by john | Jun 6, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
Hey there!
If you follow me on social media, you might have seen a few pre-written tweet and Facebook messages that come out from my account. You might actually have seen enough to make you dread the thought of ever hearing from me again. But obviously not, because now you’re here to read even more of my crap, so either something I’m doing is working, or there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
Or both.
Be that as it may, I do post a LOT of tweets and pre-scheduled social media messages. There are a few reasons for this –
- If commercials and junk mail (what I often refer to as the “shotgun approach” to marketing) didn’t still work to some degree, companies with a lot more money to buy marketing and analyze its effectiveness wouldn’t still do it.
- It takes multiple mentions of a product for it to stick in someone’s mind. That product may be a specific book, but more often than not, that product is YOU. So you need a fair amount of visibility. That means being active all through the day, particularly when the bulk of people are in a place to see it. My completely non-scientific belief is that most people fuck off in front of their computers the most from 9AM-5PM Eastern time. And even more between 11AM-2PM, because that’s lunch. That’s when I post most heavily.
- Facebook and Twitter throttle your posts so that only a small percentage of things you put out in the world are seen unless you’re willing to pay for the privilege. To combat this, I send out the same message once per day, six days a week. My hope is that different people will see it each time, or at least that a few new people will see it each time.
So that’s the “why” I post a bunch. But what about the “how?” What makes a good social media post? Well, here are a few things that I try to include in most of my posts, and this is something that is constantly being refined as I learn more and look at what posts get the most interaction.
By the way, I will refer to all of these as tweets, even though I have HootSuite set up to cross-post to Facebook and Twitter. Each message I create goes to five different feeds – my Twitter, the Falstaff Books Twitter, my Facebook page, my Author page, and the Falstaff page. But it’s identical, because I only have so much time in my life.
I try to be funny, witty, or at least entertaining. I frequently use over-the-top examples to push the humor if it’s a funny book or story, or I try to tie it to something that will make the person who sees it go “Wait, what?” In a tweet for the book Changeling’s Fall, I make mention of the fact that unless you read the book, you won’t know what part of a goblin glows in the dark. This is something that people aren’t expecting, and makes them want to look further.
You’re always working toward the click in social media. With pre-written messages, you aren’t just looking to make people remember your name, you’re looking for something that makes them think “I need to know what the hell he’s talking about” and click the link. They can’t buy your shit if they don’t click the link. And that’s the endgame – getting people to buy your shit. You are not playing around on social media because you’re a great artist, you’re playing around on social media because you are in business to make money.
So a good tweet is made up of three things – a hook, a hashtag, and a link.
I’ve already talked about the hook. It’s kinda like your back cover matter, only super-condensed. Or it’s a cover blurb, only super-condensed. When I tweeted about Midsummer, a Bubba meets Shakespeare novella, I made mention of A.J. Hartley, because he’s a Shakespeare expert. When I tweet about Of Lips and Tongue, I mention that it’s one of the best novellas released last year. When I tweet about Pawn’s Gambit and War Pigs, I’ll mention that they are finalists for the 2017 Manly Wade Wellman Award (Congrats to Darin Kennedy and Jay Requard!).
Your hook is that “Wait, what?” moment. It’s what makes the person seeing it read further. It’s what cuts through the noise, and there’s plenty of noise out there. You can (and will) have multiple tweets about each release. You can make one funny, one serious, one scary, one referential to another work out there, whatever. Just use part of your 140 characters to make it interesting.
You need at least one hashtag, preferably two. I’m just getting better at this, because hashtags baffled me for a long time. Hashtags are the way people filter social media. If someone wants to see all the tweets and posts about ConCarolinas, they can search using #concarolinas, and all the posts using that hashtag will pop up.
Do not use very specific hashtags. If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that you aren’t a huge bestseller. If you aren’t James Patterson, using a hashtag with your name is useless. If no one will ever search for the hashtag, it’s just a waste of space. I find that #kindle #amazon #audible #audiobook #ebook #bargain #free #fantasy #horror #scifi are all broad enough to be useful, while #falstaffbooks or #johnhartness would be absolutely useless. No one is searching twitter feeds for those terms, so don’t bother with them.
