Friday, September 04, 2009
Marketing fiction on the Internet
Well, Beneath Gray Skies is starting to sell a few copies, and when I say “a few”, I mean a few. It’s more than the number of thumbs on one hand, for sure, and I wasn’t expecting enormous sales in the thousands. But there’s not even any record of even one being sold through Amazon Japan - I would have thought at least one SWET member might have bought a copy (sniff!). Maybe they have, and the Amazon sales returns just take a long time to come in. Hope so, anyway.
Of course, without a commercial publisher, all the marketing has to be done by the author - this is one of the drawbacks of independent publishing. But so many of the little tricks mentioned in the “get your book out there” advice on the Web are useless if you live outside your main target market. “Get on your local radio talk show”, for example. Useless here in Japan. Kathleen Morikawa’s book is excellent, but many of the promotional tips seem a little more directed to non-fiction than fiction.Yes, there are local English-language newspapers and periodicals - and I have yet to send review copies to them, since the price of buying copies and getting them shipped over has been prohibitive up to now, and it would hardly have been worth it, compared with the potential local sales (if the current figure is anything to go by!). However, Lulu has reviewed its shipping prices somewhat, and I can now actually get the US trade edition for significantly less than the Amazon Japan price, so I may well end up ordering a batch for review, etc. and even have a few left over for book events or whatever[1].
Many of the textbooks and gurus on Internet marketing talk about improving your Google rank. Now for non-fiction books, this makes perfect sense - after all, if you are looking at (say) repairing and customizing your 1972 Chevy and you need the book to help you, then you look for the relevant terms, and hopefully, Chester Bludgett’s Make that ‘72 Chevy really SHINE! pops out of the search engine. Even if it’s a self-improvement or health-related or inspirational (Linda Whelkclencher’s How the Spinach Diet and Meditation Cured My Agoraphobia) - and these are some of the most popular genres in self-publishing right now - a high Google ranking will be a great boost to awareness, and maybe even to sales.
But who goes window-shopping for fiction? Especially when it’s a slightly off-the-wall subject like mine (alternate history, a 1920s Confederacy, airships, Nazis, etc. etc.). Unless you knew such a book existed, how would you ever go about looking for it? Well, the answer seems to be linking, but getting your way onto other people’s sites seems to be tricky. I have a few mentions out there, and the site describing the book gets several hits from these each day, but if the links only live on other low-ranked fiction sites, this doesn’t help.
So you can take your book to special interest groups, like (in my case) alternate history groups, airship enthusiast sites and so on. But people don’t like comments on their sites that are too obviously there to sell a product or service. So it takes time to be tactful and ease your way into sites (SWET, for example, has pretty much zero tolerance for such comments, even when they’re on target).
Even when they get to your site, they have to be persuaded to buy your book. I could start selling from the site, I suppose - it’s not something I really intended doing when I started out, and it’s probably better for me to do what I have done - put up links to the book’s pages on the various international booksellers. Is there a better way?
I knew that marketing my book was going to be the hard part of self-publishing - and I knew it wasn’t going to be just a matter of building a pretty Web site and watching the orders flood in. But it does seem to me that fiction is somewhat of a rara avis when it comes to sales on the Internet - the books are just a little too expensive to be an impulse buy, you can’t kick the tires (i.e. read the product specs) and though you can provide excerpts, you can’t really provide a demo like the software makers do.
So - I am genuinely looking for ideas and support to get the book out there into people’s hands. I still have enough faith in the book and the writing to want it to go there (apparently, my 13-year-old nephew thinks it’s a great story, and it’s started him writing his own book!). Comments on how to market (including “you’re doing all this completely wrong”) are welcome.
[1] If you think you’d like to order a copy through me, I think I can deliver within Japan for ¥2000 - Amazon price is about ¥2600. I guess it will take 2-3 weeks to deliver. I can take payment by Paypal and you can contact me through the Web site. Hey, if you order this way, I might even sign the copies I sell to you!
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