rocking horse publishing « Robin Writes

I saw this question in a FB group of which I’m a part, and thought I’d go more into depth today, here, with my answer.

“Do I need an agent to market my self-published book?”

The short answer is no, you don’t need an agent to market your book. You’ve already published that book; the time for an agent was BEFORE you self-published. What you need is a publicist, someone who will get exposure for that book, and therefore sales.

But first, there are things you, the author need to do. Low or slow or even non-existent sales can be due to many things.

Start here:

A good cover.

A well-edited manuscript.

Proper formatting.

Competitive pricing.

Promotion and marketing.

If you have a bad cover, and Internet examples abound, no one is going to look twice at your book. Period. Not too cluttered, good margins, compatible colors, one or two fonts, easily readable fonts.

If your book is full of mistakes, no one will read it. They might buy it, and be severely disappointed, and never read your work again. Oh, and they’ll tell everyone how horrible it is. You can bet on that.

If your book is not a conventional size, readers may avoid it. Books are typically 8.5 square or 5X8 or 6X9, or something closely matching those sizes. The right margin should be justified, and there should be equitable margins all around. Line spacing should hold at 1.15 and there shouldn’t be spaces between paragraphs.

Pricing can be tricky, but know this: on a royalty-based contract from a publisher, you will earn around $1 on each copy sold. If you self-publish, you can make a few more dollars, but you aren’t going to earn $10 or $15—because no one will buy a paperback novel for $20. Especially if that “novel” is fewer than 70K words.

Promotion. If you self-publish, you probably don’t have much in the way of distribution, so the default is Amazon. Your book will not get enough exposure on Smashwords, or Lulu, or any other third-party, obscure site for books. Make use of the author page on Amazon and all forms of social media, whichever ones work best for you.

Do some research. Give away some books. Pound the pavement.

And yes, you can hire a publicist, if you can afford it. They are expensive, the good ones. Anyone can refer to himself as a publicist, but be sure to do your homework and hire someone who gets results.

But at this point, you don’t need an agent unless you want to pull your book and start over. Some authors do that—and others perhaps should.

But it’s your call. Being an indie author certainly has its benefits.

Do you get those invites? To virtual book events, on Facebook? I’m not a fan, maybe because I have too much else going to spend more time on Facebook “attending” an event. Just don’t like them. If you do, that’s okay, I won’t hold it against you—but I doubt I’ll accept, either. Nothing personal.

Another event I’ve seen cropping up a lot lately, and ‘tis the season, and all that, is multiple invites for the very same event. Now, I usually don’t post an “event” unless I’m the only author attending, or unless I’m attending as a publisher.

First, Facebook lists the poster as the “host.” If I’m going to an event, the venue is usually the host. Like a library or bookstore. Festivals, on the other hand, have multiple items and vendors, like farmers’ markets and toy festivals or horror conventions, etc.

Typically, the venue posts the event, and I’ll share it; sometimes they’ll send me a .pdf flyer and I’ll post that as a photo. All the information is there, without the hassle of creating an event.

The problem comes when EVERYONE involved creates an event and invites EVERYONE to said event. Of course I’m going to that event, my name is listed there! Why should I respond, or how should I respond, to the invite? There’s no “um, yes, I’ll be there, I’m on the program” option.

Second, when I do create an event, I invite people who actually live in the area and/or who may be in town at that time. It’s a little irksome to see, when inviting willy-nilly from a friends’ list, people who live 1000 miles away and who click “going.” I mean, really?? Often, they add “will be there in spirit!” or something like that. Or maybe they click “going” because they’d like to go, or like the event itself. Hard to say.

Imagine that you and a friend are hosting a party. A real-life one. Would you send each other invitations? No. Would you like getting RSVPs from people who obviously aren’t going to be able to come because, say, they live in another country? No again.

So what’s the difference? Nothing that I can see.

This kind of goes along with the “like for like” events and invitation to “like” Facebook pages. I don’t like that either.

Why?

Because those aren’t “real” likes. If someone likes your page because you like his, is it much different than trading book reviews? Nothing unethical about it, really, but it can quickly become tiresome. And when those people who are liking you only for a kickback get tired of seeing your feed or decide to cull their list a bit, off you go, because they have no idea who you are or what you wrote. And they aren’t interested. They’re only interested in numbers.

Let’s say you have a thousand likes on your author page. Great! Has it helped sales? How many of those 1000 people have bought your book? It’s hard to tell, right? But let’s play numbers. Have you sold to 10% of them? That’s 100 books. Maybe some you sold to directly, maybe they bought online somewhere. That’s pretty good. Then again, maybe at an event, you sell two books. Maybe the attendance is 200 at a multi-author event, which comes to 1%. Maybe it’s an individual signing and you sell four books out of the 25 that you brought along. That’s about 20%.

As a side note: often, people will TELL you that they bought the book. But they didn’t. Really.

Sales is just a number—it’s the percentage that counts. But those doing like-for-like want to gain likes and sell their own books. They aren’t interested in selling yours, unless they read it and loved it. In that case, they might actually read your posts and share them. And that is exposure. The liking itself is nothing.

Now, anyone at all can like my pages or follow me on Twitter. Any exposure is good, right? But I have particular rules for following back on Twitter, and on Facebook, I’ll like a page only if it’s interesting to me. Or, well, okay, a close friend or colleague.

Look at your shares—how are those doing? Because that’s where the exposure comes from. Be honest. Like what you like, because you like it. It’s the same thing as going to a conference, planning to sell books, and doing “trades,” where you buy someone’s book because he bought yours. A neverending circle.

I get invites every day to like pages, but I seldom do, simply because I can’t keep up with I’ve got now—particularly those pages whose owners still think that social media is real time and they can check in a post and comment once a week, if that. You know the ones, who comment on a week-old post that everyone else has long forgotten about. And, too, the ones that I’m simply not interested in; why would I care about a “local business” in Timbuktu? My liking them, virtually, will do little to nothing for that business.

So be selective with invites, events, and likes. You’ll cut down clutter on your newsfeed and shave off some time in your social media promotions. Remember, all the marketing you do, particularly online, should be aimed at the ONE reader. Narrow it down and do everything you can to pull in that ONE reader. Like the pages they like, post about the things they like and are interested in—this is what will increase your sales and the effectiveness of your online promotion.