Don’t overdo it with hashtags, either. After a while, it just becomes a parody of your content and the message is lost. I think one or two is plenty.
The link – this part is easy. You need something that people can take action on, namely to buy your shit. But there are a few things that go into making a link, and some of them you might not know about.
- Universal Links – We all know how much is sucks to have your book available on ten different platforms but you can only fit one link into each message. Well – Books2Read is your new best friend! Books2Read makes universal links for your book. You just go to their site, insert the buy link from any online store into the field, and it will scour the internet for everywhere else the book is available, and create a Universal Link that points to ALL of them! What happens is that your customer clicks the universal link, and they are directed to a page that says “Hey! This book is available all over the interwebs! Where do you want to buy it?” You customer says “Here!” and clicks their favorite ebook store. Books2Read sends them there, and remembers their choice for next time. So next time they click any Books2Read link, it takes them to the book on their selected store. This gives you the opportunity to share the link to all online stores in one shot, and your readers can get your shit wherever they want.
- Link shorteners – most social media aggregators like HootSuite or TweetDeck have a tool that will shorten a link for you. I don’t use them. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I use bit.ly. Bil.ly shortens the links, lets you customize the link, and gives you tracking for the link. All with a free account. I use them for all my link creation.
So there you go, the short version of how to build a tweet that sings instead of sucks. Build a hook, a hashtag, and a link, and then go promote the fuck out of your stuff! Remember, art is awesome, and as soon as you make enough money, you can make all the art you want!
by john | May 23, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
Let’s talk about social media, shall we? I know, you’re probably tired as fuck of hearing about social media. You’re either baffled by the idea of social media, because you don’t really do the technology thing, or you’re paralyzed by anxiety about social media, because you hate dealing with people and are terrified that someone might talk to you, or you’re annoyed with social media, because people like me keep telling you to use social media and you have no idea what is the right way to do it, and you wish someone would just tell you exactly what to do and then you could do it and get on with your life, but you don’t want it to take up too much of your writing time, because you already have a day job, and kids, and hobbies, and other family, and can barely squeeze in an hour each day to write, and now some asshole has you reading these blog posts every week about how to sell books when what the fuck does he even know about how to sell books anyway?
Does that pretty much sum it up?
I thought so. Look, social media is, at its core, two thing. It is a way for friends to communicate with each other, and it is a way for companies to get their name out in front of customers. There are a lot of types of social media, and it is very easy to drive yourself absolutely bonkers trying to keep up with what the cool kids are using. Is it Instagram? Is it Tumblr? Is it Pinterest? Is it Twitter? Is it Facebook? Is it MySpace?
Here’s a hint – it ain’t MySpace. But any of the others are perfectly valid places to spend time interacting with people and telling them about your books, your life, your cat (people fucking love cat pictures), your poop (less love for the poop pictures), or your kids (they might love or hate kid pictures). It’s all about what you want to focus on. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on scheduled posts on Facebook and Twitter, because that’s what I do. I do scheduled posting on Facebook and Twitter because it’s easy and I can do it without taking up too much of my writing time.
A lot of people will tell you that this kind of shotgun, junk mail posting on social media is worthless, annoying, and will alienate fans. I will tell you that on weeks that I do not do scheduled posts, I see an average of 10% less sales than on weeks where I do scheduled posts. I sell between 30-50 books per day, depending on the month and the recent releases, so we’ll say I average 275 books per week. So I sell about 28 books more in weeks that I do scheduled posting. That’s worth around $75 cash.
That is more money than I am willing to leave lying on the ground for the hour that it takes me to schedule a week’s worth of Facebook and Twitter posts.
I also do a lot of organic Facebook posting, sharing, and interacting with people. I don’t hang out on Twitter a ton, but I go on there every once in a while and go on a retweet or liking binge. But I hang out on FB a lot, so I do a lot of organic activity there in addition to my structured posts.
Here’s the way I set it up each week. I block out about an hour on Saturday or Sunday (the days of the week I am most likely to not write) to do my social media. I have created Word documents with pre-written tweets that I copy and paste from. Yes. this is time-consuming on the front end, but if you write 2-4 different tweets for every product you release, and save them all in a master document, it’s really easy to stay on top of it. If you’re coming into this with 25 backlist titles, that’s going to be a pain. Too bad. It’s still worth it.
