsements from somebody else, and it's that kind of thing. You can be lucky, but it can be quite challenging. And it's like pitching yourself in any respect, and pitching is part of being in a creative business, but not all of us are good at it. And a lot of people become indie authors because they don't want to be sending pitch letters to agents and publishers, and now they don't want to be sending pitch letters to somebody to endorse.
[00:20:18] However, if you have somebody in your arena and you know them, or you have one or two degrees of separation where you can actually draw on some kind of personal or networky kind of connection, it can help. If there's a very close, and I mean, really close kind of synergy between your work and theirs, particularly if you drew on their work or you've quoted them in the book, something like that can be really helpful.
[00:20:46] But you might want to forget about endorsements and wait for reviews. That is also a valid thing to do. So, our to-do lists, we have to look at them and see what are the things that we want to keep and what are the things that are going to have most effect. Will these endorsements actually sell your book or are they kind of nice to haves? A lot depends on your genre. So there are some genres where you won't get away with not having them. If you're writing anything that's vaguely educational or textbooky or something like that, it really, really does help if you can get those endorsements. But as I said for fiction, poetry, I'm not so sure.
[00:21:26] Matty: I have found it much easier to both ask for and get endorsements for my non-fiction books, and I think your example about if you've drawn on the work of another person is a good one because in TAKING THE SHORT TACK, which is the book I wrote with Mark Lefebvre, we didn't even get into the whole legal rights thing in a ton of depth because Douglas Smith has the book PLAYING THE SHORT GAME, which covers that very nicely. And so, right in the book, we said, in this part where we would otherwise put a bunch of stuff in about legal rights, just go buy Douglas Smith's PLAYING THE SHORT GAME and then we'd let Douglas Smith know, and we have mutually benefited from promoting each other's books. So whenever Mark or I are doing a podcast guest spot, for example, about TAKING THE SHORT TACK, we mention Doug's book and vice versa, so that's been very nice.
[00:22:22] On the fiction front, I'll share two things I've done, one of which has worked really well and one of which I'm still experimenting with. But one is that for the first two Ann Kinnear books and the first Lizzy Ballard book, I requested a Kirkus review. And Kirkus is one where you pay for the review, but you are not guaranteed a good review, which is great, because people know that, and they don't assume you've just paid for a positive review. And so I was fortunate that I got very positive reviews from Kirkus for the first of both my books.
[00:22:51] But it's pricey, so I didn't want to keep doing it for every book, so what I do is, I rely heavily on those Kirkus reviews for the first in series. And if I'm ever in a scenario where I'm promoting something else, I don't know that I've ever done this, but I could conceivably say, “here’s Book 4 in the series. Kirkus Reviews said of Book 1 in the series ..." So I could use it to promote even after the first one. But 99% of the time I'm promoting the first in series anyway, so it's a nice tie-in. So that's worked very well for me.
[00:23:19] And then the other thing that I'm still experimenting with is the idea of finding a big name in your genre and sending them a short story that you feel is representative of your style and saying, here's like a 4,000-word short story, which I feel is representative of my writing style, would you be willing to read it and then comment on the style, not the plot or the particular topic, but just the style. And be explicit with them that then what you plan to do is say, Stephen King said of one of Matty Dalrymple's short stories, "the best thing I've ever read." So being explicit with them about how you're planning on using it.
[00:23:56] And I actually did this with a very big name in my genre, and this person was so gracious, but she commented on the whole story. Actually, she didn't comment at all on the style other than to say, oh, the style seems nice, but here are some comments about the plot. And I realized in that case, I had picked the wrong story to send to her because it was a story that would make more sense for somebody who had read the novels and was now reading the short story, versus vice versa. So I still think it's a good idea, but you have to be careful what you're sending them to make sure it's going to leave the impression that you want to.
[00:24:29] Orna: I really like this idea. It's not one I've heard before, so I think that's a really interesting tip. And also, feeding into that, there was some research, it's quite old now. but there was some research that said depending again on the genre, but if you're on the quasi literary end of the fiction world, by which I mean, just that language, counts a bit and style and so on counts a bit with your readers, they're not just about give me the path of the story next, the quotes, that praise, the author style, actually get more clickthrough than something that's very specific about, this was good in this book. So, you might be onto something, let's keep talking about that one. That's interesting.
[00:25:15] Matty: I'll let you know how my continued research goes because I did burn out. Requesting testimonials or endorsements or blurbs is just as an exhausting as writing a pitch letter. And I finally just decided, you know what, I'm just not going to spend my time on that anymore.
[00:25:31] So another thing, a question that comes up about promotion is the value of hiring a publicist. So I'm curious as to your thoughts about the value of hiring a publicist.
[00:25:42] Orna: It very, very, very, very rarely pays for itself. It has to be a very particular kind of book. Again, fiction, forgot about it. Even big-name fiction authors can be disappointed with their trade media outings now. It's getting harder and harder to get attention and the big names are getting most of the attention.
[00:26:05] So we just recently had somebody, really experienced author, really great author, who sold loads of books and also runs a publishing house and publishes other authors to great success and she hired a publicist in London for her latest novel. And she said everything was great. They were fantastic. They did everything. She knows they did. Can't praise them highly enough. But was super disappointed, got one interview on a local BBC radio. That was the extent of it. And she'd spent thousands.
[00:26:41] So I think it's one of the least effective way of selling books. And I know that it's something that people at the beginning assume is part of the deal, if you like, because we're so used to reading author interviews and the review sections of the newspapers or whatever. And when we think of being a success as an author, that's kind of how we envisage it. Yeah. You've got your full-page feature on your latest book and, you're interviewed on the chat show and you're doing the rounds and that means I've made it, I'm a success. They're not the signifiers of success for most indie authors. I can't think of anybody actually. And I know a few people, including myself back in the day, I've done these, had fantastic exposure. But it hasn't shifted the needle on the books at all.
[00:27:27] Because, again, somebody is watching something and they say, well, that sounds really interesting. You know, sometime if I find myself in a bookstore, next time I'm online, I might go and read it. It's a much less direct route than online marketing. And then click this link, now I'm there, and within five minutes, I've heard about this book, decided that I'd like to buy it, gone over and bought it, and I'm sitting reading it. That's just a much more effective and efficient methodology.
[00:28:29] Matty: I wanted to loop back on a reference you had made earlier when we were talking about endorsements and that's the idea that getting reviews is much more important than getting endorsements. So talk about that a little bit. How can especially first-time authors go about getting reviews for their books.
