Episode 143 - Getting into the Mind of Your Audience with Alexa Bigwarfe
July 19, 2022
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Alexa Bigwarfe talks about GETTING INTO THE MIND OF YOUR AUDIENCE. She discusses why marketing is such a hard sell for authors, and why it shouldn’t be; the art and science of marketing, and the importance of taking a holistic view; how social media is about being social; three key planning documents; and the importance of keeping an open mind.
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Alexa Bigwarfe is a mother to 3 wildlings who keep her on her toes. She is an advocate, activist, speaker, author & author coach, publisher, and podcaster. Her writing career began after her infant daughter passed away at 2 days old and she turned to writing for healing. Since then, she has used her writing platform for advocacy and activism to support mothers, children, and marginalized voices. She began a nonprofit, Sunshine After the Storm, to support mothers in their most difficult time.
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She is the creator and co-host of the Lose the Cape podcast and has co-authored four volumes under the Lose the Cape brand. Her primary business is Write|Publish|Sell, a company dedicated to shepherding authors through the process of writing and publishing their books like a pro. She owns Kat Biggie Press, and a children’s book publishing company, Purple Butterfly Press – both dedicated to bringing stories of hope, inspiration, encouragement, and girl-power to the world.
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"We have to get beyond this thought that I'm a writer and I'm going to write, and the rest is going to be done by someone else, and we really have to realize that, no, this is our responsibility and we need to do it. But understanding that it doesn't have to be this thorn in our side. It can be something that's really enjoyable. And the way to make it enjoyable is to put yourself in a position where you are communicating with your readers and getting feedback from your readers and having that relationship with readers." —Alexa Bigwarfe
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Links
Alexa's Links
[email protected]
writepublishsell.com
https://www.facebook.com/WritePubSell/
https://www.instagram.com/writepublishsell/
https://twitter.com/writepubsell
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-iBFOOzTLdgF_9LW1T-Qxw
Referenced in the Interview:
Episode 105 - The Fifth Process of Publishing: Marketing with Orna Ross
Episode 106 - The Sixth Process of Publishing: Promotion with Orna Ross
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
[email protected]
writepublishsell.com
https://www.facebook.com/WritePubSell/
https://www.instagram.com/writepublishsell/
https://twitter.com/writepubsell
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-iBFOOzTLdgF_9LW1T-Qxw
Referenced in the Interview:
Episode 105 - The Fifth Process of Publishing: Marketing with Orna Ross
Episode 106 - The Sixth Process of Publishing: Promotion with Orna Ross
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Alexa Bigwarfe. Hey, Alexa, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Alexa: Hey, good. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Alexa Bigwarfe is a mother to three wildlings who keep her on her toes. She's an advocate activist, speaker, author, and author coach, publisher, and podcaster. Her writing career began after her infant daughter passed away at two days old and she turned to writing for healing.
Since then, she has used her writing platform for advocacy and activism to support mothers, children, and marginalized voices. She began a nonprofit, Sunshine after the Storm, to support mothers in their most difficult time. She's the creator and co-host of the Lose the Cape podcast and has co-authored 4 volumes under the Lose the Cape brand. Her primary business is Right | Publish | Sell, a company dedicated to shepherding authors through the process of writing and publishing their books like a pro.
She owns Kat Biggie Press, and a children's book publishing company, Purple Butterfly Press, both dedicated to bringing stories of hope, inspiration, encouragement, and girl power to the world. And I met Alexa when she hosted the Women in Publishing summit, which was a great summit, great fun to participate in, and I wanted to invite her to The Indy Author Podcast to talk about Book Marketing Fundamentals and Keeping it Fun.
Why is Marketing Such a Hard Sell for Authors?
[00:01:15] Matty: And so I'm going to just start out with a question, why is marketing such a hard sell to authors? Why do we keep having to try to convince authors that it can be fun?
It's really funny because I don't know why it's so hard for people to understand, because it seems commonplace, right? If you're going to be selling something, which now as an author, you have a product that you're trying to sell, marketing should just be the thing that you have to do. Especially for newer authors, first time authors or those who have maybe launched a couple of books but aren't seeing the sales they want, marketing is such a key piece of that, not only positioning the book in the right places, but also finding the ways that you as an author can get out there and talk about this.
[00:01:56] Alexa: But it's funny, in a lot of indy communities, and I think this is honestly shifting a little bit as we get more, what I like to call, the professional authors out there, the professionalization of authors is becoming a real thing now. There are a lot of companies like mine and the Women in Publishing summit and many other things, Joanna Penn, the Self-publishing 101 School, all these types of things that are really helping authors become better at what they're doing. I think we're starting to see this shift, but for a long time, there was a lot of resistance. Authors just wanted to write, and they didn't understand why marketing needed to be such a big piece of this.
And I think it stems from our belief back in the old traditional system where authors had a big publisher behind them who would do a lot of this on their behalf, and they didn't necessarily have to. But as the entire publishing industry has shifted, as more people are indy publishing, as more people are working with smaller presses, and even with some of the larger traditional companies, the marketing really is falling largely on the shoulders of the authors.
So we have to get beyond this thought that, I'm a writer and I'm going to write, and the rest is going to be done by someone else, or the rest is just going to happen when I put my book on Amazon. And we really have to realize that, no, this is our responsibility, and we need to do it.
But understanding that it doesn't have to be this thorn in our side. It can be something that's really enjoyable. And the way to make it enjoyable is to put yourself in a position where you are communicating with your readers and getting feedback from your readers and doing the things on social media that you enjoy and having that relationship with readers.
The Art and Science of Marketing
[00:03:32] Matty: It does seem as if there's an art and a science to marketing. And the art should be easy for us, because it pretty much involves talking about our books. The science, I think, is sometimes more challenging because I think that authors can sometimes get stumped by the things like understanding how to identify comp author and things like that. But if we just start out with the art of it, the part that is, now I get a chance to talk about my book, is that in fact, a good way to go about it, or is that a pitfall way to go about it?
[00:04:05] Alexa: I think it's a pitfall because that's where people get stuck. They're like, okay, I've already told people about my book, so now what do I talk about in my marketing? And in reality, what you need to do is start thinking about the bigger interests of your readers.
And this really depends on your genre. There are so many ways that you can crack this, depending on whether you're writing fiction or whether you're writing a children's book or whether you're writing a memoir. But if you think about yourself as a user of content, as a consumer of content, of what you like to look at when you're on social media, what you like to listen to on podcasts, what you like to hear on the news or watch on TV, it's often not about a particular book. It's about the themes behind the book. It's about the things that intrigue you and pull you into that.
And that's where really, knowing your audience, your ideal audience, your target audience, and the things that they're really interested in can help you start creating other lines of topics that you can put out there so that people are engaged with you.
If you're writing romcom for example, putting funny things out there that gets people to laugh is something that'll make people want to follow you and then see what you're doing. If you're writing thriller, you want to be sharing or crime, you want to be sharing other things that are going to interest people.
Maybe it's a podcast you're listening to, maybe it's a true crime thing that just happened. If you're writing a children's book, there's generally a theme behind that book. So are you talking about empathy or kindness or learning your ABCs or any of those things?
You have to pull those themes from whatever it is in your book and find interesting things to talk about with your audience that relate to that, so that it's not always just about my book and I did this, and I did this. But here's some other books, here's some other resources, here's some other things that may be really interesting to your audience, so that you're starting to create a conversation with the people who are following you in different places or are reading your blog or reading your newsletter.
[00:05:52] Alexa: And if you're just talking about your book and what you're doing, you're going to shut down that communication, people are going to lose interest and even potentially unfollow you, which you definitely don't want. Because that shuts down everything with your potential with them.
Social Media is About Being Social
[00:06:06] Matty: Yeah, I think one of the lessons I learned the hard way as I think many people did, is when I was starting out, I knew all the roles about, 60% of your social media posts should be about something other than yourself. I forget what the numbers were. It was clear that it shouldn't always be buy my book, buy my book.
