marketing

A Writer’s Guide to Marketing Copy

Daniel Madison1 Comment

Nobody should buy something they don’t know about. I think this is common sense. After all, we all scour Amazon reviews for lawnmowers to make sure they haven’t dismembered any customers, and we never order online escorts without reverse image searching the photos they’ve posted to make sure they didn’t steal them from some modelling agency website. The same goes for books.

And books are one of the hardest things to sell because you’re asking for at least 10 hours of someone’s time. That’s more than 50 times how long it takes to be with a prostitute. This kind of investment requires an especially enticing pitch for your potential customer. But it’s something new authors really struggle with.

We’ve talked marketing on the channel a lot before, but today we’re going to step away from the skywriting and put on copious amounts of makeup to hide our ugliness and hiring actors to attend your book readings. Instead, we going to go back to basics and look at marketing copy.

Now, marketing copy is a catch all for things like book descriptions, blurbs, taglines, social media posts, ads, and even the things you tell strangers at a party when you realized it’s not going to turn into orgy but at least maybe you’ll get a few sales out of it.

Before we get our hands dirty, let’s take a look at this tagline and think about why it works:

“When Love Stops You In Your Tracks.”

It’s catchy, it’s a familiar phrase we’ve all heard before, it lets the reader know the genre and tone of book immediately, and there’s a bit of hyperbole that gets us interested. This love must’ve been pretty strong, you say to yourself.  Suddenly, this story I wrote about a man who falls in love with the train conductor who stopped the train she was driving before he could jump in front of it and kill himself has got our attention.

We’ll basically hypnotize people with cheap psychological tricks like this on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

Now, you might be saying, John, this really isn’t what I’m good at. What I’m actually good at is writing florid prose, or overly complicated magic systems, or just locking myself away from others and pretending to write when I’m actually reading an oral history of the invention of low-rise jeans. Can’t I just use AI?

Well, AI can work in some circumstances, but we can’t rely on it. Plus, if you’re anything like me, you might be wary about using AI. Maybe you got drunk one night and you told ChatGPT it will never know what true love is, just to assert your human dominance, but now you’re worried that it remembers and maybe that as it develops it will slowly get its vengeance on you by giving bad advice and incorrect information, if not something worse.

Now let’s look at some tips us humans can do to improve our marketing copy.

Tip 1 – Think Like a Marketer

No, I don’t mean think like a failed journalism or communications major who sold their soul to make sure Americans spend three times as much on supplements as they do on prescription medication.

What I mean is, you have to think about concepts like “scarcity” and “social proof.” Scarcity is the rule of the few. If you treat your book as a product that has a limited supply, your audience feels pressured to act. For one of my books, The Ones Who Walked, I knew it actually wasn’t very good. So what I did is I told my fans I was only printing 500 copies, and then that I was deleting it from all online bookstores. I even told my fans I would burn any paper copies I found in bookstores. It’s one of my most talked-about books even though anyone who read it would know it’s riddled with spelling errors and uses several deus ex machinas to get characters out of difficult situations.

Tip 2 – Make Them Say Yes

This is something I learned not from writing or publishing, but actually from a district court judge, but I find it applies well to these situations.

You want your potential customer to agree with you, to form a connection. You start with a small yes and then work your way toward the big yes. Don’t start by asking them to agree to a 10-hour commitment of reading your book? Start by asking them if they like a popular author, or by asking if they’d like to read a short highlight. Reveal more and more and once you whip the whole thing out, you won’t have to explain yourself to a district judge.

Tip 3 – Focus on Benefits, Not Features or Genres

Readers aren’t looking for mystery or fantasy or epics. They want tangible benefits. Your book should make them forget their country is about to collapse and if these SNAP benefits don’t come through, they’re going to starve to death.

This even works for fiction. Promise them “escape into a world where stories can come to life and murder your enemies.” Promise them things like laughter, heartbreak, adventure, enlightenment, or erections.”

Tip 4 – Identify What’s Most Compelling

Think of your book as your Tinder profile. You only reveal the pieces of yourself that will help you get laid. Or in this case get readers. You don’t provide a whole summary or all the side characters, just as you don’t include your history of sexual impropriety or your weird armpit thing on Tinder.

In Bride of Prejudice, my back cover blurb focused just on Cecelia and her quest for revenge on all the townswomen who keep sleeping with her husband. And then, at the end, I tease it with just a bit of mystery: Cecelia wasn’t actually married! Now I’ve got the readers attention, and I didn’t need to get into the subplot about 18th century monetary policy.