[00:28:43] Orna: Yeah. I'd like to give a plug to our guide YOUR FIRST 50 REVIEWS, because that's goes into this in detail. But the thing is, first of all, you've got to realize how important reviews are these days. And when we're talking about reviews here, we're talking not about the editorial kinds of reviews that Matty was talking about with Kirkus, or you're being reviewed by a blogger or a book review page in the newspaper or whatever. Their editorial reviews, they go up top and Amazon and they can be used on your website and so on. They're kind of testimonials after the event. That's fine, but we're talking here about customer reviews and doing your best to get some visibility on Goodreads with reviews and or Amazon, Apple, Kobo, wherever your books are sold.
[00:29:31] And first of all, it's really important to realize that reviews are important and that you need to have a review strategy. to begin to put that in place while you are doing the other aspects of producing your book. So the early stages in the process. You begin trying to get some reviews.
[00:29:50] So as soon as you have a copy of your book that is very tidy and readable but maybe might have some final proofreading to do or you might be adding an index and there might be a few little bits and pieces left to finish, but you have what's called an advance review copy, an ARC, you begin to get that ARC out to as many people as possible. And so if you've been building up your own reader list, you can tell your email list that your book is ready, and if anybody would like to review it, that you'll provide an ebook copy and a digital copy in return for an honest review.
[00:30:29] And that's really important. So you're not asking them to give a positive review. You have to leave it up to them to review whatever way they want to publicly on Amazon or Goodreads. I know most of you listening know that, but often when people come into this business, they just assume that they go around trying to find positive reviews and trying to kill negative ones. It doesn't work like that. Once the book leaves you, people are free to review it honestly. And that's a really important part of the whole transaction for readers, because it's all about the readers in the end.
[00:31:03] So, yeah, your own list may provide a way. There are services like NetGalley and others who will actually organize reviews for you. You can do blog tours where book bloggers will sign up to take your book and review it. There are lots of ways to get reviews. But the most important thing is that you have a reviews policy and that you keep on doing it. You know, to keep on trying to get those reviews. They're becoming essential.
[00:31:31] Matty: One of the questions I've had in assessing my own pool of reviews is that it appears to me that Amazon lets at least customer rate a product without necessarily leaving a review because I have hundreds of ratings for my first book, but definitely not hundreds and hundreds of reviews. But when I see people asking their followers on social media, for example, to support them in this way, they're usually saying "ratings and reviews." Whereas I would think that if it's possible on the different platforms for readers to just rate something, there's definitely value, I mean, I know when I'm looking at products and it says, 400 people gave this a 4.5, then I'm attaching some importance to that. Even if I don't ever go in and look and read what those 400, some subset of those 400, people said. So do you know the mechanics? Is it possible for people to rate without reviewing?
[00:32:32] Orna: Yes. Absolutely. You can. You used to be able to, a long time ago though. Now you absolutely can just give your rating. And you're absolutely right. I would say there are lots of people who don't read the reviews at all, but they look at the star rating and then decide if it's four plus or whatever they'll go or three plus maybe on Goodreads because it's harder obviously to get a decent star showing on Goodreads. But, yeah, the mechanics is definitely there to just leave your star rating now and let that be that.
[00:33:07] Matty: The other thing I was doing, you can weigh in on what you think about this is that a lot of times I would be happy to leave a review, but I might've read the book months ago and I don't really remember it that clearly. So what I started doing is creating images that I would pull quotes from favorable reviews, "a great page turner" or "never saw the ending coming" or whatever it is, and then I would sprinkle those through an image that I would put up so that if someone wanted to support me by leaving a review, but maybe they read the book a while ago, or maybe they just didn't feel comfortable about writing a review and they could say, oh, "page turner," that sounds good. I thought it was a page turner. I'm going to go put that.
[00:33:43] And so I was prompting people. I was trying to give them some fodder to at least trigger an idea for their own review. And I have to say that on social media, I would say, "if you enjoyed the book, please leave a rating or review," not, "regardless of what you thought about the book, leaving a rating or review." Any comments about that approach?
[00:34:02] Orna: All good. You're good. And I think the prompting is a really good idea. It's like when people write for endorsements and they give a suggested sort of, you know, "other people have said, this book is blah, blah, blah." So you're kind of trying to steer them towards, you're not forcing anything and you're not insisting or anything, but you're kind of trying to steer them towards the outcomes that you want. All very good marketing, I will say, yes, top of class for your marketeer.
[00:34:31] Matty: Thank you. So I'm going to ask about another aspect of promotion that stumps me and the listeners will groan because I've been obsessing about this for the last several episodes, but that's pricing. So I have what I've got to believe is a pretty common set up for an indy author. My first in series are 2 99 for the ebooks and subsequent ones are 4 99. And I interviewed a JK Ellem fairly recently. TAKING THE LONG VIEW FOR PUBLISHING SUCCESS, that was Episode 97. And he had said that he had moved his post first in series books from 4 99 to 5 99. And he was encouraging me to do that too. And I have, for whatever reason, this huge mental block about it, because my fear is that I'm going to piss off the people who have gotten used to 4 99 and they'll never come back. And his very reasonable position was well try it, and if it doesn't work, put it back. Any thoughts on that approach? Or just more generally what indy authors should be considering when they're pricing?
[00:35:30] Orna: Well, try it. Yeah, I think, there aren't clear answers on these things, and I've personally had experience of putting my prices up and selling far more. I would also say that be aware that some platforms are less price sensitive than others. So Apple readers would pay more for books. So you don't have to price everything in the same way as straight across the board. Do keep in mind that Amazon will always want to be the cheapest. So don't make it cheaper on your own website because they were price match down and their algorithms will pick it up sooner or later. So it must be cheapest on Amazon and Amazon prides itself on being good value, so that's fine. But be aware that readers are less price sensitive elsewhere. And also that for some readers, if a book is below a certain price, they assume it's not good. And that is a recognized phenomenon.
[00:36:27] Now where you fit, I don't mean you, Matty, but all your listeners, where you fit on this spectrum is going to be influenced by all sorts of things. Again, the genre you're in will make a difference. Buyers of literary fiction are more tolerant of higher prices.
[00:36:44] I would say that my overall just general comment is indy authors are pricing too low. We're pricing too low to make a living. We're not allowing for the expenses of marketing. We're pricing based on just the cost of the production of the book. And not even that sometimes. So again, making profit your central motive, valuing your own time, how much should this book cost is a question that's well worth asking.
