The Ad Man Answers #86

Thursday + Gregory Huffstutter = The Ad Man Answers

Over the past few years, the Ad Man has interviewed multiple ex-Advertising professionals that have crossed over to the world of fiction. 

Now we’re expanding to authors that didn’t come from the Advertising world, but have embarked upon their own marketing adventures.

We begin with Mark Terry, a terrific and prolific author and blogger, who balances a fiction career with being a writer/editor for technical journals.  Mark’s latest release, THE FALLEN, is the third in his series featuring Homeland-Security troubleshooter Derek Stillwater.  He currently lives in Michigan with his wife, two sons, and a chocolate lab named Frodo.

So, Mark, before your fiction career, your background was in microbiology and public health... do you now feel like you've earned an honorary marketing degree?  Was the pressure to publicize and self-market your books something you anticipated before selling your first novel?  Do you approach that aspect of the business with excitement or resignation?

 I suppose I do sort of feel like I’ve earned an honorary marketing degree. Certainly I’ve read — and written — a lot about marketing over the last ten years or so. In addition to everything I’ve learned about marketing my books, I’ve written many, many articles about marketing, most of them aimed at physicians and how to market their medical practices. There’s a fair amount of crossover, so it’s been an education. 

Although I suspect all writers, or most writers, think they understand the pressure to market their own work after it’s published, I think when the reality sets in they find themselves in over their head. I’ve worked with a couple different publishers now and with different publicists, some in-house, some I’ve hired, some hired by my publisher, and I’ve done a lot on my own, and I can safely say that everyone’s skill level and enthusiasm varies a lot.  What can be puzzling is sometimes the publisher’s marketing people don’t seem to do much.  Sometimes they do.  My suspicion is they’re all overworked and understaffed and the amount of promotion you get tends to reflect the publisher’s overall support of you — so if you aren’t getting any, they may not be all that supportive or optimistic about your work.  And that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’m afraid I tend to approach self-marketing with resignation rather than enthusiasm.  Granted, resignation now is a vast improvement over how I used to approach it.  I accept now that it needs to be done, plus I’ve tried a lot of different things and I have a better idea now of what works (for me) and what doesn’t.  Also, when you have a publisher who’s really willing to help you with this, it becomes a lot easier and more effective.  And that’s where I am with my current publisher, Oceanview Publishing.  They’re terrific.

You've experimented with book signings, direct mail, public speaking, eNewsletters, contests... which effort do you feel had the best ROI on your book sales?  

Probably the blog tour, in terms of my own efforts. It exposes you to a lot of different readers and if they’re interested, they visit your site or even take a link directly to an online bookstore.  I still think positive reviews make a huge difference.  The publicist for my current publisher was very aggressive in getting review copies out to reviewers, particularly for online review sites, and reviews have been pretty uniformly glowing for THE FALLEN, and as a result, sales have been positive.

 

What other media forms -- like online banners -- have you not tried, but would give a shot if upfront cost wasn't an issue?

I think there’s some real potential for ads in program books at book conference events — like ThrillerFest, Bouchercon, or Mystery Writers of America events. I’m not sure how much impact going to those things has on marketing — I generally have a much better time if I go to enjoy the cons and hang out with writers — but if you’ve got 2,000 rabid readers in one place and you advertise your book in a program that they all see a million times a day for a couple days, it’s bound to make some sort of impression.  And I think banner ads on the ITW Report might make a difference, too, although it’s hard to say without any metrics at my fingertips.  Banner ads have changed the world of advertising, but an awful lot of people ignore them and don’t click through.

 

If your publisher gave you $20K to create your own book-marketing campaign, how would you break out the budget? 

 Hmmm.  I’d have to really think that through in detail if it actually happened, but I think I’d put a fairly good-sized chunk into a travel budget for a fairly focused book tour.  That is to say, okay, Michigan’s fairly easy.  Now, what metropolitan areas could you visit and do a lot of booksignings at that wouldn’t eat up all the money?  New York City area?  California?  East Coast?  Or would I want to try going on the road ala JA Konrath and just visit as many bookstores as I possibly could over a specific time period. With that kind of money to pay for gas and motels, etc., I could probably hit several hundred bookstores in the Midwest over a fairly short period of time.  I’d want some of it to go to at least one con plus an ad, as mentioned earlier.  For my last release, my publisher sent out a lot of review copies.  I think it might be worthwhile to expand that, to getting several hundred review copies and press kits out to reviewers at major markets.

 

For your last release, THE FALLEN, you embarked on an online blog tour.  How many blogs did you visit during the launch period?  What impact did you see to your website traffic, book sales, Amazon ranking, guest-speaker requests, etc?

I visited over 20 blogs and it boosted my website traffic significantly.  I started the tour in late March and saw a huge jump over February’s page loads.  In April I had 18,135 page loads with 6,855 unique visitors.  In May, when the tour was basically over, it dropped a lot — 10,049 page loads and 5,282 unique visitors — but May and June sustained at higher metrics than before the blog tour.  July appears low because this report was pulled during the first week.

 

I don’t have any metrics on book sales or Amazon ranking.  I used to obsess over Amazon ranking, but I got over it.  A sale of 2 or 3 books in an 8-hour period on Amazon can make your ranking jump about 30,000, so it’s hard to get a handle on how meaningful it is.  It depends a lot on who else is being sold that day.  Most bestseller lists, but especially the Amazon lists, have more to do with sales velocity than sales volume.  That is to say, if you sell 10 books in one day you might be a bestseller on an Amazon list, but to get onto the New York Times Bestseller List you might need 5,000 sales (or orders, which is a different topic) over a week spread out over a whole slew of bookstores.  But overall I’d say the blog tour had a major impact.

 

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Thanks, Mark!  Next column, we’ll return with Part 2 of our chat where Mark talks about eBooks, blogging, and being an accused Debbie Downer.

Gregory Huffstutter has been punching Ad Agency timecards for over a dozen years, working on accounts like McDonald's, KIA Motors, Suzuki Automotive, AAA, and the San Diego Padres. His first mystery, KATZ CRADLE is on submission while he's working on the sequel. The first 100 pages of his novel are linked here. For general advertising questions, leave a comment or send e-mail to katz @ gregoryhuffstutter dot com with 'Ask The Ad Man' in the subject line.