And I tried to do that, and I wasn't getting a lot of traction. And at some point, I just thought, you know what, I'm just not really going to worry about this marketing stuff anymore.
But I'll use my Facebook platform as an example. I would be scrolling through my own feed and when I was looking for ways to promote the Falcon and the Owl, which was one of my Ann Kinnear suspense novels, I must have written "falcon and owl" in post, and then I started getting a lot of bird pictures. And bird photography is like a huge thing, and people have these unbelievable photographs they've gotten of birds. And I started sharing those up to my page. Like it wasn't until I'd given up on my Facebook page as a promotional outlet that I started having success in engaging people, because I was like, well I don't feel like posting about my book, but this is a really cool bird picture. And I think if people can go into it with that recognition that, like, find the things that you like and that tie to the brand you want to create and just share those out. Even if they have nothing to do with your book at all.
[00:07:22] Alexa: That's exactly right, but that's a hard mindset for people to get into and understanding that it just boils down to social media is about being social. People want to build relationships with you. They want to know what's going on. They want to know what you're doing. They want to know what you're eating, sometimes. They want to know what kind of bird pictures you're looking at. There are all kinds of examples of things that aren't related to your book.
And where you have to put the strategy into it is saying, okay, now that I'm showing these pictures of birds, am I getting more people who want to see pictures of birds than want to read my thriller or mystery? That happens to have that bird title in the name and how you interlink those, how you bring them in and then figure out how to continue the conversation in a way that keeps them on your list, on your social media platform, and also encourages them to want to learn more, to maybe sign up for a freebie that you have, to maybe read your free chapter or do whatever you're doing to bring them in.
Social Media Marketing is a Skill
It's a skill and it takes time. And to your point about getting frustrated, it's easy to get frustrated and to want to give up, because this is not easy. This is why professional marketers charge so much money, because it is a strategy. It is a skill, it takes time. You have to know so many things about making sure that you're showing up in front of the right people, that you're using the right hashtags, that you're engaging enough so that when you do put content out there, it's actually being seen and being followed. So there's a lot that goes into it. And that's the part that makes people feel like it's not fun.
Marketing vs Promotion
I really appreciated a distinction that the Alliance of Independent Authors makes about marketing versus promotion, and I'm going to point listeners to two episodes in the seven-episode series I did with Orna Ross, we talked about the Seven Processes of Publishing, 105 was Marketing and 106 was Promotion.
[00:09:07] Matty: And the distinction that Orna makes, and the Alliance makes, is that marketing is that thing you're doing all the time and promotions are the timebound thing. So how you position yourself on social media's marketing. How, when you get a BookBub feature deal, that's promotion. Is that the same definition that you would use as well?
[00:09:24] Alexa: I think that's a phenomenal definition. Yeah, definitely. You're promoting a book launch, you're promoting when you have these special sales or deals coming on, you're promoting when you have those things, but you're marketing all the time. So I love that. Orna is a very smart woman, so yes, I will check that definition.
[00:09:40] Matty: Great. And so we've mentioned a couple of the sort of foundational elements of marketing, email, social media. Are there other sort of big chunks of marketing content that we want to address?
The Holistic View of Marketing
So when you break down marketing and promotion, obviously being two different things, you have your, from start to finish or never finish. Just get the finish word out of your mind because you'll be doing this as long as you're trying to sell your books. You have those different inroads, I suppose you could call them, on how you're doing this.
[00:10:11] Alexa: So you have paid ads, you have promos that you're doing either with other groups of people or that you're doing out there. You're doing positioning of your book and a lot of things that people don't even consider about marketing. Does your cover market the book the way that it's supposed to be? When people look at your cover, do they understand what your book is about or what genre you're in? Are your keywords and set up properly? Is your book description there.
These are a lot of things that people don't even consider when they're thinking about their marketing, is the big picture of all the things that you're doing out there. Have you found people to leave reviews? The reviews are a tremendous piece of your marketing. That word-of-mouth marketing, other people giving feedback on your book and what they want people to know about your book. So all of these things come together to help you figure out a big holistic picture of what's going on, and they need to be working together.
But then you have your social media. As you mentioned, you have your website, if you're using that for blogging, you have a podcast, you have media, earned media and paid media where you're getting out and discussing in front of groups.
But now that COVID is finally, hopefully, on its way to being behind us, you have the opportunity to get out and meet people. And those interpersonal relationships and being face to face with people, whether it's at a book signing event, whether it's at a fair where you set up a table, whether it's at a panel that you're being a participant of, all of these different things that you can participate, these are all different avenues for marketing your book.
So basically, anytime that you can get out and meet people and talk to people, whether that's virtually or in real life events, anytime you're doing anything that can make people know that you are an author and that you have a book and that your book is about this, those are all different avenues to consider.
[00:11:55] Matty: So obviously, we could probably do an episode in some cases I have, on each of those topics, but let's take the perspective of someone who is just finishing their first book or has just published their first book, and they've just been heads down in the writing part now. So now they're stepping back and they're realizing that there's this other marketing activity that has to happen. And I think we've mentioned the concept of holisticness of one's marketing approach a couple of times.
Preparing Your Marketing
[00:12:22] Matty: So if you look across all these components, like social media and website and reviews and podcasts and cover and all that, what prep work can a new author do in order to make sure that they're approaching this in a holistic way and that they're setting themselves up for success from a marketing point of view?
[00:12:38] Alexa: Now, the biggest thing is not to decide, okay, I'm done writing my book, and now I'm going to start marketing. That's a mindset that people really have to pull themselves out of and realize that we have to establish our own platform as indy authors. We have to grow those things and they do not grow overnight. So the sooner that you can start that, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to say that so many people wait until it's too late really, to start their marketing.
But if that's your case, if you find yourself, oh no, that's me, I just finished writing my book and I was planning on launching it next month, and I haven't done all of these things, the beautiful thing about indy publishing is that we are in control of the timelines. So the biggest thing that I would tell people is, give yourself the space to actually do enough marketing so that you can see the kinds of results that you want on your launch day.
Now, people will say, do I have to do that? I encourage our authors to spend at least three to six months marketing, from the time they have an arc, an advanced reader copy that they can start getting into people's hands. And that really freaks people out. What they don't know is that ideally, I'd love them to have 12 to 18 months. That would be the ideal situation, but I know people's minds would just be blown all over the place if we said that.
So really, if you can at least get three months where you can start getting your book into the hands of people, getting people to leave reviews. People can leave reviews on Goodreads at any point in time. So it's unlike Amazon, where you have to wait until the book is published. You can leave those early.
You can start getting trade reviews and making sure that those are up so that you have that Kirkus or that Blue Ink or that Indie Readers or anything like that, that adds a little bit of extra credibility in all of those things. But give yourself the time and space to have something behind you so that when you get that book out the door, other people are already talking about it. There's some credibility behind it.
Marketing Depends on Your Goals
[00:14:26] Alexa: And of course this is really going to depend on goals and what I tell people is, to really think about what it is that you're trying to do when you publish that first or second or third book. Are you more focused on getting a book to an audience of readers that you already have? For example, in the non-fiction world, I worked with an author not long ago, she's been working on this book for several years. She didn't care about hitting a best-seller list, she didn't care about being number one on Amazon category. She didn't care about any of those things. What she cared about was the fact that she'd been telling her already-established community of people that she had this book. There was a specific date that she wanted to get it done by, and we just, as soon as the book was ready, we published it because it was very short timeframe, and she didn't do a lot of these other things. And she was happy with that, because her community that she already had went to buy the book and her biggest goal was just delivering it to the people that she already knows and having that to be able to promote to her audience as it grows. So that's perfectly fine if that's your goal and expectation.