[00:37:12] Matty: A long time ago, at least probably a couple of years ago at this point, I was doing an author event at a bookstore, and she asked what the price was, so she could put it into the system. And this was for my paperbacks, and I said 12 99. And she was like, oh, you should be getting more than that. So, it's a good tip. I think both the observation that a pricing lower does not necessarily attract people and might in some cases deter them.
[00:37:37] And I feel like what I'm seeing is pricewise, indies, especially as the approach becomes more and more professional are feeling comfortable pricing a little higher. And I kind of feel like in some cases, the traditional publishers are pricing a little lower. So I feel like eventually sort of meet in the middle and that people won't be able to distinguish whether it's traditionally or indy published just based on price anymore. And that will be a good thing.
[00:38:04] Orna: I think it will be a good thing because indies played the price advantage, but the problem with price advantage is it's a downward spiral. And the core around which we should build our business is not price, but value. And being very aware of the value that we're giving. Then we will need to hire professionals to help us to do that. We also need to spend some money on marketing. So indy authors go into business without thinking, hey, I'm going into business. I need to budget for my marketing. I need to put for my this, and so on. They just go and do it and then go, oh, I'm in business. Am I in business? Oh yeah. Okay. Right then. So you know, there is no business that you would start without setting aside money for two years to keep it going, what you built up and so on and so forth. And so we bootstrap to a ludicrous degree and some people never get beyond that barrier.
[00:38:56] You can only charge the kinds of prices that are charged in the indy sphere, in parts of the indy sphere, if you are either suffering a loss or you're giving over a huge amount of your own time for no return. So, yeah, pricing concentrates the mind, pricing for profit is how we need to be thinking about it. And that means paying ourselves, not just making enough money, taking in enough money for the business to keep turning over. But if we want to actually price in a way that we make enough profit to pay ourselves a salary, then these prices are not sustainable.
[00:39:38] Matty: Do you have any tips for people pricing their print books and now on a platform like Findaway their audio books other than finding similar authors in your genre who are kind of like a similar level of success and considering that those are the people that your readers or listeners are going to be comparing your prices against?
[00:39:59] Orna: Yeah, I think that's the best. When you're thinking about prices, that is definitely the best benchmark to take. Pricing print has become very tricky because paper is becoming a more and more and more expensive and POD, it's becoming quite difficult to make the economics work in some cases, depending on the size of the books and so on. So pricing for print is becoming quite tricky. But yeah, I think your best benchmark is what is going on around you.
[00:40:26] But again, not being afraid to stand out a little if that's what's right for you and your business model. So as well as looking at what's happening out there, you have to look at what's happening in here. What's happening in your business model. How do you want to grow? How do you want to develop next year? What sorts of resources do you need for that? Don't just be guided by trying to be the best value. Be more aware of the value you're bringing and the price that you put on that and the price that you expect others to put on that.
[00:40:56] And having that sort of confidence reflects itself in the book. If a reader really wants a book, they will buy it. And there is no doubt about that. If they're taking a punt, it's something slightly different. But I often think that free or so low in price that they don't have to think about something, that's your giveaway, that's your product for prospects as what they would call it in the business world.
[00:41:17] You're just putting something out there in order to attract people. That should be very low in price, or first in series strategically priced lower to get people in and then you put them up, also fine. But as you said, there's almost a formula in the indy world that everybody kind of adopts without exploring enough. Is this actually my optimal sweet spot of number of sales versus amount of revenue generated?
[00:41:48] Matty: One of the reasons that I've liked putting my first and series at 2 99, but now I'm going to rethink that as well, is that it gives you a point to discount to. So if you're selling your first in series for $0.99 and you want to apply for a BookBub or similar, then there's nowhere you can go other than free. And free is always such a fraught conversation. What are your further thoughts on offering something for free?
[00:42:11] Orna: I think free needs a strategy. So just putting out free books and assuming that's going to attract the right readers is not a good plan. There are free junkies who will never buy a book. Don't worry too much about them because they never wouldn't buy a book anyway, no matter what happens and fine if they get a free book because they weren't going to buy anyway. But, yeah, you need a strategy for free. You're doing free in order to attract. So you need to make sure that your strategy works, and they need to be clear about what is the next step. So if you're giving something for free, you certainly should be expecting something in return if you're doing it as a business proposition.
[00:42:49] So just, mindlessly, as it were, just I'm going to make this book free and then everybody's going to read it free and then they're going to come and read my book, that's not necessarily so at all. And there was a time where free was a very effective strategy, but that bus has left the station. It can work. It depends on the genre. It depends on, we're always saying this, everything does, I can work. it can attract people in but be aware.
[00:43:16] And don't give away too much for free. This is something that people vary on, but I'm not a fan of this, here's your free library of books, because lots of people, once they get that free library, they've had enough of you. You know, they want to move on and buy another and read another writer now. And so you want that free offer to be tantalizing. You want it to be an attractor. You want to put some thought into what you're giving out.
[00:43:43] Matty: I think it wasn't a conversation I had with Lee Savino about newsletters, and I'll put a link to this in the show notes, and we were talking about reader magnets for collecting email addresses, and she was saying that she had the experience of signing up for someone's newsletter, and they sent her an entire series. It was one of these authors who has like 500 books. So Lee had received a whole set of books for free as a result of signing up. And she said it was kind of a detractor. And I think the same applies to offering your books online for free. That once you've had all that, it's kind of like when you eat too much at Thanksgiving and then you don't want to see turkey ever again for a little while. They don't want to repel people with free content.
[00:44:26] Orna: And the thing is that there's a very well know indy authority at the moment who's saying just giving away a free book doesn't cut it any anymore. You have to get away a library of books. And a lot of people are listening to that and doing that. And I personally think it's a very bad strategy.
[00:44:44] Matty: Yeah. I just have never been able to get past that feeling that I want to give away anything. The things that I give away, I'm moving more toward deleted scenes and things like that. And again, this is on the email side, but I'm kind of using that as an analogy that I don't want somebody to think that my book is worth nothing. I want them to recognize that it's worth something. And I think based on the conversation with you and the conversation with JK Ellem, I'll experiment with that and then report back on how things are working out at a higher price.
[00:45:16] And I think also the key is you have to make it worth the higher price. You can't just decide that now I'm going to charge the same that the big guys are charging unless your work is really indistinguishable in quality from those or better. There should be a standard of excellence, not different ones for indy in traditional.
[00:45:36] Orna: Absolutely. You're singing my song, Matty.
[00:45:40] Matty: Any other promotional considerations that we should be hitting, especially for early authors?