All this is my opinion. None of my opinions are humble. That’s your last caveat. From here on out, we’re presenting this as the Gospel According to Hartness. Don’t like it? You don’t have to read it. You are welcome to do your social media however you like. This is what I do, and how to copy what I do. If you want to do it, go for it.
So – I have a Word document with 2-3 prewritten tweets for each thing that I have out there. That’s every book, every audiobook, this website, my Patreon, my mailing list, and my podcast. I don’t promote everything every week. Some stuff is older backlist stuff that I just promote when I don’t have a new release. Some stuff I just rotate through. My Patreon gets promoted every week, my newsletter gets promoted every week, and this website gets promoted every week, These things are evergreen, and I always want as many eyes on them as possible, so I make sure they get promoted. Any new releases get promoted first, then new audio releases, then most recent releases. I try to promote at least one product from each of my three main series every week.
I use Hootsuxte to aggregate my tweets and auto-schedule them. Because I’m an early adopter, the plan I’m on costs me less than $10 each month. The same plan now costs $15/month, which is still a bargain. Because ain’t nobody got time to sit down every day and schedule a shitload of Twittering.
I set things up so that I send out a tweet (which cross-posts to Facebook on my timeline, my author page, the Falstaff Books FB page, and the Falstaff Twitter feed) every hour on the hour between 9AM EST and 6PM EST. That’s ten messages every day promoting me and my work. I do this Monday – Saturday, with the idea that fewer people look at Twitter on Sunday, so that’s often the day I’m using to build the following week’s posts.
Then I go back through and send one message per day for every product that Falstaff Books has published or has scheduled for pre-release. Every book we’ve ever done gets promoted every day, once per day. It’s all I can do, because we have a promotional budget of somewhere near seventy-five cents, and this fits within that budget.
I try to make the messages funny and interesting. I use Bit.ly to build all the links, because I can shorten them, and it offers some tracking. I used to embed my Amazon Associates link in the messages, but someone pointed out that it was against the Amazon Associates TOC, so I stopped.
But that’s it. I end up programming somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 tweets per week, and it takes me less than an hour. It will take you time to get the list of messages built, but once you have that established, you can get all this done in not a ton of time.
Is this better than real engagement with your buying public? Not by a long shot. Is this better than sitting around bemoaning the lack of sales? Yes, by a long shot. If commercials and junk mail and spam weren’t effective, we wouldn’t get so much of it. And you’re not just sending out ads for dick pills, you’re telling people who actually like you and/or your work what’s going on with you. This is much more targeted than that email about your schlong or the RedPlum flyer in your mailbox yesterday. So give it a shot. I find it valuable, maybe you will too.
By the way, I’m working on the page to let y’all buy autographed paperbacks from me. If you want to check it out, click the link that says “Autographed Books” at the top of this page. Thanks!
by john | May 16, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
Last time around, we talked about the two types of email list subscribers – incentivized subscribers and organic subscribers. Organic subscribers are the ones that come to you naturally, they are interested in you or your work, and they seek you out and sign up of their own free will. These are the unicorns of email list subscribers – they’re lovely, they’re beautiful, and may very well be mythical.
Nah, not really. But while they are the best type of subscriber, they are also the toughest to acquire, and the ones that require the most effort to cultivate. They are the folks that sign up from convention appearances, from links in the back of your books (you do have a link to your newsletter signup page in the back of your ebooks, don’t you?), or just from finding you on Facebook or the interwebs.
The other flavor of subscriber is much more prevalent, and they are the ones who subscribe because you give them something for signing up. I call these incentivized subscribers, and while it may seem at first blush that I value them less than organic subscribers, that’s not true at all. They just require different care and feeding.
Organic subscribers are easy to keep, but much harder to get in the first place. Incentivized subscribers are easier to get in the door, but much harder to keep once you have them. Both type of subscriber can turn into true fans over time, you just need to know what kind of cultivation you’ll have to do for each one.