Timeline for Launching a Book
[00:15:24] Alexa: A lot of entrepreneurs won't do a lot of buildup and build in to the marketing because they already have an email list of people that are ready for that. And for fiction authors, if you're launching multiple books, for example, maybe you have a three or four-book series and you're going to be publishing them in a rapid release kind of format. That in itself is a marketing endeavor, because that first one, you may not have as much marketing and lead up and build in to it. But when you launch the second one, there's a little bit more, and that also markets the first book, when you launch the third one, that helps the first and the second.
There's no one, true, cut and dry answer on the timeline for launch and how to do it. It really goes back to, what do you want when you release that book?
[00:16:08] Alexa: And if you're okay with saying, I know I didn't do 3, 6, 9 months of marketing. I'm good with that. I want this book in the world so that I can get the second one out so I can, and so on and so forth, then that's okay. But what we often see happen is, people say that, and then they launch the book, and it doesn't have the sales they want, and then they're all bummed about it.
So going into it knowing, if I do not spend the time to get advance readers, to get reviews, to do all the things, I know if I don't have a large audience, that I'm probably going to see very minimal sales. But this is my strategy, because next book will bring in more, et cetera, et cetera.
Work Backwards from Your Desired Outcome
You hear this a lot with any kind of marketing expert, any kind of business, establish what you want to achieve and then work backwards from that to determine what you need to do, how much time, energy, money, all of those things that you need to do to achieve that.
[00:16:56] Alexa: I was the same way with my first book. It was, as you mentioned in my bio, I started writing because of grief and loss. Marketing was not even a consideration to me at all with Sunshine after the Storm: A Survival Guide for the Grieving Mother. My goal was to get it into the hands as fast as I could of the mothers who needed that book.
So we finished the book, we published it on October 15th, because it's a pregnancy and infant loss awareness day, and that's the pregnancy and infant loss awareness month. So I had different goals that were very important for getting that book out there when I did. And marketing has never been a big concern for me for that particular book.
So again, why are you publishing the book is a huge thing in fact, doing what you're going to do to get it out there. Who are you publishing it for? Do you need to spend all the time and money?
But for fiction authors, for your first book, especially if you don't have one coming out immediately after, and this book is establishing your base as a fiction author, like I really, and for memoirs, this is a big one too, I really encourage you to put on the breaks, pause and just say, okay, what do I want on launch day? And if I'm going to be able to achieve that, is it worth it for me to go ahead and add in three more months before my launch date, so that I can check off these boxes and do these things, ensuring a little bit stronger of a launch? Or am I okay with not having that and building that as I go with my books as they come along?
The Three Marketing Planning Documents
[00:18:20] Matty: I think that an idea that I've talked about in other episodes for other topics might lend itself to this idea of not waiting until you're done with your book, then stepping back and then thinking, okay, now's the time for marketing.
And as you were talking, what I was picturing is your manuscript. Let's say you're writing a fiction book. And then two other documents that you have up in the background. One would be thoughts about marketing content, and one would be thoughts about marketing strategy. And so I've talked about this in the past with regard to writing a book description. And this applies not just if you're a new author, but even if you're an old author, that writing the back cover text for a book is really painful anyway, and for many other fiction authors.
And I was talking about this, I think it was with Brian Meeks when we did an episode about writing book descriptions. And we both agreed that it's almost a better idea to write your book description before you've written a book, because it keeps you from getting into this, now I'm going to tell you a little microcosm of the plot, which I think a lot of people fall into for book descriptions. And it's more that very early on, you might be in a place where you're saying, I really want to write a book that explores family dynamics in the case of an inheritance. And so capture that somewhere, because that would be great fodder for the content of some marketing, i.e., your back cover text.
And then the other way I've used this kind of while I'm writing, is that all my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels have kind of one design element that's the central image, and for most of the time, I'll get to the end and I'll think, oh my God, what should I tell my book cover designer I want is the central image? But if I'm thinking about it while I'm writing, I can say, oh, you know what would be really cool, would be a such and such.
But then I'm also thinking, this story about your first book made me think that there's also the strategy thing that you should have as your third open document in the background, which is, why am I doing this? And that's the goal you want to reach. You were saying you wanted to launch at a certain time because of a date that was significant, and you already knew the audience of people. If you keep those as little separate background documents, it provides a nice way to capture that, so it's not just this monumental thing you have to think about when you're done writing.
Think About Marketing While Writing
[00:20:31] Alexa: Absolutely. And that is a great way to frame it for people, because it's so important that while you're writing, this is how my mind goes. I'm writing my first novel right now. I have written lots of nonfiction books, but this is my very first novel.
And as I am writing it, like ideas just pop into my head of, it's set in Paris, right? So I'm constantly thinking, oh, I could share pictures of the Eiffel tower. I could do this, or I could do that. And coming up with these ideas, or I'm going to be in Paris this summer, I should be filming videos of the locations that will be in my book so that I can get people, because I know it's a romance, but it's really going to speak to people who love Paris and love traveling and love adventure and excitement in there.
So as you're thinking about, who's going to be reading your book, you can start thinking of ideas that will help you throughout. And I've tried to do this little by little, but I tell you, I have a whole new level of empathy for fiction writers now that I'm in the weeds with you all, is that it is hard. Like, writing a book in itself takes so much time and energy, especially if you're also working a full-time job or managing a family or caring for anyone else or doing life at all. It is hard to do all of the things.
[00:21:42] Alexa: But if you have these ideas that you're even just jotting down along to the side when you have those moments, like when it goes to your developmental editor and you have a few weeks, then you've got these ideas already in place, you can say, okay, I'm waiting for feedback. I can start doing some of these things. I can start thinking about the marketing element while I'm doing this and that.
So having this mindset of having, I love your visualization of the three different documents because you're thinking about the marketing, you're thinking about the strategy, you're thinking about the who, you're thinking about all those things as you're going through the process, and then you don't wind up at the end of your editing and going, okay, now what?
[00:22:19] Matty: Yeah.
[00:22:20] Alexa: Because you've already established that.
Marketing Beta Readers?
[00:22:22] Matty: It would also be interesting to have sort of a beta reader group. I don't know if it would be the same group of beta readers that you would give your manuscript to, but maybe after you've given your beta readers the manuscript, and they've read it, then show them your notes about your marketing strategy, marketing goals documents, and say, what do you think? Like, do you think that this is the right image to put on the cover? And they might say, oh no, because I've read other books that this reminds me of, and they all have the Eiffel tower in the background or whatever. They might be able to help you think through that reader perspective, because it's really, it's the reader perspective you need to be thinking about, not the author perspective when you're coming up with marketing ideas.
[00:23:00] Alexa: Absolutely at 150000000%. That's so true. Yeah, that is a great idea, and that's why choosing the right beta readers who know your genre is so important. Having writers, having great writers as beta readers is great, but having great writers that also know the genre and know the audience that you're marketing to is what would be phenomenal in trying to use them for that role as well.
[00:23:24] Matty: I really like this idea of the importance of getting yourself into the reader mindset. And I know that for myself, one of the pitfalls I can easily fall into is assuming that my preferences are the preferences of the people I'm trying to reach.
So as an example on the nonfiction front, when I started doing a podcast, I was doing transcripts, and then for a period of time, I considered stopping doing transcripts because they were incredibly time consuming to edit. And I wouldn't read them. If I listened to podcasts, the only time I looked at a transcript is if there's some specific thing I want to look up like, oh, she mentioned another episode I wanted to go listen to, I'm going to go look at the transcript to try to find that.
But then I found that there were a lot of people who were reading the transcript and not listening.
Keeping an Open Mind in Marketing
Do you have any tips from a marketing point of view about exercises that a writer can do to keep themselves from falling into that pitfall of thinking that their preferences are other people's preferences as well?
[00:24:17] Alexa: One of the things you can do is be a voracious reader in your genre. Because when you're reading other books and seeing what's happening and you're following what those authors are doing, if you're signing up for other author newsletters, if you're watching what they're doing on Amazon or watching how other people are responding to their books on Amazon, reading reviews of books that are your comp titles and things like that, you can glean a lot of that.
