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If you're marketing books on
the Internet you're looking for an audience of potential
readers. You want to tell those potential readers about the
book and why they should buy it. This is not exactly selling
the book. In the offline world, marketing and selling are
separated by the fact that the marketer promotes the book to
the right audience and entices them to visit a retailer, and
the retailer makes the sale. The retailer may have to do
nothing more than set the book out for display. But many a
bookseller has had to pitch books or make recommendations
based on customer questions in order to sell books.
On the Internet, the marketing and sales processes
become mingled. Once you find the right audience and tell
them about the book, you have to convince them to make the
purchase. The ease with which a customer can purchase and
receive a book goes a long way toward determining whether a
sale occurs. Some people will go the extra mile, but they
are not going to make or break a book's sales.
If
you're an author trying to promote your book on the
Internet, you need to focus on three marketing goals:
finding your audience, approaching your audience, and
informing your audience. If you are selling books directly
yourself, then you also have to make the sales pitch and
close the sale. That makes your job harder but not
impossible.
Finding your audience on the Internet is
not the same thing as making it easy for people to find you.
You need to identify resources where you can initiate
contact with potential readers. The available resources
include Web sites, Web forums, mailing lists, Web
advertisements and email advertisements, and news groups.
"Approaching your audience" translates to
advertising. And you are advertising two things: yourself
and your book. You have to advertise yourself because you
need to build up name visibility. You have to advertise your
book because people don't have any idea it exists, or that
it might be something they want to read. Name visibility
(for your book) is important because it lends your book
credibility and gives people a reason to look for your Web
site.
Informing your audience about your book goes
well beyond building a Web site and submitting it to search
engines and directories. If you have promoted a book offline
then you know authors need to get interviews, reviews in
newspapers and magazines, talk show visits, book signings,
convention and conference panels, readings, and advertising
in print media. Promoting a book is a time-consuming and
expensive process. Many people are turning to the Internet
to cut corners, costs, and time. You need to understand
right now it still takes hard work and patience.
The jury is still out on this
issue. Entire fortunes have been bet upon the Internet and
lost because the business community is still trying to
figure out what it takes to succeed online. Some people
have, in fact, made their fortunes on the Internet. There is
always someone who gets rich in every field. But if history
is any indication of who the most likely online winners will
be, keep in mind that most of the gold rush fortunes were
made by the people selling shovels and pans. The miners
usually ended up broke.
The publishing world is in a
mad scramble to get onto the Internet for many reasons, but
the potential for getting rich is not one of them.
Protecting intellectual property rights and developing
effective marketing tools are the two chief reasons large
publishers and authors are now involved with the Internet.
The Internet is fast becoming the most popular entertainment
medium of all time. And in the world of books, promotion now
includes the Internet.
A traditional marketing
campaign takes advantage of the extensive industry of book
stores which actually stock books. The publisher (or the
author) can send out promotional materials to help
booksellers inform their customers about the books in stock.
But booksellers don't want to promote books they don't
offer. They usually don't mind taking special orders, but an
online bookseller can promote each and every book it has
access to with a dedicated Web page.
So, the real
challenge with marketing anything on the Internet is that
there are now over 3,000,000,000 indexed Web pages and the
number is growing. To complicate your challenge, pages from
online book stores are now being filtered out of search
results by the larger search engines. So not only are there
more pages than ever competing for the attention of only a
few hundred million surfers, the pages an author most needs
to be seen are less likely to be found at all.
By
itself, a web page is not an effective marketing tool.
Virtually no one will see it even if it's listed in many
search engines. The odds against any Web page being viewed
more than 10,000 times a year are pretty high. And when you
think about how many books people pass by in a book store as
they browse the shelves, the number of people who have to
see a book just to sell one copy is very high.
Internet marketing depends on a complex and evolving
selection of advertising services: banner ads, email ads,
press releases, and more. But even the professionals cannot
agree on how effective these marketing tools are. The
advertising services provide conflicting data on who is
seeing the ads and how effective they are, the press
releases are largely ignored by the news media, and so on.
Online marketers have the thankless task of building brand
recognition in a medium where they cannot agree on what
constitutes a "brand". So the lowly self-promoting author is
really caught in a wild storm.
