Episode 186: Five Book Marketing Tactics That Readers Hate

In this week's episode, we take a look at five book marketing tactics that readers hate, along with five ones they usually enjoy. I also take a look at my advertising results for January 2024.

For this Coupon of the Week we're doing one of my older books, specifically the entire TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS series. If you use this coupon at my Payhip store, you can get 50% all the ebooks on the entire series:

WINTERTOWER

The coupon code is valid until February 22nd, 2024. So if you're looking for something to read, we've got you covered!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 186 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February the 2nd, 2024. Today we're going to talk about five marketing tactics that readers hate. We'll also discuss my ad results for January 2024 and have an update on my current writing projects and have it a reader question or two in the mix.

As a side note, this is the first time ever I am recording this podcast on Windows 11. I finally upgraded my desktop computer to Windows 11 in an effort to solve a driver problem that I've been having. It was something with my video driver where it had stopped receiving or the manufacturer had stopped putting out updates for Windows 10 but Windows 11 drivers were available. I've been putting that off for like two years, but I finally thought, well, nothing else has worked. Let's try and upgrade this desktop to Windows 11 and I'm pleased to report that it seems to have in fact fixed my video driver problem, so I am pleased with that. Hopefully it won't totally screw up the recording of this podcast, but I can see the file increasing in size as I record this, so I assume that it is in fact being successfully recorded.

First up, let's do Coupon of the Week and this time we're doing Coupon of the Week for one of my older series, specifically the entire Tower of Endless World Series now that we finally have those up on Payhip. The problem was I had created those ebooks way back in 2012 when the software wasn't quite as nice, so I wasn't happy with the formatting, so it was a side project over a week or two to rip apart the formatting and get them all uploaded and you know looking nice, but that's done. If you use this coupon at my Payhip store you can get 50% off the ebooks in the entire series and that is WINTERTOWER and that will be WINTERTOWER, again, that's WINTERTOWER and you can find that in the show notes, along with links to the ebooks on the store. This coupon code will be valid until February 22nd, 2024. So if you're looking for something to read, we have got you covered.

Now here is where we are at with my current writing projects. I am almost done with the Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, the second book in My Sevenfold Sword Online Lit RPG series. I just have a couple more scenes to write in the last chapter and then I need to write the epilogue and then the rough draft will be done. It will be about 90,000 words or so. I haven't decided if it's going to be a long series yet or not, because as I've mentioned before on this show, the first book did not do as well as I'd hoped, and with a year's worth of sales data, now I think it's pretty conclusive the market for LitRPGs is pretty much entirely in Kindle Unlimited and audiobook.

So I'm hoping to have a audiobook for this soon after it comes out and I'm going to see how the book does and after the first 30 days I will decide whether it will be a trilogy with everything wrapping up with the third book, or if it's going to be a longer series, if it's viable to continue writing it, or if I should just wrap it up with the trilogy and move on. So that will be determined within 30 days after the book is out.

After Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is published, my next main project will be Ghost in the Veils and I'm actually 2,000 words into that. That will be the second book in my Ghost Armor series and that will hopefully be out before April because April is when the recording slot for that to become an audiobook is scheduled and I really, really need to have it done by that. I'm also about 22,000 words into Wizard Thief, which is the sequel to Half-Elven Thief back in December and that will come out sometime after Ghost in the Veils, probably not that long after Ghost in the Veils, because I'm pretty far into that book.

Since I mentioned before December 2023 was my best month ever for self-published audio, I should probably mention where I'm at with audiobooks. Right now, recording for Shield of Storms is underway and hopefully that should be out sometime in March, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects.

00:04:10 Reader Question

Now we have a reader question this week from Nico, who asks: Hi, Jonathan. I have read several of your books on Audible (I suppose means he's listened to several books on Audible). Now I'm starting the Frostborn saga. Some time ago I committed a mistake and read the Dragontiarna saga without reading the previous sagas, now I'm starting Frostborn, but it is constantly mentioning Ridmark’s, previous adventures and I cannot find any books of this and I really don't want to make the same mistake as Dragontiarna.