But this is also a great way for you to use your social media to ask questions. Like people love giving advice. They love, love giving advice. So you can ask questions like this in your social media, hey, is this important to you? I'm thinking about doing this. Would this resonate with you or would it not? In your newsletters, these are types of questions that you can ask people. And this is another reason why growing that launch team is so important, because that's a built-in audience of people who are interested in you, interested in your book, and why you should start building it early in the process so they can help give you feedback. You can show different covers, hey, you guys, what do you think, which one of these resonates with you? Those types of things, they can be implemented in much more than just leaving reviews on launch day.
And to your point, from any type of marketing perspective, we're getting ready to launch our annual author marketing program, Book Launch in a Box. And I hate long sales pages. I can't stand them when you get to a page and you're like, I just want to know what this program includes and what it's going to cost me and what other people say about it. That's all I want to know.
But I was like, so do we really need to create all of these fancy images with pictures of all the things, because I don't care and blah, blah, blah. And I was ready to cut all of that stuff off. And half of my team was like, no, I totally want to see a picture with graphics of things, and I want to see these, and I want 72 frequently asked questions that go through everything.
So you really do, you have to know that, to your point, exactly the way you process something or think about something is not the way other people do it. We come into everything with our own biases. So know how your reader thinks.
Know How Your Reader Thinks
[00:26:18] Alexa: When I go into Amazon, for example, I love to read reviews and you should be reading reviews, not only of your books, but of other people's books, because that puts you in the mindset of what other people who are reading those types of books are thinking about those books. Do they talk about the cover? Do they hate the cover? As authors, we get really irritated when people leave us low reviews because of the cover, but those are critical reviews. The one-star reviews are critical reviews, because they show what turned somebody off from something in whatever they did. Maybe their description was off. Maybe the person bought the book thinking it was a romcom because the cover makes it look like it's a romcom, but in actuality, it's a really deep story of friendship, but that didn't come across through the message. So now you've got people who are angry because they bought a romcom or bought what they thought was thinking as romcom, and it's all of this.
So again, there's lots of ways from start to finish how you can seek out other people's feedback. And some of it's going to be passive where you're just out there looking at what is already out there on other things, and some of it will be very active where you can ask your audience, how do you feel about this? What do you think about these? Do you like illustrated covers, or do you like non-illustrated covers? This or that? All those types of things, people will tell you.
Follow the People You Admire
[00:27:29] Matty: Yeah, I think that the other nice thing about not only being a voracious reader in your genre, but also imbibing in all the marketing approaches that the people you read do. So if you love a particular author, follow them on social media and subscribe to their email newsletter and look at all those ways that they're interacting with their followers.
I know a great example of that is Karen Dionne, who wrote "The Marsh King's Daughter," which is one of my all-time favorite books. And that story is about a dysfunctional family, let's say, that lives in, I think it's the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And Karen and her husband lived there at one time. They live in that area, and they enjoy going out in the backwards of the Upper Peninsula, and she shares a lot of pictures of, here's me and my husband back when we were living off the land in the 70s.
She never says, buy my book. It's always just stories that she knows will be of interest to people if they were interested in the setting of "The Marsh King's Daughter," they're going to be interested in these posts that Karen is sharing. And yeah, I think following the people that you admire and want to emulate, is a great approach.
Not All Followers are Readers
You didn't ask me this question, but what you just said made me think of something else too. And that is on the topic of building your social media and knowing who's coming in and following you and all those kinds of things. Even if you're not constantly promoting your book out there, people should know, it should be very clear to them through your bio and through things that you post from time to time, that you are an author and that you have these books.
[00:28:56] Alexa: But know in the back of your head that even if you gain 10 million subscribers and a lot of them are coming to you on Instagram for example, because they like the pictures you post, that's not necessarily going to translate into 10 million people are going to buy your book.
And I have this conversation a lot just, had the conversation with an author the other day. And he was kind of like shoving off some of my suggestions for what he could do to market, because he's like, I'm not worried about it, I have 40,000 people that follow me on Twitter, and I have this person and I have this person that have millions of followers and they're going to share it. And that's awesome. That's a huge leg up on somebody who has 10 Twitter followers or, you know, nobody at all.
However, you have to remember that not everybody who's going to follow you wants to read a book, period. So they may just be on Instagram because they like the pictures and they like being entertained through that type of thing.
So keeping that in mind too back to the marketing thing is the numbers and the expectation and knowing that it's going to be a small percentage, and I'm going to say small, like as in 1% to maybe 10% of the people following you, who will actually buy your book. But you don't have to get discouraged about that because you may still use those folks in other ways to help you with the marketing as well. Maybe they're willing to share an image for you on their social. Maybe they're willing to talk about your book. Maybe they're willing to do other things, even if they never buy your book.
And I know that's a total side note from what we were just talking about, but I was just thinking of that, as you're building, so many people will be like, awesome, I got 1500 followers, I've been working so hard, now I'm up to 1500 followers on Instagram, this is going to be an amazing book launch. And really, only 10 to maybe 100 of those people may actually buy your book unless they are true rabid readers of your genre and have been following you because of the books that you talk about, because of your book, because of these types of things.
So expectations is a massive part of marketing and you just have to go into it knowing that.
I do feel like, I think I had introduced this conversation as Making Marketing Fundamentals Fun, but I think I'm going to retitle it as Getting into the Mind of the Audience That You Want to Reach.
[00:31:06] Matty: And so I wanted to close out by asking, if someone is just working on their first book, maybe they're in the middle of it, so it's not too late, and they're saying, you know what, the only people I have that can help me understand the people I want to appeal to are my mom and my next door neighbor or the people in my book club or something like that. Let's say they're starting really from ground zero.
Creating Your Marketing "Team"
[00:31:26] Matty: What are a couple of tips you would share with them that will help them create a team or create an environment that is going to help them understand the mindset of the people that they want to appeal to?
[00:31:54] Alexa: Absolutely. I mean, even if it's just your mom or your best friend or your neighbor who initially are interested, use them and to tell you, why are you interested? And what kind of things would you like to hear more about? How can I make this so that you would definitely want to click on this link or engage in this post or all of these things?
And also, who do you know? You mentioned book clubs. Most people in a book club, where there is at least generally five to seven people there, can you share this with them and ask them to also follow or ask them also to read my sample or become part of this book club? Do they know other people, other places that are in book clubs with them? Even if it's only two readers in the beginning, you have those two readers as your baseline of information. So get as much information from them as you can and see how you can use that information to help you grow and spread and see how they can help you as well, by sharing it with their communities. This is the beauty of social media.
And while we are talking about getting in the minds of your readers, like this can be really fun, figuring these things out if you make it fun. If you decide, oh man, I have to figure out what people want to read my book for. That's not fun, but if you're like, this is exciting, I want to know what lights people up about these, not only my books, but these types of books. Why do you buy thrillers? What is it, what are the feelings that you get from it? What are the colors that you associate with it? What are the thought processes or the podcasts that you listen to or the Netflix movies that you watch or series or all those types of things, and then bring them together into that type of thing.
But then knowing that they, even your small group, are powerful. They can go post on Facebook, or we all see posts from friends, those of us who are still using Facebook regularly.
I'd say once a week, I see a post of people asking for recommendations. It's summertime. I love to read thrillers. Does anyone have a great book that I can add to my list? When they see posts like that say yes, indeed. I do. I know of this book. It's really awesome. And then not only does that friend, but everybody because we all do this. We're like, I know when my friend posts this and I'm like, oh yes, I need some new good summer romance reads. And I say, I'm like, okay, write this book down. Okay, add this one to my cart, okay, add this to my library list. All of those types of things.
Make Your Book Available Everywhere
[00:33:42] Alexa: And on that note, making your book available to all the places where readers can access your book is so important. Not everybody is like us authors. We are willing to invest every last dime we have on buying books in many cases, if we're voracious readers. But not everybody is like that. They love to read books, but they may not want to spend all their money on books, so they want to get it from a library.