There are good and bad ways to incentivize people signing up for your newsletter, and multiple methods of each. My favorite method of getting people to sign up for a newsletter is to give them a free ebook. I offer a free Quincy Harker short story, High Fashion Hell, to new subscribers. If you aren’t already on my email list, you can click here to join and get your free ebook. This story is available for sale, and it’s also available in an anthology, but there have been hundreds of copies of it claimed by people signing up for my email list since I started giving it away. So there is still some incentive to sign up, even with a story that is available elsewhere.
The way this works is – people see the link, click the link, and they are taken to a signup form on Mailchimp. Once they fill out the signup form, and confirm their email address, they receive another email that directs them to a page on BookFunnel. Book funnel hosts the ebook file and sends it to people in whatever format they request, for Kindle, Nook, iPad, whatever. You don’t have to put anything else in place. Mailchimp costs a monthly fee based on the number of email addresses on your list, and Bookfunnel charges based on the number of downloads per month.
I pay $25/ month for MailChimp and $10/month for BookFunnel. I also pay $20/month for Instafreebie, another service I use to send out ARCs and rewards. I’ll talk more about IF in a later post. With Hootsuite, another service I’ll talk about later, I spend about $60/month in automation and services to help with my marketing. As my lists and reach grows, so will that number. Nothing in life is free, and if it is, it’s probably worth what you pay for it. Hell, I even have a blurb at the end of this post asking for money, so this advice isn’t even really free. (BTW, if you think this advice is valuable and want me to continue making posts like this, feel free to join my Patreon.)
So how do you boost your numbers quickly? Well, there are a couple of ways. First, you can do newsletter swaps with writers that have more subscribers than you. Or even writers with the same number of subscribers as you, because they’re almost certainly different subscribers. Here’s how that works – A few months ago, Eric Asher set up a six-author mailing list swap. Each author sent out a newsletter to their list with everybody else’s book cover in it, and built a link in the cover to that author’s signup page. So all the people on Eric’s list who clicked on the High Fashion Hell cover got the chance to sign up for my email list. All the people who clicked on Eric’s cover in my newsletter got the chance to sign up for his list (and get some awesome free books. Go to his website. Sign up for the list. Tell him I said Hi).
I gained several hundred new subscribers, because they wanted free ebooks. A lot of them stuck around, because they were already pre-sorted as people who wanted to read the kind of stuff I write, because Eric and I write in similar genres. Those are incentivized subscribers, but they’re vetted leads, and much more likely to become “sticky” than a blind signup in my next example.
That’s a good way to incentivize signups – you aren’t spending much cash, and the thing you’re giving away is something that people who want to buy your books will want, but the general populace will have little interest in. Someone who doesn’t read will have no interest in signing up for my email list to get a free ebook. But they might want a free iPad!
Yeah, big-ticket giveaways aren’t worth a shit. They just aren’t. There is some value to giving away something like a Kindle Paperwhite, but a Kindle Fire or an iPad has just as much value to a non-reader as it does to a reader, and even with a PaperWhite, there’s no guarantee that the winner will read in your genre. If you write paranormal romance, you aren’t going to get a whole lot of value if a Chris Kennedy fan wins a Kindle from you. But if you like Military Sci-Fi, check Chris out. He’s good people.
The stickiness of a subscriber who joins up for a big-ticket giveaway like that is much, much lower than someone who signs up to get a free ebook. When I’ve done big massive email list building promotions, I see a lot of quick signups, then a lot of quick unsubscribes as soon as they get the first newsletter. And that costs money, not just in the cost of the item given away, but also in the escalation of your mailing list numbers, which costs more for MailChimp. So be careful about participating in those kind of campaigns. I just don’t think they’re worth it.
So what should you do if you’re just starting out trying to build an email list?
- Set up a MailChimp Account. This will manage the list so yo don’t have to fuck around in Excel or Access or something else awful. If you don’t like MailChimp, find another email list service. But use something of that ilk.
- Set up Automation so that you as soon as someone signs up for your list, they get a welcome email from you. This is where you can set up your giveaway as well.
- Set up a BookFunnel with a free ebook to lure subscribers in. It can’t be anything that’s available in Kindle Unlimited, but it also doesn’t have to be a novel. I feel like too many writers give away the farm to get email subscribers. If you’ve only got two novels published, don’t give one of them away for an email address. Write a prequel novella, or even short story, and use that as bait.