[00:45:45] Orna: Yeah, I think we've definitely ticked the major boxes. I think the only other thing I would say is I think it's useful to plan your promotions around a quarterly calendar. And so each quarter of the year, you've got something going on promotionally. So you might be experimenting with your prices this quarter, and you might be experimenting with email newsletters next quarter, and you might try some digital advertising the following quarter. And sooner or later, you'll settle into, oh yeah, this is the kind of promotion I like, and it doesn't take up too much of my time. And then you can use your quarters to refine that strategy. But I think thinking quarterly about it is important because if it means that you keep on promoting in some way.
[00:46:32] And almost no promotional campaign will result in no sales. Everything is going to generate something. So you're not losing completely. But back to the original point of having a goal of how many books you do want this promotion to sell, having some sort of metric whereby you can measure did it achieve that? How much did it exceed that? How much did it fall short of that? And then taking that learning and taking that into the next quarter. I think is a good way to approach it. Because otherwise it's the kind of thing, it can fall off the desk in terms of importance because there's so many other things going on.
[00:47:09] Matty: Well, Orna, once again, this has been so helpful and interesting. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:47:17] Orna: Great. So, SelfPublishingAdvice.org and that comes from the Alliance of Independent Authors and that's AllianceIndependentAuthors.org, and I am Orna Ross, and I am at OrnaRoss.com.
[00:47:32] Matty: And Orna will be back for the seventh in our series of seven processes of publishing, and we are going to be talking about a topic I know is near and dear to Orna's heart, which is selective rights. So people will definitely want to tune in for that. And thank you again, Orna.
[00:47:47] Orna: My pleasure. Thanks Matty. Bye-bye.
[00:07:13] Orna: And two great services or two that will facilitate you to do so, you can just reach out yourself, individually, just to an author and set it up with somebody you like and admire, but the danger is you don't know how many, how their signup is, and you could be putting yourself in an awkward situation. And Story Origin and BookFunnel have two fantastic services for that, and for many other things, too.
[00:07:38] Matty: I wanted to use the conversation about the promotions as an opportunity to loop back on what you were saying earlier about having a goal in mind. So, if we look at promo sites like Bargain Booksy or Freebooksy or BookBub being the big one, I've often heard the advice that if you get a BookBub, which is difficult to do, but if you get a BookBub, then there's this whole strategy about stacking promos, and then see if you can get placement on all these other similar kinds of sites that you were mentioning.
[00:08:10] But I think the problem with that is that it's then very difficult to distinguish what you're getting from each platform. And so, if you have a BookBub on the first of the month, and then you have something else on the third, then it's hard to know where it's coming from. Do you have any advice about that, or even more generally, how can you then look back at something like an email promo, BookBub or similar, and decide if it was worth it or not?
[00:08:39] Orna: Yeah, great question. So just first, on BookBub just to say, when we're talking about "getting a BookBub" here and that's the way all of us describe it to each other, did you get a BookBub? Oh, you got a BookBub, yay! And what we mean is a BookBub Featured Deal. So BookBub also runs an advertising platform, which is a different opportunity. This is specifically the Featured Deal. And yes, it's also important I think, contextually to just say that the people who are doing this and who are recommending this as a strategy, it's algorithm marketing, really.
[00:09:13] So what you're trying to do here with your BookBub deal, if you're doing this stacking of buying other services around it, what you're trying to do is create, and it's usually Amazon that people are looking at, Amazon doesn't particularly reward spikes, it rewards consistency. The algorithms reward consistency, sales building over time is kind of what their algorithms really like and will pick up and amplify. So what you're trying to do is knowing that with a BookBub Featured Deal, you will get a big spike in sales. You're trying to build up to that and also not have this huge fall away straight afterwards, in order for the Amazon algorithm to pick you up and start giving you some organic sales, that's what it's all about.
[00:10:03] So it's important to recognize it's within that context, so you wouldn't do all this unless you actually have an algorithm marketing plan, promotional plan around this. You're doing it in order to achieve that goal. That's your outcome, otherwise, there's not really a lot of point in doing that. You don't need to do that at all, just be happy that you got your Featured Deal and bring them to wherever you want to sell it and away you go.
[00:10:28] So, in terms of knowing then, you're absolutely right, it's going to mush up a bit, you're not going to know exactly, but I will say this, the research shows that on such deals, the sales are pretty immediate. So if I have my BookBub on the first and I have something else I would sell on the first and the second, then by the third, I be picking up a few, definitely, but they won't be half, much, much less than half. We'll be down at about one 10th of the sales that we've been getting when it was at its peak two days ago.
[00:11:04] So if you're bringing something else in, you won't know exactly how many of those sales can be attributed, you're absolutely right. And that is the way it is, there's no way to know more, to be sure about that, you just have to kind of take that one on the chin and you can get a general sense and a general idea, but you can't know for sure.
[00:11:24] Matty: To use an example, if you get a listing or purchase listing, and let's say it costs a hundred dollars and it's the only one you're running, so you're avoiding this problem we're talking about, identifying where the sales came from, and let's say you make $80 in royalties in the days following that promotion. Is there a way that you can weigh whether that was worthwhile in terms of either quantifiable things like follow on sales to other books or in less quantifiable things like well, my name got out there, my name was seen by a bunch of people that might not otherwise have seen it?
[00:11:59] Orna: Yeah. So first of all, I think it's important to say better to have done it and to have fallen short a little bit probably than not to have done it at all. Better still to have done something that would've made a profit. So that's what you're trying So I hear a lot of authors saying oh well, at least my book got out there, or, oh well, hopefully it generated some organic sales as well, if they're talking about Amazon ads or something.
[00:12:27] I don't think that's a healthy way to look at it, it's not a very business-like way to look at it. I think the goal should be profit. And then you can fail, you can fall short of that and that's fine and you can fail better next time. But, you know, those kinds of consolations to ourselves can very easily lead us into vanity metrics and vanity spend. If we're not keeping ourselves, if I'm speaking now to people who are obviously in this to run a business and to make a living as an author, if money is not that important to you and you just want to sell books and get your name out there and so on, that's a different situation.
[00:13:03] But speaking to the main bulk of your listeners, which I know are the same as the main bulk of ALLi members, they want to actually make a successful business out of this, then profit has to be your motive. And as I said, you can fall short of that and you can console yourself a little bit, but it's important that you see you didn't make a profit. And so profit should be your aim, and you should judge your success or failure on profit and not on, oh, well, it was better than nothing kind of thing.