So have you also considered in your launch and marketing strategy, how do I get my book into libraries so that my friends who don't want to buy the book, so that book clubs. When I was part of a book club, almost nobody bought the books. I buy the books because I love buying books, but almost everyone was getting their books from a library or from a discounted retailer or things like that.
So considering all of those things and then going back and using that core group and asking them how they can help you build and expanding on that.
And your growth will come, if you are again, thinking like a reader, thinking about how to find those readers, approaching things from the mindset of the reader, providing content that the reader would enjoy. And that's how you take from a very small place and just continue growing.
[00:34:47] Matty: Cool. Well, Alexa, thank you so much. That was so helpful and insightful. Please let the viewers and listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:34:57] Alexa: Yeah, sure. So if you are interested in book marketing or publishing or any of those things, WritePublishSell.com is our hub for all things related to that. If you are a woman author or men too are invited and interested in growing your professional career as an author, or a professional in the industry, you can check out the WomenInPublishingSummit.com. We're on social by a variation of Write Publish Sell or Women in Publishing Summit or Women in Publishing on just about everything. Come follow us. Come check us out, we love to continue to help authors in their journey to move forward.
[00:35:30] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:35:31] Alexa: Thank you.
[00:00:05] Alexa: Hey, good. How are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Alexa Bigwarfe is a mother to three wildlings who keep her on her toes. She's an advocate activist, speaker, author, and author coach, publisher, and podcaster. Her writing career began after her infant daughter passed away at two days old and she turned to writing for healing.
Since then, she has used her writing platform for advocacy and activism to support mothers, children, and marginalized voices. She began a nonprofit, Sunshine after the Storm, to support mothers in their most difficult time. She's the creator and co-host of the Lose the Cape podcast and has co-authored 4 volumes under the Lose the Cape brand. Her primary business is Right | Publish | Sell, a company dedicated to shepherding authors through the process of writing and publishing their books like a pro.
She owns Kat Biggie Press, and a children's book publishing company, Purple Butterfly Press, both dedicated to bringing stories of hope, inspiration, encouragement, and girl power to the world. And I met Alexa when she hosted the Women in Publishing summit, which was a great summit, great fun to participate in, and I wanted to invite her to The Indy Author Podcast to talk about Book Marketing Fundamentals and Keeping it Fun.
Why is Marketing Such a Hard Sell for Authors?
[00:01:15] Matty: And so I'm going to just start out with a question, why is marketing such a hard sell to authors? Why do we keep having to try to convince authors that it can be fun?
It's really funny because I don't know why it's so hard for people to understand, because it seems commonplace, right? If you're going to be selling something, which now as an author, you have a product that you're trying to sell, marketing should just be the thing that you have to do. Especially for newer authors, first time authors or those who have maybe launched a couple of books but aren't seeing the sales they want, marketing is such a key piece of that, not only positioning the book in the right places, but also finding the ways that you as an author can get out there and talk about this.
[00:01:56] Alexa: But it's funny, in a lot of indy communities, and I think this is honestly shifting a little bit as we get more, what I like to call, the professional authors out there, the professionalization of authors is becoming a real thing now. There are a lot of companies like mine and the Women in Publishing summit and many other things, Joanna Penn, the Self-publishing 101 School, all these types of things that are really helping authors become better at what they're doing. I think we're starting to see this shift, but for a long time, there was a lot of resistance. Authors just wanted to write, and they didn't understand why marketing needed to be such a big piece of this.
And I think it stems from our belief back in the old traditional system where authors had a big publisher behind them who would do a lot of this on their behalf, and they didn't necessarily have to. But as the entire publishing industry has shifted, as more people are indy publishing, as more people are working with smaller presses, and even with some of the larger traditional companies, the marketing really is falling largely on the shoulders of the authors.
So we have to get beyond this thought that, I'm a writer and I'm going to write, and the rest is going to be done by someone else, or the rest is just going to happen when I put my book on Amazon. And we really have to realize that, no, this is our responsibility, and we need to do it.
But understanding that it doesn't have to be this thorn in our side. It can be something that's really enjoyable. And the way to make it enjoyable is to put yourself in a position where you are communicating with your readers and getting feedback from your readers and doing the things on social media that you enjoy and having that relationship with readers.
The Art and Science of Marketing
[00:03:32] Matty: It does seem as if there's an art and a science to marketing. And the art should be easy for us, because it pretty much involves talking about our books. The science, I think, is sometimes more challenging because I think that authors can sometimes get stumped by the things like understanding how to identify comp author and things like that. But if we just start out with the art of it, the part that is, now I get a chance to talk about my book, is that in fact, a good way to go about it, or is that a pitfall way to go about it?
[00:04:05] Alexa: I think it's a pitfall because that's where people get stuck. They're like, okay, I've already told people about my book, so now what do I talk about in my marketing? And in reality, what you need to do is start thinking about the bigger interests of your readers.
And this really depends on your genre. There are so many ways that you can crack this, depending on whether you're writing fiction or whether you're writing a children's book or whether you're writing a memoir. But if you think about yourself as a user of content, as a consumer of content, of what you like to look at when you're on social media, what you like to listen to on podcasts, what you like to hear on the news or watch on TV, it's often not about a particular book. It's about the themes behind the book. It's about the things that intrigue you and pull you into that.
And that's where really, knowing your audience, your ideal audience, your target audience, and the things that they're really interested in can help you start creating other lines of topics that you can put out there so that people are engaged with you.
If you're writing romcom for example, putting funny things out there that gets people to laugh is something that'll make people want to follow you and then see what you're doing. If you're writing thriller, you want to be sharing or crime, you want to be sharing other things that are going to interest people.
Maybe it's a podcast you're listening to, maybe it's a true crime thing that just happened. If you're writing a children's book, there's generally a theme behind that book. So are you talking about empathy or kindness or learning your ABCs or any of those things?
You have to pull those themes from whatever it is in your book and find interesting things to talk about with your audience that relate to that, so that it's not always just about my book and I did this, and I did this. But here's some other books, here's some other resources, here's some other things that may be really interesting to your audience, so that you're starting to create a conversation with the people who are following you in different places or are reading your blog or reading your newsletter.
[00:05:52] Alexa: And if you're just talking about your book and what you're doing, you're going to shut down that communication, people are going to lose interest and even potentially unfollow you, which you definitely don't want. Because that shuts down everything with your potential with them.
Social Media is About Being Social
[00:06:06] Matty: Yeah, I think one of the lessons I learned the hard way as I think many people did, is when I was starting out, I knew all the roles about, 60% of your social media posts should be about something other than yourself. I forget what the numbers were. It was clear that it shouldn't always be buy my book, buy my book.
And I tried to do that, and I wasn't getting a lot of traction. And at some point, I just thought, you know what, I'm just not really going to worry about this marketing stuff anymore.
But I'll use my Facebook platform as an example. I would be scrolling through my own feed and when I was looking for ways to promote the Falcon and the Owl, which was one of my Ann Kinnear suspense novels, I must have written "falcon and owl" in post, and then I started getting a lot of bird pictures. And bird photography is like a huge thing, and people have these unbelievable photographs they've gotten of birds. And I started sharing those up to my page. Like it wasn't until I'd given up on my Facebook page as a promotional outlet that I started having success in engaging people, because I was like, well I don't feel like posting about my book, but this is a really cool bird picture. And I think if people can go into it with that recognition that, like, find the things that you like and that tie to the brand you want to create and just share those out. Even if they have nothing to do with your book at all.
[00:07:22] Alexa: That's exactly right, but that's a hard mindset for people to get into and understanding that it just boils down to social media is about being social. People want to build relationships with you. They want to know what's going on. They want to know what you're doing. They want to know what you're eating, sometimes. They want to know what kind of bird pictures you're looking at. There are all kinds of examples of things that aren't related to your book.