- Put a widget on your website with a link to drive signups. The book cover with a “Sign up for my Email List” tag is all you need.
- Create a Call to Action button on your Facebook Author page that is a signup button for your email list.
- Automate your Twitter and Facebook (or other social media outlets) to send out one message every day reminding people that they can get free shit by signing up for your email list. Every. Single. Day. Yes, even you, with one book out. Don’t do it every hour, but do it every day. Less than 20% of your FB contacts see the things you post, so you have to post frequently to get them out there. I don’t care if you think it’s annoying, shut up and do it. I’ll teach you how to Hootsuite later.
- Find some other authors who have shitty newsletter numbers and do a swap with them. Find other writers in your genre and do a newsletter swap with them. See if your publisher will send out a newsletter with your book cover linking to a newsletter signup page.
- Find authors who like you that have much bigger lists who will let you ride their coattails a little and do a newsletter swap with you. Don’t use this willy-nilly, and don’t email me. If everybody that reads this emails me, I’ll be overwhelmed. I might even get ten emails, given the traffic I get here. 🙂
- Communicate with your list regularly. At least once a month. Don’t consider it spam. Don’t consider it bothering people. Your readers, as much as you love them, aren’t your besties. They are your customers, and your job is to make sure they know about everything you have out there that they can buy. So go get their money!
That’s a pretty good primer on building an email list. I hope it’s been helpful. If you think I missed something, hit me up in comments. If you think I’m an idiot, then you probably shouldn’t have read this far and should go do something more fulfilling. 🙂 If you think I’m brilliant, buy all my shit. Or click the link for my Patreon.
by john | May 10, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways, Writing
So you know you need an email list, but you have no idea how to go about building an email list, right? You don’t think you have anything interesting to say, or anything that people will want to hear about. You don’t release a book every month like some crazy bastards you know (BTW, the new Quincy Harker book is out for pre-order, and you should totally do that), you don’t think you lead a terribly interesting life, but this Hartness asshole keeps telling you to build a mailing list. So how are you supposed to do that?
There are a lot of ways to build a mailing list, and we’re going to start with my preferred method. The two styles of mailing list construction are Organic Growth and Incentivized Growth. Organic Growth is slower, much more labor-intensive, and requires writers to do the one thing that many of them hate to do – interact with people.
It’s also the best way to build a mailing list. With organized growth, you are slowly cultivating people who actually want to hear from you. People who have either seen you on a panel, or at a con table, or met you in line at the restroom, or in the bar, or read one of your books, or whatever – they have had some interaction with you or your work and they WANT to know more. Maybe they’re just another writer friend and they want to know when you have something new coming out. Whatever. You don’t care why they want to hear from you, they have interacted with you in some way, and made the decision that they actually want to hear from you.
These are the best mailing list subscribers. They are already predisposed to want to hear from you. They like you, and people buy shit from people the like. They don’t like to be lectured at, they don’t like to be preached at, but they like to laugh, so make people laugh every chance you get. Or cry. People like to cry, too, They don’t, however, like to feel like they are trapped in an elevator with Aunt Marge from the family reunions who always smells a little like pee and wants to pinch you. So don’t be Aunt Marge.
That escalated quickly. Moving back to the point, the people who subscribe organically are more likely to click on a link in your newsletter, and more likely to open the newsletter in the first place.
On the other side of the coin are the Incentivized Subscribers. These are people who want a free ebook, or want to enter to get a free Kindle, or whatever they are getting out of signing up for you list. These folks will have a high number of join and drop folks, and you won’t be able to convert that many of them into real fans and readers. Sorry, it’s just true. You might have 8,000 people on your email list, but if you’re only getting a 10% open rate on your newsletter, then you’re not doing any better than someone with a 2,000-person list and a 50% open rate. So look for quality over quantity, or ideally a mixture of both. Because you do need to be visible, and giveaways and mailing list swaps are good ways to do that, and they are often good ways to increase your mailing list dramatically in a very short time. I’ve added 1,000 people to my mailing list since the beginning of this year, and a lot of that has been off of Incentivized Subscribers. I’ve also had a lot of people drop from my mailing list immediately after downloading their free ebook, so the long-term success of those programs is yet to be determined.
So how do you get the Organic Subscribers? Well, there are a few ways.