[00:13:34] Matty: That brings up the interesting question of the scenario where someone has written one book and doesn't intend to write another one. They have one book, they finished it, they worked on it for 20 years, whatever, and let's say they have a day job, so they're not relying on the sales of the books to pay their mortgage. But they're very interested in getting that book into the hands of as many people as possible. And for the purposes of this example, let's say it's a novel, not a how to, nonfiction book. Does ALLi even bother to give advice about promotion in that scenario, or is that so specialized and so different than what most of your members and followers are looking for that there's not the same pool of advice to offer?
[00:14:14] Orna: Again, it's a very good question. So it comes back to that idea of your goal and your definition of success, doesn't it? So what is your goal when you're setting out and why and knowing yourself and all that kind of stuff. What they will actually do won't be that different. It's the same thing to push one book as it is push all of your books. The only thing is that when you've got lots of books, it gets easier. So each book that you promote will have probably you get some people who really like your books and buy another one of your books. It's getting your name out there, it's building your author platform, it's got all sorts of ancillary benefits. If you've only got one book, everything is harder because everything is folded into that one book.
[00:14:58] It doesn't mean it can't be done, it absolutely can be done, and you'll use the very same techniques as the author who wants to make a living from their writing. But the thing is that it will be, A, it will be harder for you to be focused in just on that one book and success or failure will be quite stark. It'll just, you'll see it, you will see it very clearly, but on the plus side, you're not actually there to try and make a profit. So in a way you can kind of see it maybe as a paying hobby. And it might take a while, if this is what you like doing, marketing your one book that you wrote and getting it into the hands of as many readers as possible, and you're not exercised by profit, you just want to get the book out there, then in that way, it's a lot easier.
[00:15:47] Matty: I always thought that a distinction that would need to be made between that kind of scenario and a scenario where an author has a whole set of books that they're trying to lead people to is, for me, so I'm of that second type and I'm focusing on Facebook and my email newsletters, let's say, and so that's great, because I'm going to have, one hopes, a whole series of books to point those followers to, but if you have just one book, it's always going to be new to somebody, but you'd have to keep changing your approach because you're quickly going to exhaust your Facebook followers.
[00:16:21] So then you're going to have to either switch to a different platform, or maybe you decide you want to pitch yourself for articles and newspapers, so you would have pitch yourself to every newspaper in every geographic area that you're interested in. It's good that you only have one because then the effort needed to get it in front of people who haven't heard about it before is more intensive because you have to keep thinking of new ways to do that and new places to do it.
[00:16:47] Orna: But the great thing, and the reason why people can do well now with one book, whereas they never could before, is that we have this wonderful thing called digital publishing on the internet. So, there are lots and lots of territories that are open to us once we're selling. And presumably, this mythical person has their book in three or at least two formats, so ebook and print, maybe audio as well. So, between the three different formats and all the different territories that you can get your book out into and all the people in each of those territories that can be approached through different social media, all the different ways to get at people, you can actually keep going with one book for years.
[00:17:31] There are lots and lots of ways in which you can constantly keep growing that following. And of course, for those of us with more than one book, you want a bit of that, we were talking about this in the last episode, you want a bit of that going on, where you're reaching out to new people and new people, as well as selling more, which is easier, selling more stuff to your already warm people.
[00:17:57] Matty: Another topic under promotions is endorsements. It's always a little bit of a depressing topic. Not depressing, but intimidating, I think. So, can you talk about what an endorsement is and what your advice is, especially for first time authors for getting that?
[00:18:15] Orna: So I'm assuming by endorsements, you mean somebody well-known and kind of giving them a bit of a blurb that they can use to say that this is a good book, yeah. So I have a bit of a personal sort of observation on this, which not everybody will agree with. I think endorsements are much more useful for nonfiction than for fiction and poetry. I think we're in endorsement and blurb fatigue now, as readers of fiction and poetry, because every book appears with hyperbolic sort of praise, and I'm not sure that has value. However, having this discussion publicly with somebody recently, they were saying, that hyperbole is becoming the base. If you don't have those hyperbolic endorsements, then people think there's something wrong. So yeah, you can't win.
[00:19:10] So, let's just assume that people who are listening want to get endorsements. So this is something that takes a lot of time. You've got to do a lot of work upfront to get good endorsements from good people. And you've got to put yourself in the position of writing to people and asking them to read your book, which is a huge thing to ask somebody to do, please read my book. You're basically saying to somebody, please give over maybe 10, maybe more hours of your life and then give me a blurb.
[00:19:37] So, A, a lot of people are not very successful. They just can't get the people that they want to do the endorsements because they never heard of them and their inbox is full and they're really busy and they're probably looking for endorsements from somebody else, and it's that kind of thing. You can be lucky, but it can be quite challenging. And it's like pitching yourself in any respect, and pitching is part of being in a creative business, but not all of us are good at it. And a lot of people become indie authors because they don't want to be sending pitch letters to agents and publishers, and now they don't want to be sending pitch letters to somebody to endorse.
[00:20:18] However, if you have somebody in your arena and you know them, or you have one or two degrees of separation where you can actually draw on some kind of personal or networky kind of connection, it can help. If there's a very close, and I mean, really close kind of synergy between your work and theirs, particularly if you drew on their work or you've quoted them in the book, something like that can be really helpful.
[00:20:46] But you might want to forget about endorsements and wait for reviews. That is also a valid thing to do. So, our to-do lists, we have to look at them and see what are the things that we want to keep and what are the things that are going to have most effect. Will these endorsements actually sell your book or are they kind of nice to haves? A lot depends on your genre. So there are some genres where you won't get away with not having them. If you're writing anything that's vaguely educational or textbooky or something like that, it really, really does help if you can get those endorsements. But as I said for fiction, poetry, I'm not so sure.
[00:21:26] Matty: I have found it much easier to both ask for and get endorsements for my non-fiction books, and I think your example about if you've drawn on the work of another person is a good one because in TAKING THE SHORT TACK, which is the book I wrote with Mark Lefebvre, we didn't even get into the whole legal rights thing in a ton of depth because Douglas Smith has the book PLAYING THE SHORT GAME, which covers that very nicely. And so, right in the book, we said, in this part where we would otherwise put a bunch of stuff in about legal rights, just go buy Douglas Smith's PLAYING THE SHORT GAME and then we'd let Douglas Smith know, and we have mutually benefited from promoting each other's books. So whenever Mark or I are doing a podcast guest spot, for example, about TAKING THE SHORT TACK, we mention Doug's book and vice versa, so that's been very nice.