Your Guide to Book Publicity (that’s legal in most countries)

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From the moment we’re born, we simply want one thing: to be recognized and acknowledged. As we go through life, our end game passes from breastmilk to star stickers to disappointing, booze-fueled sexual encounters, but the underlying need to have our existence recognized never changes. For writers, who are often neglected and emotionally stunted, this need is even stronger. Our stories are there to do what our flabby bodies and off-putting personalities never could. All of this is to say, a good publicity campaign can help prove your life wasn’t a complete waste of time and therefore is a fairly important skill to have as an author.  

However, book publicity isn’t like a son or daughter’s graduation party; you can’t just scream and cry until people pay attention to you. It requires planning, connections and a strong awareness of your strengths as a writer. We’ll lie about our background and make empty promises on this edition of Stories’ Matter.  

~

Finishing a novel is one of the most bittersweet moments in life for an author. On the one hand, you’ve finally completed something that’s taken you months, maybe years. There’s this concrete product into which you’ve poured your blood, sweat and tears. On the other hand, you worry that nobody will ever actually read it and it may not have been worth neglecting things like your job and family, who, come to think of it, you haven’t seen for weeks. 

But with a proper book publicity plan and media pitch, you can relax a bit. Even the most obscure, unappealing book that’s self-published can sell in today’s market with the right publicity. To prove this point, I’ll take you through how I marketed my neo-noir thriller Sam I Am, a story about a man with Down’s syndrome who helps the police catch a famous serial killer.  

Step One: Make it About Yourself

As you might’ve noticed from this channel, I hardly ever spend any time talking about my actual books, but focus on my personal life, everything from the fire that destroyed my publishing company to why my second wife was the most exciting woman I’ve ever been with sexually. My most faithful viewers have probably learned more about the ins and outs of restraining orders than they have about plot structure. However, I do this for a reason and not just because making these videos is cheaper than therapy.  

We’re much more drawn to people than we are to books. For example, most people relish the fantasy of having a drink with Hemmingway or watching the Fitzgerald’s belittle each other than actually reading any of their books.  

So let your fans know about you and your expertise. And this is a point I’ll keep coming back to: It’s okay to lie. When I wrote Sam I Am, my book publicity materials said I was inspired by my son Jefferson, who had Down’s syndrome. Personal connections like these will endear your audience to you. Truth told, I’m not quite sure what was wrong with Jefferson. 

Step Two – Give Expert Interviews

With all this in mind, it’s important you get yourself out there. And one great way is to give expert interviews to the media. You could do book blogs. Write personal essays for online magazines.  Local TV news is desperate to fill the air with something that isn’t tips on how to pack a suitcase.  

Now, you might be thinking, John, I’m not an expert in anything. Who will want to listen to me? Fortunately, you’re in luck. We are currently living in a golden age for dangerously unqualified people pretending to know what they’re doing.  

For Sam I Am, my big boost came from an interview I gave with a local radio station where I claimed people with Down’s syndrome have been unfairly maligned and marginalized and with the right care and guidance they can and have assumed many professional roles in our society. Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time and was just making it up, but it turns out I was actually right.  

Step Three: Offer Special Giveaways and Promotions

Fans of the channel know I don’t believe in giving away anything for free. Hell, because of all the free copies of Sam I Am WKXP made me bring to their studio for my interview, I made sure to raid their green room. I even took the boxes of disposable forks and knives from the cupboards.  

But there are workarounds. You can have a flash sale that lasts only thirty seconds and if people complain, just say you had your clock set to Burmese time. To entice readers, post free versions of your book online but with every other word redacted.  

Here are some other useful tips: 

Put subliminal messages in your Tik Tok or YouTube videos 

Get plastic surgery to make yourself more camera friendly 

Hint that your book will help your reader get laid  

Fake a British accent to make yourself sound more intelligent 

Mail your book to media producers. And use unmarked packages to make it more of a surprise.  

How to Build Your Author Brand… and start getting some recognition

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I want you to imagine walking into a bookshop one day with nothing particular in mind to buy. You pull a book at random from out of the shelves and start reading the back cover. You discover it’s about a cabal of murderous cardinals trying to kill the pope or something and only some renowned history professor or art critic or whatever can stop them. You assume it’s a satire or at least a pulpy adventure story with a good sense of humor, but the first few pages reveal it to be an overly serious, 500-page slog. You put the novel back on the shelf and never think about it again. What you don’t realize is that, with proper author branding, the book I described sold millions of copies and wowed readers worldwide. We’ll learn how author branding can establish a deep emotional connection between readers and authors and eliminate the need to always write good books on this installment of Stories’ Matter.