If you are self-published, you can put a signup link in the back of all of your ebooks. If you are traditionally published, you can put a link in your author bio and either hope your publisher doesn’t see it, or ask your publisher if it’s okay. If I publish you, it’s fine. I want you to have a million people on your email list, because then we both make more money. This is a passive method that will slowly net some signups.
Please note that all of these organic methods are slow dribbles of signups. They are like putting out dozens of little buckets in a rainstorm. You don’t get very much water in any one bucket, but when you collect everything out of all the buckets, you can fill a bathtub pretty quick. These are your buckets.
Your website is another bucket. You’ll notice there is a link one the right-hand side of the page here with a picture of the High Fashion Hell cover. That’s a signup link for my website. People click on the picture, cover by the lovely Natania Barron, and they are directed to a signup form for my email list. Oh, you don’t have a website? Well, welcome to the late 20th century, you need a website. I suggest it be your name, not any book or series name, because you will have your name longer than you will have any given book series, and you want to remain easy to find online. Same with email addresses – get one that’s just your name, because eventually you will no longer want to be known as Hot2Trot4Cumberbatch420@whateverthefuck.com.
My author page on Facebook has a call to action button, which is another email list signup. That allows people who find me on Facebook to sign up for my emails directly from there. You don’t have an author page yet? Well, better get on that shit. You are a professional, whether you do this for your entire living or not, and you need to be able to use all the tools at your disposal.
I also use Twitter to drive email signups. I’ll get into the scheduled Twitter and Facebook posts in a later article, but suffice to say that at least once per day a message goes out on Facebook and Twitter telling people that I have a mailing list, and that they can get a free ebook if they sign up for it. I don’t get a ton of email signups, I have about 2,500 people on the list, and I add 5-6 per day. So it’s pretty good, and it’s growing nicely, but it’s not yet a huge list by any stretch. And I’m good with that, because it remains the single most effective marketing tool I have (heh heh, I said tool).
So that’s a little bit on organic methods to grow an email list. Next time around, we’ll talk about Incentivized Subscribers, good and bad incentives to build a list, and how to streamline all this shit so you don’t have to babysit it all the time. Until then, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments, and if you love what I’m doing, feel free to subscribe to my email list by clicking the book cover to your right or you can subscribe to my Patreon by clicking the link below. Thanks!
by john | May 2, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Promos/Giveaways
This is not going to be exciting. None of these posts in this series are going to be exciting. I’m not going to tell you how to jump up the bestseller lists and go from selling five books each month to 5,000 in the span of thirty days. I’m not going to tell you The Secret To Becoming An Amazon Bestseller. I’m not going to tell you how to Make A Million Dollars Selling Ebooks.
I’m not going to do any of that crap. Because those posts are bullshit. The only people getting rich off the words in a bunch of How To Sell Ebooks books are the people that wrote the book. And I’m giving this shit away, so I’m obviously an idiot.
But I’m an idiot who makes a living selling books. So that puts me ahead of most idiots out there.
I pay my bills and feed my family off my writing. Most writers can’t do that. We live modestly, and we try to manage our spending, but we are a single-income family, and that income grows out of my writing. These posts will try to give you some of the tools that I use to sell more books. I’m not looking to make anyone (except me) into the second coming of Stephen King. I just want to help you find more success in your writing.
So let’s start with the basics – a mailing list. You’ve heard you need one, but you don’t know shit about how to build one. You don’t know what a newsletter should look like. You don’t know how to get people to subscribe to it, and you don’t know how to create one that doesn’t look like it was drawn by a three-year-old epileptic chimpanzee. So let’s start there.
Yes, you need a mailing list. Your newsletter is the single most important piece of marketing material that you have, with the exception of writing amazing books. People who sign up for your newsletter, for the most part, are already interested in you and your work. So first you have to create a mailing list, and figure out how to send a newsletter. Then we’ll move on to how to get people to sign up for your mailing list.
Mailing List Services – there are plenty of companies out there that will manage your email list for you. Constant Contact is the one that most big companies use, and you probably get 2-3 emails using that service every day. I use Mailchimp, because it’s cheaper at the level that I’m at. I’m currently at around 2700 people on my email list. That’s not a huge number, but it’s decent. It’s all the better because most of those people are there organically, but we’ll get to that later.