[00:22:22] On the fiction front, I'll share two things I've done, one of which has worked really well and one of which I'm still experimenting with. But one is that for the first two Ann Kinnear books and the first Lizzy Ballard book, I requested a Kirkus review. And Kirkus is one where you pay for the review, but you are not guaranteed a good review, which is great, because people know that, and they don't assume you've just paid for a positive review. And so I was fortunate that I got very positive reviews from Kirkus for the first of both my books.
[00:22:51] But it's pricey, so I didn't want to keep doing it for every book, so what I do is, I rely heavily on those Kirkus reviews for the first in series. And if I'm ever in a scenario where I'm promoting something else, I don't know that I've ever done this, but I could conceivably say, “here’s Book 4 in the series. Kirkus Reviews said of Book 1 in the series ..." So I could use it to promote even after the first one. But 99% of the time I'm promoting the first in series anyway, so it's a nice tie-in. So that's worked very well for me.
[00:23:19] And then the other thing that I'm still experimenting with is the idea of finding a big name in your genre and sending them a short story that you feel is representative of your style and saying, here's like a 4,000-word short story, which I feel is representative of my writing style, would you be willing to read it and then comment on the style, not the plot or the particular topic, but just the style. And be explicit with them that then what you plan to do is say, Stephen King said of one of Matty Dalrymple's short stories, "the best thing I've ever read." So being explicit with them about how you're planning on using it.
[00:23:56] And I actually did this with a very big name in my genre, and this person was so gracious, but she commented on the whole story. Actually, she didn't comment at all on the style other than to say, oh, the style seems nice, but here are some comments about the plot. And I realized in that case, I had picked the wrong story to send to her because it was a story that would make more sense for somebody who had read the novels and was now reading the short story, versus vice versa. So I still think it's a good idea, but you have to be careful what you're sending them to make sure it's going to leave the impression that you want to.
[00:24:29] Orna: I really like this idea. It's not one I've heard before, so I think that's a really interesting tip. And also, feeding into that, there was some research, it's quite old now. but there was some research that said depending again on the genre, but if you're on the quasi literary end of the fiction world, by which I mean, just that language, counts a bit and style and so on counts a bit with your readers, they're not just about give me the path of the story next, the quotes, that praise, the author style, actually get more clickthrough than something that's very specific about, this was good in this book. So, you might be onto something, let's keep talking about that one. That's interesting.
[00:25:15] Matty: I'll let you know how my continued research goes because I did burn out. Requesting testimonials or endorsements or blurbs is just as an exhausting as writing a pitch letter. And I finally just decided, you know what, I'm just not going to spend my time on that anymore.
[00:25:31] So another thing, a question that comes up about promotion is the value of hiring a publicist. So I'm curious as to your thoughts about the value of hiring a publicist.
[00:25:42] Orna: It very, very, very, very rarely pays for itself. It has to be a very particular kind of book. Again, fiction, forgot about it. Even big-name fiction authors can be disappointed with their trade media outings now. It's getting harder and harder to get attention and the big names are getting most of the attention.
[00:26:05] So we just recently had somebody, really experienced author, really great author, who sold loads of books and also runs a publishing house and publishes other authors to great success and she hired a publicist in London for her latest novel. And she said everything was great. They were fantastic. They did everything. She knows they did. Can't praise them highly enough. But was super disappointed, got one interview on a local BBC radio. That was the extent of it. And she'd spent thousands.
[00:26:41] So I think it's one of the least effective way of selling books. And I know that it's something that people at the beginning assume is part of the deal, if you like, because we're so used to reading author interviews and the review sections of the newspapers or whatever. And when we think of being a success as an author, that's kind of how we envisage it. Yeah. You've got your full-page feature on your latest book and, you're interviewed on the chat show and you're doing the rounds and that means I've made it, I'm a success. They're not the signifiers of success for most indie authors. I can't think of anybody actually. And I know a few people, including myself back in the day, I've done these, had fantastic exposure. But it hasn't shifted the needle on the books at all.
[00:27:27] Because, again, somebody is watching something and they say, well, that sounds really interesting. You know, sometime if I find myself in a bookstore, next time I'm online, I might go and read it. It's a much less direct route than online marketing. And then click this link, now I'm there, and within five minutes, I've heard about this book, decided that I'd like to buy it, gone over and bought it, and I'm sitting reading it. That's just a much more effective and efficient methodology.
[00:28:29] Matty: I wanted to loop back on a reference you had made earlier when we were talking about endorsements and that's the idea that getting reviews is much more important than getting endorsements. So talk about that a little bit. How can especially first-time authors go about getting reviews for their books.
[00:28:43] Orna: Yeah. I'd like to give a plug to our guide YOUR FIRST 50 REVIEWS, because that's goes into this in detail. But the thing is, first of all, you've got to realize how important reviews are these days. And when we're talking about reviews here, we're talking not about the editorial kinds of reviews that Matty was talking about with Kirkus, or you're being reviewed by a blogger or a book review page in the newspaper or whatever. Their editorial reviews, they go up top and Amazon and they can be used on your website and so on. They're kind of testimonials after the event. That's fine, but we're talking here about customer reviews and doing your best to get some visibility on Goodreads with reviews and or Amazon, Apple, Kobo, wherever your books are sold.
[00:29:31] And first of all, it's really important to realize that reviews are important and that you need to have a review strategy. to begin to put that in place while you are doing the other aspects of producing your book. So the early stages in the process. You begin trying to get some reviews.
[00:29:50] So as soon as you have a copy of your book that is very tidy and readable but maybe might have some final proofreading to do or you might be adding an index and there might be a few little bits and pieces left to finish, but you have what's called an advance review copy, an ARC, you begin to get that ARC out to as many people as possible. And so if you've been building up your own reader list, you can tell your email list that your book is ready, and if anybody would like to review it, that you'll provide an ebook copy and a digital copy in return for an honest review.
[00:30:29] And that's really important. So you're not asking them to give a positive review. You have to leave it up to them to review whatever way they want to publicly on Amazon or Goodreads. I know most of you listening know that, but often when people come into this business, they just assume that they go around trying to find positive reviews and trying to kill negative ones. It doesn't work like that. Once the book leaves you, people are free to review it honestly. And that's a really important part of the whole transaction for readers, because it's all about the readers in the end.
[00:31:03] So, yeah, your own list may provide a way. There are services like NetGalley and others who will actually organize reviews for you. You can do blog tours where book bloggers will sign up to take your book and review it. There are lots of ways to get reviews. But the most important thing is that you have a reviews policy and that you keep on doing it. You know, to keep on trying to get those reviews. They're becoming essential.