And where you have to put the strategy into it is saying, okay, now that I'm showing these pictures of birds, am I getting more people who want to see pictures of birds than want to read my thriller or mystery? That happens to have that bird title in the name and how you interlink those, how you bring them in and then figure out how to continue the conversation in a way that keeps them on your list, on your social media platform, and also encourages them to want to learn more, to maybe sign up for a freebie that you have, to maybe read your free chapter or do whatever you're doing to bring them in.
Social Media Marketing is a Skill
It's a skill and it takes time. And to your point about getting frustrated, it's easy to get frustrated and to want to give up, because this is not easy. This is why professional marketers charge so much money, because it is a strategy. It is a skill, it takes time. You have to know so many things about making sure that you're showing up in front of the right people, that you're using the right hashtags, that you're engaging enough so that when you do put content out there, it's actually being seen and being followed. So there's a lot that goes into it. And that's the part that makes people feel like it's not fun.
Marketing vs Promotion
I really appreciated a distinction that the Alliance of Independent Authors makes about marketing versus promotion, and I'm going to point listeners to two episodes in the seven-episode series I did with Orna Ross, we talked about the Seven Processes of Publishing, 105 was Marketing and 106 was Promotion.
[00:09:07] Matty: And the distinction that Orna makes, and the Alliance makes, is that marketing is that thing you're doing all the time and promotions are the timebound thing. So how you position yourself on social media's marketing. How, when you get a BookBub feature deal, that's promotion. Is that the same definition that you would use as well?
[00:09:24] Alexa: I think that's a phenomenal definition. Yeah, definitely. You're promoting a book launch, you're promoting when you have these special sales or deals coming on, you're promoting when you have those things, but you're marketing all the time. So I love that. Orna is a very smart woman, so yes, I will check that definition.
[00:09:40] Matty: Great. And so we've mentioned a couple of the sort of foundational elements of marketing, email, social media. Are there other sort of big chunks of marketing content that we want to address?
The Holistic View of Marketing
So when you break down marketing and promotion, obviously being two different things, you have your, from start to finish or never finish. Just get the finish word out of your mind because you'll be doing this as long as you're trying to sell your books. You have those different inroads, I suppose you could call them, on how you're doing this.
[00:10:11] Alexa: So you have paid ads, you have promos that you're doing either with other groups of people or that you're doing out there. You're doing positioning of your book and a lot of things that people don't even consider about marketing. Does your cover market the book the way that it's supposed to be? When people look at your cover, do they understand what your book is about or what genre you're in? Are your keywords and set up properly? Is your book description there.
These are a lot of things that people don't even consider when they're thinking about their marketing, is the big picture of all the things that you're doing out there. Have you found people to leave reviews? The reviews are a tremendous piece of your marketing. That word-of-mouth marketing, other people giving feedback on your book and what they want people to know about your book. So all of these things come together to help you figure out a big holistic picture of what's going on, and they need to be working together.
But then you have your social media. As you mentioned, you have your website, if you're using that for blogging, you have a podcast, you have media, earned media and paid media where you're getting out and discussing in front of groups.
But now that COVID is finally, hopefully, on its way to being behind us, you have the opportunity to get out and meet people. And those interpersonal relationships and being face to face with people, whether it's at a book signing event, whether it's at a fair where you set up a table, whether it's at a panel that you're being a participant of, all of these different things that you can participate, these are all different avenues for marketing your book.
So basically, anytime that you can get out and meet people and talk to people, whether that's virtually or in real life events, anytime you're doing anything that can make people know that you are an author and that you have a book and that your book is about this, those are all different avenues to consider.
[00:11:55] Matty: So obviously, we could probably do an episode in some cases I have, on each of those topics, but let's take the perspective of someone who is just finishing their first book or has just published their first book, and they've just been heads down in the writing part now. So now they're stepping back and they're realizing that there's this other marketing activity that has to happen. And I think we've mentioned the concept of holisticness of one's marketing approach a couple of times.
Preparing Your Marketing
[00:12:22] Matty: So if you look across all these components, like social media and website and reviews and podcasts and cover and all that, what prep work can a new author do in order to make sure that they're approaching this in a holistic way and that they're setting themselves up for success from a marketing point of view?
[00:12:38] Alexa: Now, the biggest thing is not to decide, okay, I'm done writing my book, and now I'm going to start marketing. That's a mindset that people really have to pull themselves out of and realize that we have to establish our own platform as indy authors. We have to grow those things and they do not grow overnight. So the sooner that you can start that, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to say that so many people wait until it's too late really, to start their marketing.
But if that's your case, if you find yourself, oh no, that's me, I just finished writing my book and I was planning on launching it next month, and I haven't done all of these things, the beautiful thing about indy publishing is that we are in control of the timelines. So the biggest thing that I would tell people is, give yourself the space to actually do enough marketing so that you can see the kinds of results that you want on your launch day.
Now, people will say, do I have to do that? I encourage our authors to spend at least three to six months marketing, from the time they have an arc, an advanced reader copy that they can start getting into people's hands. And that really freaks people out. What they don't know is that ideally, I'd love them to have 12 to 18 months. That would be the ideal situation, but I know people's minds would just be blown all over the place if we said that.
So really, if you can at least get three months where you can start getting your book into the hands of people, getting people to leave reviews. People can leave reviews on Goodreads at any point in time. So it's unlike Amazon, where you have to wait until the book is published. You can leave those early.
You can start getting trade reviews and making sure that those are up so that you have that Kirkus or that Blue Ink or that Indie Readers or anything like that, that adds a little bit of extra credibility in all of those things. But give yourself the time and space to have something behind you so that when you get that book out the door, other people are already talking about it. There's some credibility behind it.
Marketing Depends on Your Goals
[00:14:26] Alexa: And of course this is really going to depend on goals and what I tell people is, to really think about what it is that you're trying to do when you publish that first or second or third book. Are you more focused on getting a book to an audience of readers that you already have? For example, in the non-fiction world, I worked with an author not long ago, she's been working on this book for several years. She didn't care about hitting a best-seller list, she didn't care about being number one on Amazon category. She didn't care about any of those things. What she cared about was the fact that she'd been telling her already-established community of people that she had this book. There was a specific date that she wanted to get it done by, and we just, as soon as the book was ready, we published it because it was very short timeframe, and she didn't do a lot of these other things. And she was happy with that, because her community that she already had went to buy the book and her biggest goal was just delivering it to the people that she already knows and having that to be able to promote to her audience as it grows. So that's perfectly fine if that's your goal and expectation.
Timeline for Launching a Book
[00:15:24] Alexa: A lot of entrepreneurs won't do a lot of buildup and build in to the marketing because they already have an email list of people that are ready for that. And for fiction authors, if you're launching multiple books, for example, maybe you have a three or four-book series and you're going to be publishing them in a rapid release kind of format. That in itself is a marketing endeavor, because that first one, you may not have as much marketing and lead up and build in to it. But when you launch the second one, there's a little bit more, and that also markets the first book, when you launch the third one, that helps the first and the second.
There's no one, true, cut and dry answer on the timeline for launch and how to do it. It really goes back to, what do you want when you release that book?
[00:16:08] Alexa: And if you're okay with saying, I know I didn't do 3, 6, 9 months of marketing. I'm good with that. I want this book in the world so that I can get the second one out so I can, and so on and so forth, then that's okay. But what we often see happen is, people say that, and then they launch the book, and it doesn't have the sales they want, and then they're all bummed about it.
So going into it knowing, if I do not spend the time to get advance readers, to get reviews, to do all the things, I know if I don't have a large audience, that I'm probably going to see very minimal sales. But this is my strategy, because next book will bring in more, et cetera, et cetera.
Work Backwards from Your Desired Outcome
You hear this a lot with any kind of marketing expert, any kind of business, establish what you want to achieve and then work backwards from that to determine what you need to do, how much time, energy, money, all of those things that you need to do to achieve that.
[00:16:56] Alexa: I was the same way with my first book. It was, as you mentioned in my bio, I started writing because of grief and loss. Marketing was not even a consideration to me at all with Sunshine after the Storm: A Survival Guide for the Grieving Mother. My goal was to get it into the hands as fast as I could of the mothers who needed that book.