Mailchimp is a subscription service. They charge you for their work. In exchange for your monthly fee, they will collect all the email addresses and give you tools to send out good-looking newsletters and autoresponders to people when they contact you. I currently pay $40/month for this service, because of the number of people I have. I’m not far from looking for another service, because once you get over about 3500 names on your list, Mailchimp isn’t quite as cost-effective. But that’s a discussion for later as well.
Once you sign up with MailChimp, you have to start building a list. First add yourself. That lets you see the emails you send out in their natural and complete form. Then go over to your Facebook Author Page and build a button. Facebook lets you make a Call to Action at the top of your page, and yours should almost certainly say “Join my Email List.” It’s very easy to build the button, Facebook walks you through every step.
Once you’ve built your button on your author page (if you don’t have an author page, that’s a hint – you better get one), then it’s time to post some notices on your personal timeline and on your author page, telling people to sign up for your email list. You have to do this a few times. Facebook doesn’t show everything by everybody, so to get through their signal-to-noise ratio, you have to repeat yourself a few times. Also, you will have better success if you put the link in comments, as FB hides posts with links built in.
Don’t post all the damn time, just once a day or so. Let’s not be complete dicks about this promo thing. Yes, I understand exactly how often I post promotional things myself. But I have a LOT of shit to promote. So I’m not posting the same thing more than once per day.
While you’re waiting for someone to sign up for your mailing list, it’s time to set up some automations. MailChimp lets you create stored newsletters and welcome letters that go out whenever someone signs up for your mailing list. This way, whenever someone signs up to hear from you, they get a nice welcome email from you. A lot of people recommend sending one note within a few hours of signup, then another in a couple of days, then a third a week or two later. I send out two, one an hour or so after signup, then another a few days later. I figure a couple of weeks after they’ve joined the email list, they’ll be getting a newsletter anyway.
That’s always another question – how often should I send out newsletters? I have been doing mine once each month, but I’m about to increase to twice a month. Some folks send stuff out weekly, but I think that’s a little much. You want people to remember you, but not get tired of hearing from you. If you only have a few releases each year, then once a month is probably fine. But it is important to stay on top of it and send stuff out. Even if you don’t have a new book coming out, you can solicit reviews for older work, pitch your upcoming audio releases, publicize events and appearances, or promote stuff by your friends. All of those make for good newsletter fodder.
But you must send out your newsletter regularly. That’s the only way it’s going to get traction and you’re going to be “sticky” in people’s heads.
I’ll be back next week with talk about ways to grow a newsletter, like newsletter swaps, and incentives. If there are questions about what I’ve written this week, leave them in the comments! Thanks!
by john | Feb 6, 2017 | Business of publishing, How to Sell Books, Writing
Now that I’m in publishing, I’m working with a lot of writers. A lot of these writers are publishing their first book, or their first stand-alone work, after having been in a number of anthologies over the years. One question I get a lot of times is “How do you sell books on social media?”
Well, there are a lot of disparate opinions on that. Some people, who sell a lot of books, think that you can’t actually sell anything on social media. They feel that it’s all about building your brand, and engagement, and getting people to like you and be interested enough in you to go buy your stuff. I tend to tell those people that they have very valid opinion, and it’s one way to approach social media. These folks frequently build a very rabid following for their blogs, or their twitter feeds, and are able to parlay those readerships into readerships for their books. Chuck Wendig and John Scalzi both built a lot of their fanbase off their blogs early in their careers, and still have very popular blogs today. They’ve done a great job of building engagement, and almost surreptitiously selling their fiction while building real engagement with other things they had to say. It’s very much a good way to work it, and can be very successful.
Some other folks think that social media is the devil, and they hate it, and just want to stay in their ivory towers and write. I usually tell those people that they are not going to make much money writing, and they should leave that J.D. Salinger/Emily Dickinson shit in previous centuries where it belongs.
My method is different, and it’s one that a lot of people don’t care for, but it results in actual sales for my books, so I’m not likely to change it anytime soon.
I promote the hell out of my stuff on social media.
Like, a LOT.