[00:31:31] Matty: One of the questions I've had in assessing my own pool of reviews is that it appears to me that Amazon lets at least customer rate a product without necessarily leaving a review because I have hundreds of ratings for my first book, but definitely not hundreds and hundreds of reviews. But when I see people asking their followers on social media, for example, to support them in this way, they're usually saying "ratings and reviews." Whereas I would think that if it's possible on the different platforms for readers to just rate something, there's definitely value, I mean, I know when I'm looking at products and it says, 400 people gave this a 4.5, then I'm attaching some importance to that. Even if I don't ever go in and look and read what those 400, some subset of those 400, people said. So do you know the mechanics? Is it possible for people to rate without reviewing?
[00:32:32] Orna: Yes. Absolutely. You can. You used to be able to, a long time ago though. Now you absolutely can just give your rating. And you're absolutely right. I would say there are lots of people who don't read the reviews at all, but they look at the star rating and then decide if it's four plus or whatever they'll go or three plus maybe on Goodreads because it's harder obviously to get a decent star showing on Goodreads. But, yeah, the mechanics is definitely there to just leave your star rating now and let that be that.
[00:33:07] Matty: The other thing I was doing, you can weigh in on what you think about this is that a lot of times I would be happy to leave a review, but I might've read the book months ago and I don't really remember it that clearly. So what I started doing is creating images that I would pull quotes from favorable reviews, "a great page turner" or "never saw the ending coming" or whatever it is, and then I would sprinkle those through an image that I would put up so that if someone wanted to support me by leaving a review, but maybe they read the book a while ago, or maybe they just didn't feel comfortable about writing a review and they could say, oh, "page turner," that sounds good. I thought it was a page turner. I'm going to go put that.
[00:33:43] And so I was prompting people. I was trying to give them some fodder to at least trigger an idea for their own review. And I have to say that on social media, I would say, "if you enjoyed the book, please leave a rating or review," not, "regardless of what you thought about the book, leaving a rating or review." Any comments about that approach?
[00:34:02] Orna: All good. You're good. And I think the prompting is a really good idea. It's like when people write for endorsements and they give a suggested sort of, you know, "other people have said, this book is blah, blah, blah." So you're kind of trying to steer them towards, you're not forcing anything and you're not insisting or anything, but you're kind of trying to steer them towards the outcomes that you want. All very good marketing, I will say, yes, top of class for your marketeer.
[00:34:31] Matty: Thank you. So I'm going to ask about another aspect of promotion that stumps me and the listeners will groan because I've been obsessing about this for the last several episodes, but that's pricing. So I have what I've got to believe is a pretty common set up for an indy author. My first in series are 2 99 for the ebooks and subsequent ones are 4 99. And I interviewed a JK Ellem fairly recently. TAKING THE LONG VIEW FOR PUBLISHING SUCCESS, that was Episode 97. And he had said that he had moved his post first in series books from 4 99 to 5 99. And he was encouraging me to do that too. And I have, for whatever reason, this huge mental block about it, because my fear is that I'm going to piss off the people who have gotten used to 4 99 and they'll never come back. And his very reasonable position was well try it, and if it doesn't work, put it back. Any thoughts on that approach? Or just more generally what indy authors should be considering when they're pricing?
[00:35:30] Orna: Well, try it. Yeah, I think, there aren't clear answers on these things, and I've personally had experience of putting my prices up and selling far more. I would also say that be aware that some platforms are less price sensitive than others. So Apple readers would pay more for books. So you don't have to price everything in the same way as straight across the board. Do keep in mind that Amazon will always want to be the cheapest. So don't make it cheaper on your own website because they were price match down and their algorithms will pick it up sooner or later. So it must be cheapest on Amazon and Amazon prides itself on being good value, so that's fine. But be aware that readers are less price sensitive elsewhere. And also that for some readers, if a book is below a certain price, they assume it's not good. And that is a recognized phenomenon.
[00:36:27] Now where you fit, I don't mean you, Matty, but all your listeners, where you fit on this spectrum is going to be influenced by all sorts of things. Again, the genre you're in will make a difference. Buyers of literary fiction are more tolerant of higher prices.
[00:36:44] I would say that my overall just general comment is indy authors are pricing too low. We're pricing too low to make a living. We're not allowing for the expenses of marketing. We're pricing based on just the cost of the production of the book. And not even that sometimes. So again, making profit your central motive, valuing your own time, how much should this book cost is a question that's well worth asking.
[00:37:12] Matty: A long time ago, at least probably a couple of years ago at this point, I was doing an author event at a bookstore, and she asked what the price was, so she could put it into the system. And this was for my paperbacks, and I said 12 99. And she was like, oh, you should be getting more than that. So, it's a good tip. I think both the observation that a pricing lower does not necessarily attract people and might in some cases deter them.
[00:37:37] And I feel like what I'm seeing is pricewise, indies, especially as the approach becomes more and more professional are feeling comfortable pricing a little higher. And I kind of feel like in some cases, the traditional publishers are pricing a little lower. So I feel like eventually sort of meet in the middle and that people won't be able to distinguish whether it's traditionally or indy published just based on price anymore. And that will be a good thing.
[00:38:04] Orna: I think it will be a good thing because indies played the price advantage, but the problem with price advantage is it's a downward spiral. And the core around which we should build our business is not price, but value. And being very aware of the value that we're giving. Then we will need to hire professionals to help us to do that. We also need to spend some money on marketing. So indy authors go into business without thinking, hey, I'm going into business. I need to budget for my marketing. I need to put for my this, and so on. They just go and do it and then go, oh, I'm in business. Am I in business? Oh yeah. Okay. Right then. So you know, there is no business that you would start without setting aside money for two years to keep it going, what you built up and so on and so forth. And so we bootstrap to a ludicrous degree and some people never get beyond that barrier.
[00:38:56] You can only charge the kinds of prices that are charged in the indy sphere, in parts of the indy sphere, if you are either suffering a loss or you're giving over a huge amount of your own time for no return. So, yeah, pricing concentrates the mind, pricing for profit is how we need to be thinking about it. And that means paying ourselves, not just making enough money, taking in enough money for the business to keep turning over. But if we want to actually price in a way that we make enough profit to pay ourselves a salary, then these prices are not sustainable.
