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Without an obvious target market or news hook, new fiction can get lost in the sea of novels published every year, no matter how well written it may be.

Successfully Marketing Fiction in the 21st Century is a step-by-step guide that’s jam-packed with proven tips and ground-breaking strategies to make your novel a sales success. 

Excerpt

Camouflage:  Now that you have a book that reads like popular science fiction or romance or whatever your genre is, make sure that’s obvious to the casual observer. Big publishers ensure this as a matter of course, and small presses usually do pretty well too. Their experienced book designers, artists and marketing teams create the standard look and feel.  But if you’re self-published or a POD author, it’s up to you. Don’t expect your POD publisher to mention ANY of this.

Why must your book look, feel, and smell like everyone else’s? Because readers decide to buy based on a large number of subconscious signals a book sends them. They’ve been trained by publishers to expect certain things. They’ve also been conditioned by those same publishers to believe that any book worth reading will be published by them. We know that’s not true, of course, but a book that says “self-published“ to the consumer also says “amateur.” The same applies to booksellers.  Your focus should be to make your book look as professional as possible, from the layout of the words inside to the cover art you choose.

Of course, you’ll need to look, sound, and act like a professional writer too, but that should not be camouflage. That’s what you are!

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Among my own marketing efforts is an e-mail newsletter that I send to just about anyone willing to accept it on a regular basis.  The most common reply I get to my newsletter is generally something like “Damn, boy, when do you sleep?”

I do spend a good deal of my free time marketing my fiction. Most weekends I’m someplace signing books. That’s because I’ve learned that people want to take away a piece of the author with them when they leave and, for me, personal appearances are fun and profitable.

Your level of success will depend largely on how much time you invest. I view my writing as my hobby and I don’t think I spend more time on it than a lot of other fellows spend on fishing, bowling, or role-playing games.

But, you say, “I want to spend my time telling stories, not selling books.” Hey, me too. But I’ve spoken to a number of commercially published writers and what I learned from them has changed my view of this business. Most mystery authors are expected to “drop” a novel a year. This all makes good marketing sense. Nothing drives the sales of a first book as much as the publication of a second or third novel. Publishers give these authors a set schedule that only leaves four months for writing and another four months for the editing process.

What I find most interesting is that these writers are expected to spend the same amount of time, four months out of the year, on a circuit of book signings, conference appearances, and television/radio interviews. In other words, they are expected to spend as much time marketing their books as writing them. I looked at that model and decided that if it’s so popular among the big publishers, there must be something to it. I now spend roughly as much time on marketing as I do on writing. If you want to push your sales to impressive levels, I suggest you do the same. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also very rewarding. And I’ve found a lot of it to be great fun.