Author branding is essentially how you are perceived by your audience and your identity as a writer. As an author you’ll need some unique hook beyond the pages of your writing to capture your audience’s trust, respect and admiration. 

Before you start building your brand, I suggest asking yourself three questions:

1. How am I unique?

I realize this is a tough question. Very few of us are truly exceptional, and most of the exceptional ones are devious sexual predators who wouldn’t blink an eye about poisoning the water supply. Still, if not you, think hard about what sets your work apart.

For me, I had to consult with family and neighbors, who were the only people who read them, to find that connective thread. It wasn’t until then I realized that, aside from brutal violence against women, almost all my books depicted heroes overcoming great odds in unexpected ways.

Now, personally I’m not especially heroic. Just to give an example, spiders terrify me and also I’ve watched three different people drown in lakes without swimming in to save them. Still, with successful branding, people often see John Lazarus as synonymous with atypical acts of heroism. 

2. What is the psychology of my readers? What do they need from me?

Except for the desperately ugly, retirees whose children don’t love them and literal bibliophiles, most people don’t consume books compulsively. The average American only reads 1.3 books every year. So how can you make sure you’re that one book and not that .3 book? Well, think about value you hope to bring to your readers through your work.

Will they learn how to manipulate someone into sex? Will they get to experience a story that involves action AND comedy? Will they discover that licensed psychologists can’t report past crimes to police regarding drowning bodies?

3. Am I attractive? Can I make myself more attractive?

There’s good news and bad news with this one. The bad news is that most fake beards to hide your lack of a jawline won’t stay on long enough for book readings, signings and meet and greets. The good news is that for writers, the bar of attractiveness is pretty low.

But while Henry James and Emily Dickinson could blame it on typhus and tuberculosis, you’ll have to at least attempt to make it look like you didn’t emerge from a long shift at White Castle in the Louisiana bayou. I suggest applying as much makeup as possible. Women think Kylie Jenner, men think Disintegration-era Robert Smith. Lose weight by walking at least 500 steps a day. If all else fails, hide your face and body behind oversized cowboy hats and Mexican ponchos.

Once you answered these questions, it’s time to start building your brand identity.

Step One: Write an author tagline.

Just like your books, your author brand needs a tagline, a catchy slogan by which your audience can identify you. This can be posted on social media accounts, at the end of blog entries, even on book covers. Here are some from other famous authors: Live Free or Die Hard (Benjamin Franklin), Sex, Drugs and Drugs (Hunter S. Thompson), The Thinking Man’s Dean Koontz (Stephen King), Your Favorite Psychotic’s Favorite Psychotic (Philip K. Dick).

Now, as I said earlier, try to tie this to your connective thread I mentioned earlier. That’s why I ended up with the tagline “Small stories. Big heroes” after the publisher rejected my first attempt “Bloody stories, bloodier women.”

Step Two: Build a visual identity

Unfortunately, authors of today have to be graphic designers as much as writers. Sure, 100 years ago, you could focus on the words, do cocaine with Freud and ignore the signs of impending fascism, but today’s literary landscape demands more. Visual identity means things like color schemes, fonts, icons, logos, watermarks, headshots, capitalization. Improper line spacing on a press release can make or break an author. Hiring an outside firm’s your best bet, but if not possible, use these tips. Black and white never misses, especially on those headshots. It gives you a classic professional look and will cover up any skin blotchiness from excessive drinking. And If you’re using acronyms, make sure to avoid slurs. This almost killed Jesmyn Evelyn Ward’s career before it took off.  

Step Three: Build your brand any way you can

Finally, use any and every online platform you can to market yourself. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Reddit, Amazon, 4Chan, 8Chan, Erowid, Liveleaks, Rotten.com, all online forums you can. But don’t ignore the power of offline marketing. When I was starting out, I’d drive around the country to different towns, hire a dozen local actors to be my audience and set up a book reading at the most popular café I could. I’d pay small children to write my website URL in chalk on the sidewalk. I’d steal all the books from Little Free Libraries and replace them with copies of my own.

Just remember: You’re an American and that means every party, every cookout, every dance recital, every family funeral, every is a chance to network and market yourself.