So we finished the book, we published it on October 15th, because it's a pregnancy and infant loss awareness day, and that's the pregnancy and infant loss awareness month. So I had different goals that were very important for getting that book out there when I did. And marketing has never been a big concern for me for that particular book.
So again, why are you publishing the book is a huge thing in fact, doing what you're going to do to get it out there. Who are you publishing it for? Do you need to spend all the time and money?
But for fiction authors, for your first book, especially if you don't have one coming out immediately after, and this book is establishing your base as a fiction author, like I really, and for memoirs, this is a big one too, I really encourage you to put on the breaks, pause and just say, okay, what do I want on launch day? And if I'm going to be able to achieve that, is it worth it for me to go ahead and add in three more months before my launch date, so that I can check off these boxes and do these things, ensuring a little bit stronger of a launch? Or am I okay with not having that and building that as I go with my books as they come along?
The Three Marketing Planning Documents
[00:18:20] Matty: I think that an idea that I've talked about in other episodes for other topics might lend itself to this idea of not waiting until you're done with your book, then stepping back and then thinking, okay, now's the time for marketing.
And as you were talking, what I was picturing is your manuscript. Let's say you're writing a fiction book. And then two other documents that you have up in the background. One would be thoughts about marketing content, and one would be thoughts about marketing strategy. And so I've talked about this in the past with regard to writing a book description. And this applies not just if you're a new author, but even if you're an old author, that writing the back cover text for a book is really painful anyway, and for many other fiction authors.
And I was talking about this, I think it was with Brian Meeks when we did an episode about writing book descriptions. And we both agreed that it's almost a better idea to write your book description before you've written a book, because it keeps you from getting into this, now I'm going to tell you a little microcosm of the plot, which I think a lot of people fall into for book descriptions. And it's more that very early on, you might be in a place where you're saying, I really want to write a book that explores family dynamics in the case of an inheritance. And so capture that somewhere, because that would be great fodder for the content of some marketing, i.e., your back cover text.
And then the other way I've used this kind of while I'm writing, is that all my Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels have kind of one design element that's the central image, and for most of the time, I'll get to the end and I'll think, oh my God, what should I tell my book cover designer I want is the central image? But if I'm thinking about it while I'm writing, I can say, oh, you know what would be really cool, would be a such and such.
But then I'm also thinking, this story about your first book made me think that there's also the strategy thing that you should have as your third open document in the background, which is, why am I doing this? And that's the goal you want to reach. You were saying you wanted to launch at a certain time because of a date that was significant, and you already knew the audience of people. If you keep those as little separate background documents, it provides a nice way to capture that, so it's not just this monumental thing you have to think about when you're done writing.
Think About Marketing While Writing
[00:20:31] Alexa: Absolutely. And that is a great way to frame it for people, because it's so important that while you're writing, this is how my mind goes. I'm writing my first novel right now. I have written lots of nonfiction books, but this is my very first novel.
And as I am writing it, like ideas just pop into my head of, it's set in Paris, right? So I'm constantly thinking, oh, I could share pictures of the Eiffel tower. I could do this, or I could do that. And coming up with these ideas, or I'm going to be in Paris this summer, I should be filming videos of the locations that will be in my book so that I can get people, because I know it's a romance, but it's really going to speak to people who love Paris and love traveling and love adventure and excitement in there.
So as you're thinking about, who's going to be reading your book, you can start thinking of ideas that will help you throughout. And I've tried to do this little by little, but I tell you, I have a whole new level of empathy for fiction writers now that I'm in the weeds with you all, is that it is hard. Like, writing a book in itself takes so much time and energy, especially if you're also working a full-time job or managing a family or caring for anyone else or doing life at all. It is hard to do all of the things.
[00:21:42] Alexa: But if you have these ideas that you're even just jotting down along to the side when you have those moments, like when it goes to your developmental editor and you have a few weeks, then you've got these ideas already in place, you can say, okay, I'm waiting for feedback. I can start doing some of these things. I can start thinking about the marketing element while I'm doing this and that.
So having this mindset of having, I love your visualization of the three different documents because you're thinking about the marketing, you're thinking about the strategy, you're thinking about the who, you're thinking about all those things as you're going through the process, and then you don't wind up at the end of your editing and going, okay, now what?
[00:22:19] Matty: Yeah.
[00:22:20] Alexa: Because you've already established that.
Marketing Beta Readers?
[00:22:22] Matty: It would also be interesting to have sort of a beta reader group. I don't know if it would be the same group of beta readers that you would give your manuscript to, but maybe after you've given your beta readers the manuscript, and they've read it, then show them your notes about your marketing strategy, marketing goals documents, and say, what do you think? Like, do you think that this is the right image to put on the cover? And they might say, oh no, because I've read other books that this reminds me of, and they all have the Eiffel tower in the background or whatever. They might be able to help you think through that reader perspective, because it's really, it's the reader perspective you need to be thinking about, not the author perspective when you're coming up with marketing ideas.
[00:23:00] Alexa: Absolutely at 150000000%. That's so true. Yeah, that is a great idea, and that's why choosing the right beta readers who know your genre is so important. Having writers, having great writers as beta readers is great, but having great writers that also know the genre and know the audience that you're marketing to is what would be phenomenal in trying to use them for that role as well.
[00:23:24] Matty: I really like this idea of the importance of getting yourself into the reader mindset. And I know that for myself, one of the pitfalls I can easily fall into is assuming that my preferences are the preferences of the people I'm trying to reach.
So as an example on the nonfiction front, when I started doing a podcast, I was doing transcripts, and then for a period of time, I considered stopping doing transcripts because they were incredibly time consuming to edit. And I wouldn't read them. If I listened to podcasts, the only time I looked at a transcript is if there's some specific thing I want to look up like, oh, she mentioned another episode I wanted to go listen to, I'm going to go look at the transcript to try to find that.
But then I found that there were a lot of people who were reading the transcript and not listening.
Keeping an Open Mind in Marketing
Do you have any tips from a marketing point of view about exercises that a writer can do to keep themselves from falling into that pitfall of thinking that their preferences are other people's preferences as well?
[00:24:17] Alexa: One of the things you can do is be a voracious reader in your genre. Because when you're reading other books and seeing what's happening and you're following what those authors are doing, if you're signing up for other author newsletters, if you're watching what they're doing on Amazon or watching how other people are responding to their books on Amazon, reading reviews of books that are your comp titles and things like that, you can glean a lot of that.
But this is also a great way for you to use your social media to ask questions. Like people love giving advice. They love, love giving advice. So you can ask questions like this in your social media, hey, is this important to you? I'm thinking about doing this. Would this resonate with you or would it not? In your newsletters, these are types of questions that you can ask people. And this is another reason why growing that launch team is so important, because that's a built-in audience of people who are interested in you, interested in your book, and why you should start building it early in the process so they can help give you feedback. You can show different covers, hey, you guys, what do you think, which one of these resonates with you? Those types of things, they can be implemented in much more than just leaving reviews on launch day.
And to your point, from any type of marketing perspective, we're getting ready to launch our annual author marketing program, Book Launch in a Box. And I hate long sales pages. I can't stand them when you get to a page and you're like, I just want to know what this program includes and what it's going to cost me and what other people say about it. That's all I want to know.
But I was like, so do we really need to create all of these fancy images with pictures of all the things, because I don't care and blah, blah, blah. And I was ready to cut all of that stuff off. And half of my team was like, no, I totally want to see a picture with graphics of things, and I want to see these, and I want 72 frequently asked questions that go through everything.
So you really do, you have to know that, to your point, exactly the way you process something or think about something is not the way other people do it. We come into everything with our own biases. So know how your reader thinks.