Well, first thing, thanks for listening, Nico. I'm glad you're enjoying all those audiobooks. I think what Nico is asking is what is the proper order to listen or read the Ridmark and Andomhaim stories because it seems like he started with Dragontiarna and then went back to the older series. I have to admit, when I wrote these I had in mind that they would each be stand alone and readers could read the series or whatever order they like, but I found in practice after almost 11 years of doing this, that that is not the case and people prefer to read everything in order.

The proper order of the series is first the Frostborn series, second the Sevenfold Sword series, third the Dragontiarna series, fourth the Dragonskull series, and now fifth the Shield War series, of which Shield of Storms is the first book. Anything that Ridmark mentions about his previous adventures early in the Frostborn series is not something I've actually written. It's all like a back story to his character at that point that I haven't actually written, whereas if you're reading from Ridmark's perspective in Shield of Storms, and he mentions his previous adventures at that point, there's a good chance that this is referencing events that happen like Frostborn or Dragontiarna or Sevenfold Sword. As I mentioned, I did intend for each of these series to be entirely stand alone, but in practice it actually hasn't worked out that way. Though I am grateful that people keep reading them.

00:06:08 January 2024 Ad Results

Now, since it's the start of February and we're a couple days past the end of January, let's see how my ads did for January 2024 because, like it or not, if you're selling something online, digital advertising is an inescapable part of your business model for most people. As usual, I advertised on Facebook, Bookbub, and Amazon. We'll go through that list in that order.

First up, my Facebook ads. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I got back $4.22 for every dollar I spent and 8.5% of the profit came from the audiobooks, which was a big improvement from past months. For the Ghost series, I got back $4.36 for every dollar I spent and 15% of the profit came from the audiobooks, probably because there's a lot more of them.

Next up is the Bookbub ads. I've only been advertising Frostborn there, though I might expand that to include the Silent Order series in February and March. For Frostborn, I got back $6.14 for every dollar I spent, with a whopping 49.9% of the profit from the audio. So I very nearly made more from the Frostborn audiobooks than I did from the ebooks in January 2024.

Now on to Amazon ads. I tend to target Amazon ads for individual books rather than series. In this case, Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire got back $2.05 for every dollar spent, with 44% of the profit coming from the audiobook. Sevenfold Sword: Creation, which I've been advertising in preparation for Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, got back $2.46 for every dollar spent, with 46% of the profit coming from the audiobook. Half-Elven thief, which currently has no audiobook, got back $3.27 for every dollar spent and finally, Silent Order Omnibus One back $15.60 for every dollar spent. I strongly suspect this was an anomaly due to Silent Order: Iron Hand having a big spike in free downloads for the month of January.

So once again, we see that having audiobooks makes it a lot easier to generate a profit on ads, especially if you have a completed audiobook series. Of course, as we all know, the effort and money to get to a completed audiobook series is immense. I suspect that's why AI audio is so alluring to people. Of course, in my opinion, it's a false allure, since I suspect the vast majority of listeners have gone from passively to actively hating AI audio and will actively avoid it, save for circumstances like it's the night before your econ or biology final and you have to drive 12 hours, so you might as well have your phone read the PDF file of your textbook aloud to you, that kind of thing. People do seem to be a bit more forgiving of AI audio in certain nonfiction scenarios like that. But overall, it seems like the listener base for audiobooks still strongly prefers human narrated audiobooks. If you are thinking about doing AI narrated audiobooks, probably should proceed with caution there. So as always, thanks to everyone who bought or listened to my books in the month of January 2024. Since we were just talking about ads, that seems like a good way to segue to our main topic this week: 5 marketing tactics that readers don't like.

00:09:29 Main Topic: 5 Marketing Tactics Readers Don’t Like

As I mentioned earlier in the show, online marketing is an inescapable fact of selling things online. If you are selling anything online, be it books or cosmetics or machine parts or nails or anything else, at some point, you're probably going to have to do some online advertising. However, the point of advertising is not to annoy people. The point of advertising is to introduce your product or service to people who would benefit from using your product, your service, people whose lives would be better for having you as your product or service. As authors, we want to introduce our books to people who will read them and enjoy them and have you know, perhaps the troubles of their lives momentarily lightened as they are able to read a book and enjoy an adventure story and take their mind off their troubles for a little while. That is the purpose of online advertising: to get your books in front of the audience that will appreciate them. Now where this goes wrong is if you are using marketing tactics that are annoying.