There are many myths about online
book promotions. Sadly, professional authors and publishers
from the traditional publishing industry are helping to
spread the myths. Their ignorance is being accepted as
credible knowledge. In a news group devoted to writing, one
science fiction author told people that ebooks don't sell,
that the best sellers have "downloads in the hundreds".
Nothing could be further from the truth. That is not to say
eBooks sell as many copies as printed books. They don't.
Eventually they may, but right now there is a great
disparity between eBook sales and print book sales, and
though the gap is closing it's not closing as fast as many
people would like. Nonetheless, the average well-promoted
eBook is expected to generate sales in the low thousands,
not "in the hundreds".
It is easy to distribute an
eBook on the Internet. In fact, if you want downloads in the
tens of thousands, just offer your eBook for free. Free
eBooks are downloaded approximately 20 times more often than
those offered for sale. The inconveniences of eBooks have
been the chief reason for why they are not breaking into the
New York Times Bestsellers lists. Many people don't want to
read books on a computer screen (although most people who
spend 20 hours a week online read the equivalent of several
books every week). But just because people download your
free ebook doesn't mean you'll accomplish your goals. One
doctor reported that, after generating 20,000 downloads of a
free eBook he hoped would promote an eBook he was selling,
he had not realized one sale of the second book. So, you
need to understand what you are getting into, and what
people are looking for on the Net (in a phrase: free stuff).
Are there any success stories in eBooks? Sure. Leta
Nolan Childers' The Best Laid Plans, a Romance novel, sold
more than 16,000 copies within a matter of months. Childers
is a well-known syndicated writer, however, with a large
readership. And, of course, most everyone has heard about
Stephen King's The
Plant. He sold more than 500,000 copies of
the first part of this online novel in six installments. The
publishing community became divided over whether the book
was a success after King announced a two-year hiatus on the
project. And, of course, he is Stephen King. His earlier
eText release, "Riding the Bullet", was offered both for
free and for pay and it made a couple hundred thousand
dollars. Another major author to step into the waters of
eBook sales is Suspense/Mystery author Frederick
Forsyth.
By contrast, Scott Adams
claimed to have the top-selling eBook for 2001 with God's
Debris, which sold over 4500 copies. However, Adams also
claimed that "it's rare for any eBook to crack a thousand
(sales)". He did not seem to be aware of Leta Nolan
Childers's previous sales record. Some eBook publishers
claim an average of about 1,000 copies per year of annual
ePublications. And in the middle of 2002, eTextbooks started
earning mention in the news media.
The most
conservative estimates of eBook sales put their revenues at
something like $9,000,000 for the year 2000. Conservative
projections show an increase to $414,000,000 by 2004. Print book sales through traditional
outlets are measured in billions (9 zeros) of dollars
annually. So eBook sales have a way to go before they really
start threatening print sales. But if $9,000,000 was brought
in by eBooks in 2000, where did the money go? Who is selling
the books?
The problem with tracking eBook sales is
that there are four sources for eBooks: self-published
authors, small eBook publishers operating over the Internet,
publishing services providers (vanity presses), and
traditional presses. Rarely does anyone report actual sales
figures, and there is no central clearing house for
information. The traditional presses tend to report
percentage increases in sales over previous years. For
example, in 2002, McGraw-Hill reported their eBook sales
were "up 55% over the same period last year". Well, is that
55% of 1,000 sales or 55% of 100,000 sales? It makes a
difference.
The makers of the Palm
microcomputer reported over 180,000 eBook sales for
2001. Those
sales, in their proprietary format, are an aggregate number
for ALL eBook titles sold in Palm format. Probably, major
publishers and distributors like Palm sold in total fewer
than 1,000,000 eBooks in 2001. And yet, those sales must be
regarded as only the tip of the iceberg, since no one is
collecting data on the thousands of eBooks being sold by
individuals and smaller companies. But who is really making
any money through eBook sales?