Know How Your Reader Thinks
[00:26:18] Alexa: When I go into Amazon, for example, I love to read reviews and you should be reading reviews, not only of your books, but of other people's books, because that puts you in the mindset of what other people who are reading those types of books are thinking about those books. Do they talk about the cover? Do they hate the cover? As authors, we get really irritated when people leave us low reviews because of the cover, but those are critical reviews. The one-star reviews are critical reviews, because they show what turned somebody off from something in whatever they did. Maybe their description was off. Maybe the person bought the book thinking it was a romcom because the cover makes it look like it's a romcom, but in actuality, it's a really deep story of friendship, but that didn't come across through the message. So now you've got people who are angry because they bought a romcom or bought what they thought was thinking as romcom, and it's all of this.
So again, there's lots of ways from start to finish how you can seek out other people's feedback. And some of it's going to be passive where you're just out there looking at what is already out there on other things, and some of it will be very active where you can ask your audience, how do you feel about this? What do you think about these? Do you like illustrated covers, or do you like non-illustrated covers? This or that? All those types of things, people will tell you.
Follow the People You Admire
[00:27:29] Matty: Yeah, I think that the other nice thing about not only being a voracious reader in your genre, but also imbibing in all the marketing approaches that the people you read do. So if you love a particular author, follow them on social media and subscribe to their email newsletter and look at all those ways that they're interacting with their followers.
I know a great example of that is Karen Dionne, who wrote "The Marsh King's Daughter," which is one of my all-time favorite books. And that story is about a dysfunctional family, let's say, that lives in, I think it's the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And Karen and her husband lived there at one time. They live in that area, and they enjoy going out in the backwards of the Upper Peninsula, and she shares a lot of pictures of, here's me and my husband back when we were living off the land in the 70s.
She never says, buy my book. It's always just stories that she knows will be of interest to people if they were interested in the setting of "The Marsh King's Daughter," they're going to be interested in these posts that Karen is sharing. And yeah, I think following the people that you admire and want to emulate, is a great approach.
Not All Followers are Readers
You didn't ask me this question, but what you just said made me think of something else too. And that is on the topic of building your social media and knowing who's coming in and following you and all those kinds of things. Even if you're not constantly promoting your book out there, people should know, it should be very clear to them through your bio and through things that you post from time to time, that you are an author and that you have these books.
[00:28:56] Alexa: But know in the back of your head that even if you gain 10 million subscribers and a lot of them are coming to you on Instagram for example, because they like the pictures you post, that's not necessarily going to translate into 10 million people are going to buy your book.
And I have this conversation a lot just, had the conversation with an author the other day. And he was kind of like shoving off some of my suggestions for what he could do to market, because he's like, I'm not worried about it, I have 40,000 people that follow me on Twitter, and I have this person and I have this person that have millions of followers and they're going to share it. And that's awesome. That's a huge leg up on somebody who has 10 Twitter followers or, you know, nobody at all.
However, you have to remember that not everybody who's going to follow you wants to read a book, period. So they may just be on Instagram because they like the pictures and they like being entertained through that type of thing.
So keeping that in mind too back to the marketing thing is the numbers and the expectation and knowing that it's going to be a small percentage, and I'm going to say small, like as in 1% to maybe 10% of the people following you, who will actually buy your book. But you don't have to get discouraged about that because you may still use those folks in other ways to help you with the marketing as well. Maybe they're willing to share an image for you on their social. Maybe they're willing to talk about your book. Maybe they're willing to do other things, even if they never buy your book.
And I know that's a total side note from what we were just talking about, but I was just thinking of that, as you're building, so many people will be like, awesome, I got 1500 followers, I've been working so hard, now I'm up to 1500 followers on Instagram, this is going to be an amazing book launch. And really, only 10 to maybe 100 of those people may actually buy your book unless they are true rabid readers of your genre and have been following you because of the books that you talk about, because of your book, because of these types of things.
So expectations is a massive part of marketing and you just have to go into it knowing that.
I do feel like, I think I had introduced this conversation as Making Marketing Fundamentals Fun, but I think I'm going to retitle it as Getting into the Mind of the Audience That You Want to Reach.
[00:31:06] Matty: And so I wanted to close out by asking, if someone is just working on their first book, maybe they're in the middle of it, so it's not too late, and they're saying, you know what, the only people I have that can help me understand the people I want to appeal to are my mom and my next door neighbor or the people in my book club or something like that. Let's say they're starting really from ground zero.
Creating Your Marketing "Team"
[00:31:26] Matty: What are a couple of tips you would share with them that will help them create a team or create an environment that is going to help them understand the mindset of the people that they want to appeal to?
[00:31:54] Alexa: Absolutely. I mean, even if it's just your mom or your best friend or your neighbor who initially are interested, use them and to tell you, why are you interested? And what kind of things would you like to hear more about? How can I make this so that you would definitely want to click on this link or engage in this post or all of these things?
And also, who do you know? You mentioned book clubs. Most people in a book club, where there is at least generally five to seven people there, can you share this with them and ask them to also follow or ask them also to read my sample or become part of this book club? Do they know other people, other places that are in book clubs with them? Even if it's only two readers in the beginning, you have those two readers as your baseline of information. So get as much information from them as you can and see how you can use that information to help you grow and spread and see how they can help you as well, by sharing it with their communities. This is the beauty of social media.
And while we are talking about getting in the minds of your readers, like this can be really fun, figuring these things out if you make it fun. If you decide, oh man, I have to figure out what people want to read my book for. That's not fun, but if you're like, this is exciting, I want to know what lights people up about these, not only my books, but these types of books. Why do you buy thrillers? What is it, what are the feelings that you get from it? What are the colors that you associate with it? What are the thought processes or the podcasts that you listen to or the Netflix movies that you watch or series or all those types of things, and then bring them together into that type of thing.
But then knowing that they, even your small group, are powerful. They can go post on Facebook, or we all see posts from friends, those of us who are still using Facebook regularly.
I'd say once a week, I see a post of people asking for recommendations. It's summertime. I love to read thrillers. Does anyone have a great book that I can add to my list? When they see posts like that say yes, indeed. I do. I know of this book. It's really awesome. And then not only does that friend, but everybody because we all do this. We're like, I know when my friend posts this and I'm like, oh yes, I need some new good summer romance reads. And I say, I'm like, okay, write this book down. Okay, add this one to my cart, okay, add this to my library list. All of those types of things.
Make Your Book Available Everywhere
[00:33:42] Alexa: And on that note, making your book available to all the places where readers can access your book is so important. Not everybody is like us authors. We are willing to invest every last dime we have on buying books in many cases, if we're voracious readers. But not everybody is like that. They love to read books, but they may not want to spend all their money on books, so they want to get it from a library.
So have you also considered in your launch and marketing strategy, how do I get my book into libraries so that my friends who don't want to buy the book, so that book clubs. When I was part of a book club, almost nobody bought the books. I buy the books because I love buying books, but almost everyone was getting their books from a library or from a discounted retailer or things like that.
So considering all of those things and then going back and using that core group and asking them how they can help you build and expanding on that.
And your growth will come, if you are again, thinking like a reader, thinking about how to find those readers, approaching things from the mindset of the reader, providing content that the reader would enjoy. And that's how you take from a very small place and just continue growing.
[00:34:47] Matty: Cool. Well, Alexa, thank you so much. That was so helpful and insightful. Please let the viewers and listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:34:57] Alexa: Yeah, sure. So if you are interested in book marketing or publishing or any of those things, WritePublishSell.com is our hub for all things related to that. If you are a woman author or men too are invited and interested in growing your professional career as an author, or a professional in the industry, you can check out the WomenInPublishingSummit.com. We're on social by a variation of Write Publish Sell or Women in Publishing Summit or Women in Publishing on just about everything. Come follow us. Come check us out, we love to continue to help authors in their journey to move forward.
[00:35:30] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:35:31] Alexa: Thank you.
A question for you ...
Are you planning your marketing so that it’s scalable and sustainable when you have ten times as many followers? A hundred times as many? A thousand? And if yes, what’s your strategy?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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