We can all think of examples of very annoying marketing tactics. In the Internet age, the pop up ad is one. If you go on the radio, the ads where the guy talks really fast about used cars and then he has a long disclaimer at the end. On TV or Internet videos, those ads for a pharmaceutical product that sounds like the villain from a Doctor Who episode in the ‘70s like Vondacraz, and how the end of the commercial if you take Vondacraz, there's a list of like 40 seconds of side effects, ranging from horrible tortures to death. Those commercials are also annoying. For books specifically, there are different things you can do in marketing that turns out to annoy your readers, which again is defeating the purpose of advertising. The purpose of advertising is to get your book in front of the audience that will benefit from or enjoy from reading the book. It's not to annoy the reader. Annoying the reader is a failure of advertising. So with that in mind, we would, we're going to take a look at five marketing tactics that readers don't like and then five ones that they do like.

So let's start with the five marketing tactics readers don't like, number one among them is when every Tweet/post/newsletter from an author is an ad or promoting the next book. You can all think of examples like that, where you go on an author’s Twitter feed or Instagram feed or Facebook feed and it's nothing but a wall of links advertising in their book. There's no interesting content there, nothing amusing, not even, you know, funny memes. It's just an endless wall of text of links leading to the book and that is both boring and annoying. If you follow an author on social media and then their feed is nothing but “buy my book, buy my book, buy my book” it’s very quickly going to be annoying and you're going to unfollow that author pretty quickly. A subset of this problem is where the author doesn't actually engage with readers on any of these platforms. I get a lot of Facebook comments on my Facebook page and I try to at least like all of them and you know respond to them when appropriate. And so I try to keep up with that. I'm not perfect but you know, I make good faith effort doing it. But if you never engage with anyone on your social media platforms, then what's the point of having a social media platform?

Frequency and aggressiveness of promo is also a huge turn off for readers. Aggressive, in your face sales tactics might work in a very limited number of fields, though I can't think of any of them, and they definitely don't work in books and selling books. If you get too aggressive, that is a huge turn-off for readers and they will go elsewhere. So that is also something to avoid.

Our second marketing tactic that readers don't like our book marketing/ blurbs that don't work. What do we mean by that? One thing is book marketing or a blurb that gives away too much of the plot. Like if you're advertising a murder mystery and the ad gives away the ending, there's really no point in reading the book now, is there? So you will want to avoid that.

Another thing is low energy copy where the book description or the text in the ad is just boring and drags and this is clear evidence that copywriting is a distinct skill from writing interesting fictional prose. So this is why doing a little bit of copywriting and practicing it and maybe taking like a, you know, short course online course on it isn't necessarily the worst idea for an author. Too many cliches strung together as a substitute for book copy, like for example “a sparkly friends to lovers, cozy fall young adult romance for fans of the Gilmore Girls, Happily Ever After guaranteed.” That is just a string of cliches joined together, and that is also boring ad copy. Finally lazy ad copy that doesn't actually reflect the desired audience but just tries to grab the latest buzzwords like “Game of Thrones meets Harry Potter meets The Hunger Games.” What does that even mean? Game of Thrones and Harry Potter and Hunger Games are all very distinct books that are very different from one another. The only remotely tenuous connection between Game of Thrones and Harry Potter is that both had magic, though the magic of Game of Thrones is way different than the magic in Harry Potter and Hunger Games isn't fantasy at all. It's basically dystopian science fiction. So you can see how joining together those different books into “Game of Thrones meets Harry Potter meets Hunger Games” is a very ineffective marketing tactic.

The third ineffective marketing tactic is poorly targeted ads/poor category choices, like a nonfiction book with ads targeted for genre fiction. This used to be a fairly serious problem on Amazon where someone would have the bright idea of putting their, for example, their romance novel in a very specific nonfiction category like custom woodworking. Amazon has a lot of little niche nonfiction categories like that, where there are a lot of specialist nonfiction that tends not to sell very much and only a few people who are interested in their specialist nonfiction. So what happened is like this romance author would put his or her book into specialist woodworking and then, you know, sell 2 copies there and you’re number one in the category. Then this author could go around boasting and saying, “hey, my book is number one in its category in Amazon,” even though it's in totally the wrong category and it's in a category of again specialist nonfiction where you only need to sell like you know two or three copies in a week to get to #1. Amazon eventually cracked down hard on that. So if you are publishing your book now, you'll definitely want to make sure it is in categories that at least correspond somewhat with reality.