Discounting the fact
that most eBooks will sell at least a few copies, a lot of
the money is being made by businesses. That is, technical
manuals and "How to make money..." books sold as eBooks over
the Web generate a lot of money. Technical manuals have a
pretty limited market, but the "How to make money..."
industry has always made a bundle off gullible readers who
answer these ads in magazines. There are more and more
people people "How to make money..." books off the Internet
every year. And eBooks satisfy that immediate gratification
demand all that much more quickly.
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If it's not apparent by now who is selling the
most eBooks, it should be. People with name-recogniton and
established readerships are selling the most eBooks. By
extension, the people with the greatest name-recognition and
established readerships are selling the most books online
(and online book sales total more than $2,000,000,000
annually -- they comprise more than 40% of all online
purchases).
Don't despair. Although your
chances of duplicating Stephen King's success in today's
market are virtually non-existant, you can still work toward
achieving a measure of success. It doesn't matter if you are
promoting an eBook, a print-on-demand book, a book you've
printed up yourself, or just a title that isn't getting much
of a promotional boost from a traditional (or an online)
publisher. There are things you can do to help your online
book sales.
First, you need to build some name
visibility. Name visibility differs from name recognition in
that recognition is established by visibility. Or, look at
it this way. Stephen King has name recognition because
people know who he is. Edward Mulberry III only has name
visibility because his name is mentioned on this Web site.
After you leave here, you'll forget his name unless you
encounter it over and over again elsewhere.
For
example, there were times when no one knew who Stephen King
and Frederick Forsyth were. They achieved name recognition
through building name visibility. Of course, they are good
authors. Good writing will get more and better word-of-mouth
referrals than bad or mediocre writing. You are the worst
judge of your own writing abilities. You are at the mercy of
the cold and impartial marketplace. If people don't like the
way you write they are not going to recomend your book to
others. No matter how well you feel you write, if other
people disagree with you, you need to get back to work and
improve your skills. Heck, even if you are good, improve
your skills anyway.
Building name visibility on the
Internet is not easy. You have to really work at it, and it
may require more time and effort (though less money) than
building name visibility through the traditional means
available to authors. You can begin by participating in news
groups, mailing lists, and Web-based forums. Unfortunately,
once you begin posting to these discussion forums, you run
the very real risk of encountering childish, narrow-minded
people who will attack you if you don't agree with their
points of view. And sadly, many so-called professional
authors and publishers are among the first to deride people
who don't agree with their ideas. These are the very people
whom new writers turn to for help. So pick your communities
carefully and prepare for the worst. If you're lucky, no one
will attack you, but eventually most people get involved in
flame wars.
Name visibility also comes from
providing content to Web sites. Not your Web site, but other
people's Web sites. Professional authors balk at the idea of
providing free content. They have attacked the idea in more
than one forum. On the one hand, they are making a living
from their writing. They would not expect a housepainter to
paint houses for free, so why should anyone expect them to
write for free? That's true. But unfortunately if you're
serious about building name visibility on the Internet you
have to accept that most comercial Web sites are not making
money. They cannot afford to pay people to write for them,
beyond their own staffs.
Yes, there once were
thousands of sites which do pay. But these sites pretty much
died out with the dot-com meltdown. Some sites do continue
to pay, and there are ocassional new startups. There is one
rule on the Internet that professional writers haven't yet
come to grips with: people do not pay you to promote your
Web site on their Web site.
You have to sort your
priorities. If you're just going to write for paying
markets, then there are some on the Web but they come and
go. And the competition for their money is fierce. You'll be
going up against experienced professionals who have a better
shot at getting paid than you do. By excluding free content
from your list of marketing tools, you virtually sign off on
99% of potential marketing opportunities. You stack the odds
against building name visibility for yourself. Think long
and hard before you do that. You've made the decision to
market a book on the Internet, and the rules are different
here.
And yet, a desire to build name visibility
doesn't mean you should answer the call for free fiction
every time someone announces a new Web site. Free content
doesn't have to consist of stories or long How-to articles.
Consider writing letters to editors of popular Web sites,
where mentioning your book is relevant to the topic.
Consider writing book reviews for popular online stores.
Think about contributing lists and tidbits to newsletters or
other services.
Anything where you can add the plug,
"Michael Martinez is the author of Visualizing Middle-earth
and Parma Endorion" or "Michael Martinez,
http://www.xenite.org/" is helpful. People will notice.