[00:39:38] Matty: Do you have any tips for people pricing their print books and now on a platform like Findaway their audio books other than finding similar authors in your genre who are kind of like a similar level of success and considering that those are the people that your readers or listeners are going to be comparing your prices against?
[00:39:59] Orna: Yeah, I think that's the best. When you're thinking about prices, that is definitely the best benchmark to take. Pricing print has become very tricky because paper is becoming a more and more and more expensive and POD, it's becoming quite difficult to make the economics work in some cases, depending on the size of the books and so on. So pricing for print is becoming quite tricky. But yeah, I think your best benchmark is what is going on around you.
[00:40:26] But again, not being afraid to stand out a little if that's what's right for you and your business model. So as well as looking at what's happening out there, you have to look at what's happening in here. What's happening in your business model. How do you want to grow? How do you want to develop next year? What sorts of resources do you need for that? Don't just be guided by trying to be the best value. Be more aware of the value you're bringing and the price that you put on that and the price that you expect others to put on that.
[00:40:56] And having that sort of confidence reflects itself in the book. If a reader really wants a book, they will buy it. And there is no doubt about that. If they're taking a punt, it's something slightly different. But I often think that free or so low in price that they don't have to think about something, that's your giveaway, that's your product for prospects as what they would call it in the business world.
[00:41:17] You're just putting something out there in order to attract people. That should be very low in price, or first in series strategically priced lower to get people in and then you put them up, also fine. But as you said, there's almost a formula in the indy world that everybody kind of adopts without exploring enough. Is this actually my optimal sweet spot of number of sales versus amount of revenue generated?
[00:41:48] Matty: One of the reasons that I've liked putting my first and series at 2 99, but now I'm going to rethink that as well, is that it gives you a point to discount to. So if you're selling your first in series for $0.99 and you want to apply for a BookBub or similar, then there's nowhere you can go other than free. And free is always such a fraught conversation. What are your further thoughts on offering something for free?
[00:42:11] Orna: I think free needs a strategy. So just putting out free books and assuming that's going to attract the right readers is not a good plan. There are free junkies who will never buy a book. Don't worry too much about them because they never wouldn't buy a book anyway, no matter what happens and fine if they get a free book because they weren't going to buy anyway. But, yeah, you need a strategy for free. You're doing free in order to attract. So you need to make sure that your strategy works, and they need to be clear about what is the next step. So if you're giving something for free, you certainly should be expecting something in return if you're doing it as a business proposition.
[00:42:49] So just, mindlessly, as it were, just I'm going to make this book free and then everybody's going to read it free and then they're going to come and read my book, that's not necessarily so at all. And there was a time where free was a very effective strategy, but that bus has left the station. It can work. It depends on the genre. It depends on, we're always saying this, everything does, I can work. it can attract people in but be aware.
[00:43:16] And don't give away too much for free. This is something that people vary on, but I'm not a fan of this, here's your free library of books, because lots of people, once they get that free library, they've had enough of you. You know, they want to move on and buy another and read another writer now. And so you want that free offer to be tantalizing. You want it to be an attractor. You want to put some thought into what you're giving out.
[00:43:43] Matty: I think it wasn't a conversation I had with Lee Savino about newsletters, and I'll put a link to this in the show notes, and we were talking about reader magnets for collecting email addresses, and she was saying that she had the experience of signing up for someone's newsletter, and they sent her an entire series. It was one of these authors who has like 500 books. So Lee had received a whole set of books for free as a result of signing up. And she said it was kind of a detractor. And I think the same applies to offering your books online for free. That once you've had all that, it's kind of like when you eat too much at Thanksgiving and then you don't want to see turkey ever again for a little while. They don't want to repel people with free content.
[00:44:26] Orna: And the thing is that there's a very well know indy authority at the moment who's saying just giving away a free book doesn't cut it any anymore. You have to get away a library of books. And a lot of people are listening to that and doing that. And I personally think it's a very bad strategy.
[00:44:44] Matty: Yeah. I just have never been able to get past that feeling that I want to give away anything. The things that I give away, I'm moving more toward deleted scenes and things like that. And again, this is on the email side, but I'm kind of using that as an analogy that I don't want somebody to think that my book is worth nothing. I want them to recognize that it's worth something. And I think based on the conversation with you and the conversation with JK Ellem, I'll experiment with that and then report back on how things are working out at a higher price.
[00:45:16] And I think also the key is you have to make it worth the higher price. You can't just decide that now I'm going to charge the same that the big guys are charging unless your work is really indistinguishable in quality from those or better. There should be a standard of excellence, not different ones for indy in traditional.
[00:45:36] Orna: Absolutely. You're singing my song, Matty.
[00:45:40] Matty: Any other promotional considerations that we should be hitting, especially for early authors?
[00:45:45] Orna: Yeah, I think we've definitely ticked the major boxes. I think the only other thing I would say is I think it's useful to plan your promotions around a quarterly calendar. And so each quarter of the year, you've got something going on promotionally. So you might be experimenting with your prices this quarter, and you might be experimenting with email newsletters next quarter, and you might try some digital advertising the following quarter. And sooner or later, you'll settle into, oh yeah, this is the kind of promotion I like, and it doesn't take up too much of my time. And then you can use your quarters to refine that strategy. But I think thinking quarterly about it is important because if it means that you keep on promoting in some way.
[00:46:32] And almost no promotional campaign will result in no sales. Everything is going to generate something. So you're not losing completely. But back to the original point of having a goal of how many books you do want this promotion to sell, having some sort of metric whereby you can measure did it achieve that? How much did it exceed that? How much did it fall short of that? And then taking that learning and taking that into the next quarter. I think is a good way to approach it. Because otherwise it's the kind of thing, it can fall off the desk in terms of importance because there's so many other things going on.
[00:47:09] Matty: Well, Orna, once again, this has been so helpful and interesting. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and all your work online.
[00:47:17] Orna: Great. So, SelfPublishingAdvice.org and that comes from the Alliance of Independent Authors and that's AllianceIndependentAuthors.org, and I am Orna Ross, and I am at OrnaRoss.com.
[00:47:32] Matty: And Orna will be back for the seventh in our series of seven processes of publishing, and we are going to be talking about a topic I know is near and dear to Orna's heart, which is selective rights. So people will definitely want to tune in for that. And thank you again, Orna.
[00:47:47] Orna: My pleasure. Thanks Matty. Bye-bye.
Links
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From the interview:
150 Self-Publishing Questions Answered: ALLi’s Writing, Publishing, & Book Marketing Tips for Authors and Poets (Publishing Guides for Indie Authors 5) (affiliate link)
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