This is also important in advertising because very often new authors, when they try to advertise, will be like, well, I want to advertise my book to everyone who's interested in books, and that is way, way too broad. The number one rule of thumb in digital advertising is that the more narrowed down you can get on your audience, the better your results are going to be. I write epic fantasy for the most part, and when I ever has my epic fantasy books on Facebook, I try to narrow the interest down as much as possible to like you know, people who have read George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, J.R.R Tolkien books in the United States and then I will use a very specific audience like that. Where this can really go wrong is if you are advertising your book to totally in the wrong audience, like for example you have written a really dark and gritty horror thriller and you're advertising it to an audience that enjoys reading happily ever after clean romance. The disconnect will be immense and you will, at best you'll just waste your money and at worst, you'll waste a bunch of money and get a lot of negative reviews. So that's why it's important to dial down your audience in your digital marketing as much as possible, as specifically as possible, because you're much, much more likely to get a better result.

The fourth ineffective tactic we'll discuss today is relying on things that used to work but are now obsolete or way less effective than other things a writer could do instead. Add most of these tactics are the expectation that the reader will be the one making the effort, which is a bad idea. You want the process of buying your book to be as smooth and frictionless as possible, to use another common ecommerce term. One example of something that might have worked once but doesn't anymore is book signings as a beginning/niche author. I've never done an official book signing in the (how long has it been now?) in the 13 years I've been an indie author and the 11 years I've been working on Ridmark books, I have never once done an official book signing and I do not think the lack of that has hurt me in any way because it's such an ineffective way to sell books. It's an enormous amount of energy to travel around, haul your books around with you, set the table, network with bookstores and so forth, and at best, you might sell one or two copies. Now, this is different for, you know, really big name writers like, you know Stephen King or Nora Roberts or Brandon Sanderson. They can do a book signing and expect to have a reasonable number of people. But even still it's still a lot of work because, you know, both Stephen King and Nora Roberts are both over seventy I believe, and not that interested in doing a lot of travel anymore. And even Brandon Sanderson, who isn't even yet 50, even after COVID did a lot less traveling, and now just has his yearly convention in Utah. I think it's called the Dragonsteel Convention, where his fans can come and, you know, do the book signing experience and the convention experience. and he doesn't have to travel around the country, because that is definitely something exhausting to do. I'd say book signings, except for very specific and very limited circumstances, are generally a waste of time.

Another thing that used to be effective, but is not anymore in the year of our Lord 2024, would be blog tours, where you go around to different people's blogs and give interviews and such like. Blogs are still out there. People still read blogs. I have a blog on my website I post on pretty regularly with writing updates. But as for marketing and selling books, it is really just a waste of time. You might sell one or two if you're lucky, but that would be too much work.

Another one that used to work but probably doesn't anymore is giveaways with complicated rules and multiple steps. Amazon has been in a lot of lawsuits involving its software patent on one click shopping. The reason Amazon is Amazon/has grown to such size and success is because it's made e-commerce experience as seamless as it can be, which is a lot harder to do than it looks. You can buy a ton of stuff on Amazon and all you really need to do is just click that on the Buy Now button and so long as your credit card on file is current, Amazon will ship you a bunch of stuff or send you Kindle ebooks or music or whatever to your digital account and then you're good to go. In fact, that's one of the rules for people who are setting up their e-commerce sites. You need to make the experience as smooth and seamless as possible because the more steps there are between the person deciding to want to buy the book and actually making the payment, the more likely they're going to say “this is too much hassle” and drop out.

The one exception I'd say to this is when you're setting up your newsletter, you do need to send a confirmation e-mail and this is automated with most mail providers. You do need to send that confirmation e-mail for what's called double opt in, because the European Union says we have to with the General Data Protection Regulation that they did a couple of years ago, so that would be a necessary step of extra complication that basically boils down to “the government says you have to.” But other than that, you should try and make any sales or any giveaways you do as seamless as possible.