Write guest editorials, even if they are for free.
Don't be an unpaid snob. Make yourself a visible writer and
don't tell people whether you got paid for that review or
not. In some cases it's obvious you've been paid. In other
cases it's not. But it's no one's business if you have or
haven't been paid. (As an aside, many paying contracts don't
even grant you name visibility -- there is a lot of
work-for-hire writing on the Internet. I know this from
experience.)
Name visibility can be achieved by
helping to edit a section of a popular Web site. You may get
nothing but a lot of compliments in way of payment, but you
are putting yourself out there where people will see your
name.
Name visibility is also achieved by some fan
fiction authors. That is not to say you should start writing
fan fiction to build name visibility, but if you already
write fan fiction, you should consider writing it under your
own name. Xena fan fiction writer Melissa Good built up name recognition
while writing for fun. She went on to publish a book,
Tropical Storm, which has performed well (more than 1,000
copies were sold within a matter of months when the book was
first published in 1998). Missy didn't write to get rich, or
even to sell a book. She just loved to write. But she kept
writing and eventually she had the readership she needed to
make the transition to being paid for writing.
Do
you need a Web site to market your book? Absolutely. It's a
necessary part of the process. But if you haven't got the
name recognition of Stephen King, you cannot stop at
creating a Web site. Traditionally published authors have
huge marketing machines working for them. Even a
non-performing book should sell a few thousand titles before
it's done. The Internet may help the author of a low-selling
book move more copies, but only if the author builds name
visibility.
The Internet is not really an
alternative to other means of promoting books. If you're
self-promoting and you have no money, the Internet may be
your only option. But once you start getting some money from
your book you need to look at other means of promotion. The
Internet is still being built. The most effective promotion
for Web sites is still offline promotion: print and
broadcast advertisement, including URLs on business cards,
stationary, brochures, flyers, etc.
The first step is to create your
Web site. Check out the Web design and
promotion tutorials at ePubnews.com for more information about this.
You have to give people reasons to visit your Web site,
which means you have to design it so that it ranks well in
search engines for important (popular) search terms, you
have to join Webrings, and you have to promote your Web site
in your signature if you participate in discussion forums.
As part of the process of building traffic, sign up
for a free banner exchange (or two) on your Web site. But
don't submit banners to the exchange until you have earned
at least 1,000 credits. 2,000 is better. You want to come
out with a bang, not a whimper. The more often people see
your banner, the more likely they are to remember it. And if
your name is on your banner, all the better. But you need to
make sure that banner is seen all over the place when it
first starts showing. And also be sure to target where the
banner is displayed, so that it is more likely to reach
potential readers.
Consider purchasing banner ads,
but don't do so without doing careful research. Target the
banner ads to specific Web sites which address the audience
you are approaching. And you may want to wait until you have
earned some money from your book to do this. Banner ads can
be purchased for as little as $50.00 for 5,000 (rates vary).
Some people can easily afford to lose $50.00, but that's
still a big expense for many of us. Be sure you understand
what the banner is supposed to do: build your name
visibility. Don't worry about click-through rates. Chances
are only 1 in 200 that people will click on that banner.
You're not going to make money by buying banner ads. The big
corporations aren't so don't expect to do it yourself.
Consider purchasing keyword placements at services
like Overture and Google. You only pay for click-throughs, but it's
important to pick a good keyword, title, and description to
pre-qualify click-throughs. You don't want to pay to have
disinterested people click through to your site. And, again,
wait until you've made some money from your book to
reinvest. And if Amazon is still selling book exposures,
consider paying them (but choose your keywords VERY
carefully -- if they are too broad, you'll burn through a
LOT of money quickly and ineffectively).
Any
promotion you engage in should always mention three things:
your name, your book's title, and what the subject or
category of the book is. Whether you pay for the promotion,
get paid for it, or just do it for free, if you have an
opportunity to discretely tell people you have published a
book, do so. Even if you cannot include the URL of your Web
site, make sure they know your name and the book's title so
they can search for it. No one else is going to tell them
about you and your book. You have to do that yourself.
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