Every weekend, I spend an hour or so writing tweets or copying old tweets from a master list I keep on my desktop, and I paste them into Hootsuite to automate the cross-posting to Twitter, Facebook, and my author Facebook page. Every hour on the hour from 9AM – 5PM Eastern, I send out one tweet promoting one product. Sometimes, when a product is releasing that week, it will get two tweets per day, but usually just one.
Here are some samples of things I tweet –
You need more Sasquatch dick jokes in your life. Pick up Grits, Guns & Glory, Bubba Season 2 Today! http://amzn.to/1IZQSkO
Late to the Harker Party? Check out Harker Year One for the collected adventures of this badass magician! http://amzn.to/1TxBjVG
My Patrons get exclusive content like my writing advice blog posts, cool giveaways, and free stuff! https://www.patreon.com/johnhartness
Keep up to date with all my appearances, releases, podcasts, and get a #free #ebook! Sign up for my email list – http://eepurl.com/fV4In
Typically my breakdown will be – One post per day for my mailing list. One post per day for my Patreon. One post per day for the latest Harker release. One for the newest Bubba. One for the latest Black Knight. One for an older release. One for a recent audio release. One for a release that doesn’t sell as well and needs some love, and one flex slot. Some weeks the flex slot is pimping other writers, which engenders a lot of goodwill and retweets. Some weeks it’s pimping a con I’m going to, or other guests at that con. Some weeks it’s a podcast or an Audible subscription promo code. It just depends on what I’m thinking.
This is in direct opposition to what I and other people have said for years about social media. It’s using it as a billboard, and not as a conversation. It isn’t building real connections. It isn’t creating true fans. It’s very much a shotgun approach to marketing, with almost no way of knowing whether it has any effect or not.
Except on the weeks that I don’t do this promotion, I can see a noticeable dip in sales.
So it sells books.
That’s why I keep doing it. Because it sells books. And that’s my job. One of them, anyway. That’s what’s important to remember as a writer. You have many jobs, and one of those is to sell books. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written the next War and Peace if nobody reads it. So if you have to sell War and Peace as 50 Shades of Grey, so be it. Sell the book. If you want to be a professional writer, and pay your bills with your book sales, it’s on you to sell some damn books.
“But John, I only have three stories in anthologies and one book out. How am I supposed to make nine social media posts a day?”
You’re not. You should make five or six. Make one for each anthology you have a story in. The publishers will appreciate the fuck out of it, and are likely to invite you to be in more anthologies. Trust me, we notice who promotes a book and who doesn’t. Especially if it’s a Kickstarter anthology. We know who is working to promote the hell out a Kickstarter and who sends out one tweet in the 30-day funding period. You should make one post per day for the book that you have out. And one post per day about your mailing list.
Yes, I just said that you should be on social media EVERY SINGLE DAY telling people to buy your book. Yes, it is shameless. Yes, it is unseemly. Yes, it is brazen. Yes, some writers will consider you unprofessional for doing it. And yes, it will sell books. People cannot buy the book they have never heard of, so make sure they have heard of it.
I also said that you should have a mailing list, and be actively working to build it. You should have a website, and there should be a place on the website to sign up for the mailing list. Those are people who have already expressed an interest in your work, why wouldn’t you want to be able to reach out and touch them? Even if you only have one book out now, unless that’s the only book you ever plan on writing, you need to be building a mailing list. Right damn now.
If you want to promote other authors, great. It’s a great way to make friends and influence people. But you HAVE to be visible. I am at a place now where I have invited a bunch of authors to play in my Harker and Bubba sandboxes. Some of those authors were chosen because they are extremely talented. Some were chosen because they are some of my best friends, and extremely talented. And some were chosen because they are extremely active on social media, and extremely talented. Which ones do you think I expect to sell more books?
Get out there, get visible, get active. If you think you can “just write” and make a living, go lie in the dirt with Salinger, because that career path is as dead as old J.D.
This post is part of a book I’m working on about my methods for selling books and making a living. Pretty much everything that ends up in the book will be from either posts I make here or stuff I’ve written on Magical Words in the making Money Mondays posts. So you can get all the info for free. But if you like it and find what I’m writing useful, I’ hope you’ll buy the book when it comes out next year, or consider joining my Patreon.