Another thing that may have worked once upon a time but does not is Kindle lockscreen ads. If you have a Kindle e-reader or Kindle Fire tablet, you'll know that when you power it up, you usually have an ad on the lockscreen for a book or something and you can tap on it and go to the book. I have never heard of anyone having good success with those. And I strongly suspect the reason is because they're annoying. I mean, when you pull out your Kindle, you want to go read whatever book you're currently reading. You don’t want to get distracted with whatever else it is, and you just want to swipe the Kindle lockscreen ad either way, as fast as possible so you can get to your book. So Kindle lockscreen ads are also something I would review avoid.

The fifth and final ineffective tactic I would say is too many advanced reader reviews. They can come across as inauthentic or sponsored. For a while, some authors were doing with their advanced readers  something saying “Hey, here's your advanced copy of the book. Be sure to leave your review, and here's some sample text for you can copy and paste for your reviews.” Doing too much of that comes off as inauthentic and it seems like you might just be as well hiring bots to leave reviews for your books, so it's probably best to avoid that.

00:23:31 Five Marketing Tactics Readers Tend to Like

No, we don't want to be all negative here, so let's flip the coin around and come to five marketing tactics that readers tend to like. Number one: behind the scenes about the process of writing (typical day) or steps to put out a book. I do this pretty frequently on my Facebook and website where I'll say you know, this week I wrote X number of words of Sevenfold Sword Online or today I worked on making the cover for this book or listened to the audiobook proof or did this or that related to writing. That usually is a good engagement because the main reason most people ( if you are an indie writer), the main reason most people come to your website and social media is to find out when the next book is coming. And so if you talk about how you're working on the next book, that is pretty good social media content right there.

Number two: humor and genuine engagement with the audience. Humor is subjective, so a low hanging fruit content for humor would be memes. I do enjoy a good Star Trek or Star Wars meme and you know, post them every so often, not every day obviously, because that would get excessive. But occasionally when I can't think of anything else to say, I fall back to a good old Star Wars meme. I do try to reply to comments. It's a good idea to do that. I don't get every comment because there's a lot of them. But if you make a good faith effort to reply to them, and you know at least engage with people, that is good. One thing I definitely do is when I have a new release day and post a link to the book, I do try to reply to everyone and thank everyone who says they bought the book that day. It does take a bit of time to do that, but since someone is spending actual hard currency on your book, it seems only proper to thank them for doing so.

Number three would be bonus content like cut scenes or bonus chapters or scenes from alternate character perspectives, or extra information about the books that way. The way I implemented that is the short stories I've written where a lot of the short stories, in fact most of the short stories are not vital to the main plot of the books, but are sort of like DVD extra scenes and then I give them away to my newsletter subscribers, which is very good for newsletter engagement and people do very much enjoy the free short stories because people always like free stuff.

Number four would be eye-catching covers and ads that fit the genre well. That is something that either comes with practice if you do your own covers or you need to pick a good cover designer and explain exactly what you want. Your book cover (when you have a book cover) has three missions and has to convey them all in under a second. And it has to..in under a second, a reader should be able to look at your book cover and see what the title is, what the author is, and what the genre is. If your cover meets all those missions and it looks decent, it is a good cover and it's meeting the mission of a book cover. If it doesn't do any of those things, it's time for a rethink.

And finally, the fifth and perhaps best marketing tactic of all is word of mouth, where people hear about your book within communities they already engage in regularly and are intrigued enough to go take a look at it. This is something you can't force. People have tried. It usually doesn't work, or if they get away with it for a little while it, tends to backfire. But word of mouth is a huge thing, and it's something that can only happen organically and over time, where people recommend your book to their friends or their other members of their online community on Facebook groups or Reddit or whatever.

So there you have it: five marketing tactics that readers hate, and five marketing tactics that readers tend to like. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a quick word of thanks to my transcriptionist, who, in addition to transcribing in this episode, also help me pull together the research for it. I'll remind you that you can listen to all the back episodes on the show on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.