A Changing Marketing Mindset

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

My firstborn will be leaving home for college in a couple of weeks and it’s put me in a reflective mood.  This is unusual for me, since I’m ordinarily not even reflective at the end of the year.

My first traditionally-published book was Pretty is as Pretty Dies in 2009.  At the time, Kindle wasn’t even really making a ripple in my consciousness.  I had an author friend of mine at a signing to tell me that he had a Sony ereader and it seemed sort of Star Trekkish to me. I couldn’t imagine wanting to read on one or what the potential benefits might be.

I’d thought the same thing about personal computers when I became introduced to them in the 80s. The contraption looked like an unwieldy typewriter to me and I couldn’t conceive how it could be useful to me.  Then the internet came into play and suddenly computers were life-changing for me in every way…ingraining themselves into my routines and habits.

Before my first book came out, I had an actual teleconference with the publisher, my editor, a book designer, and in-house marketing people on cover design and a marketing strategy! This was 2009 for Midnight Ink.  This never happened again for me, with any other imprint or publisher.

My feelings toward marketing went through several different iterations.  There was the moment when I realized the burden of promo was actually on me, not the publisher.  I obediently jumped into action…sort of.  I did the suggested blogging and social media, even signing up for a course on how to get started.  But I retained a sense of shyness around readers and decided to stay within my comfort zone of sharing resources and interacting with writers.  I remember in early 2010 I was at a conference and a fellow author said, “Penguin has got to love you.  You’ve got so many followers on Twitter!”  And I said, “I don’t think they have the slightest idea that I’m even on social media.”

By the time my imprint, Obsidian/NAL had a presence on Twitter, I was about 20,000 followers ahead of them.  And then they were very aware of social media and its use in promo.  I was asked to retweet them or plug my book.  This made me uncomfortable because it wasn’t my M.O. on Twitter.  I don’t promote there. I reluctantly sent a couple out, but the whole time I was thinking…why are they even on Twitter?  For the most part, that’s not where their readers are found.  They’re on Pinterest and Facebook.  Even I knew that, and I’m not big on either platform.  The reason I’m on Twitter is because that’s where writers and industry people are.

So there started to be, for me, a little tension there.  Not ever between my editor and me—she was always fantastic. But between me and the publisher.  I felt a lack of support in the marketing arena and then a sort of resentment that I’d had to learn every darned thing myself…the blogging,  copywriting, social media, finding authors to blurb me.  Even searching up reviewers was sometimes on my plate when I’d end up with a box of ARCs. I hooked up with email loops to figure out what I was doing. I signed up for classes, studied blogs,  read articles, and lurked a lot.

In response to what I was reading on everything from traditionally-published author email loops and boards to Yahoo Groups to blogs, I did market the new release in 2010.  With some reluctance since I had just accepted an additional series with another imprint…bringing my total to three.  I went on a book tour with a group of trad-published authors.  I participated in blog tours and giveaways.  I emailed people I knew about the release. I went to reader conferences like Malice Domestic (photo above).  I felt my efforts did little and were personally draining.

Then I had an epiphany in early 2011. I had way too many releases to treat each one as a major event.  This realization also served to make me feel alienated from other trad-published writers. Some of them also had multiple releases in a year, but they worked the system really well…knocking themselves out with countdowns, giveaways, blog tours, and networking with other authors for coverage/promo/Facebook mentions.

I couldn’t do it.  But not doing it made me feel guilty because the other writers were doing it.  I came across an article in a now-defunct blog that stated: author publicity makes better sense than book publicity.  I even blogged about it at the time. I decided that I should simply be working on making myself visible and accessible to readers.  Continue doing what I enjoyed, build my profile online, and stop doing things I didn’t enjoy.

That worked really well for me, too.  But this year, four years later, I’ve decided I could stand to be more thoughtful in my outreach to readers.  Because, to be perfectly honest, readers had not factored into my strategy at all.  And, with 18 books out, it was about time to start targeting them a little more. This year I’ve tweaked my book description and keywords, built up my email list, sent newsletters and set up autoresponders, created Facebook ads, and explored translation.  But I’ve still made the time to write several books.  It’s helped that I’ve set myself timers when learning and implementing marketing strategies.

I’m sure I’ll adapt and change and hopefully grow more as time goes on.  But right now I like the balance I’ve created.

Have you changed your opinion of marketing?