Marketing Your Book is About Building a Community of Readers

Post #13 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Business – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

After catching up on my LinkedIn groups (you can read about how I spent my Sunday by following this link to my Getting Read post on Story Circle Network’s blog Telling HerStories), I started to think about all the ways that
an author can use the Internet to market books. I made a list of both the conventional social media methods (blogging, Tweeting, friending, commenting, posting, posting and more posting) as well as many of the creative ideas I’ve come across. I’ll reveal my list here, one item at a time throughout 2010.

This week I’d like to set the tone for 2010 by sharing a technique that has been called the “free” or “post scarcity” model. I suppose the best place to start is with Chris Anderson—editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of bestsellers The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Hyperion, 2006) and
Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, 2009). In Free, Anderson posits that the negligible cost associated with the delivery of digital products (e.g., ebooks, PDFs, audiobooks, MP3 files) via email or download opens the door to some interesting marketing techniques.

To prove his point, in July, when Free debuted, Anderson gave away digital copies via Amazon (for Kindle), iTunes (audio), Scribd, Google Books, Shortcovers and Sony Reader. With the exception of iTunes and Google Books, the free versions have been replaced with fee-based hard copies and digital versions. Now, six months after the launch, I wondered how successful his approach had been. Here’s what I found:

• Despite giving away between 200,000 and 300,000 free digital downloads in the first two weeks of Free’s release, the book debuted in the #12 position on The New York Times Book Review NonFiction list.
• Although free digital versions were available, the publisher’s list price on Amazon for hardcopy was $26.99, and even now it’s selling for $21.59 ($9.99 for Kindle). If you’re wondering if anyone actually bought the book…it’s current (December 21, 2009) Amazon bestseller sales rank is a most-respectable 2,829. Furthermore, Free is #5 among Amazon Money & Monetary Policy books.

Hmmm. Maybe there really is something to this free business. It’s an opportunity for an author to seed the marketplace, create a buzz and, apparently, not sabotage sales. Anderson believes—and author and super-marketer Seth Godin agrees—there is still a large part of the market that wants the traditional convenience of a physical copy (hardback or paperback) or that just wants to wait for the peer reviews before investing time reading a new book. For that, they are willing to pay.

I don’t know how long this phenomenon will hold true. But I suppose that as long as the generations weaned on physical books continue to read there will be a market for traditional reading material. For myself, I have become a big fan of audiobooks and I do download ebooks, but I suspect I’m somewhat ahead of the curve.

First Create Interest, Then Sell the Book

From Anderson, I moved on to check the Amazon stats on Malcolm Gladwell. His latest book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (Little, Brown and Co., 2009), is a collection of his New Yorker essays. While no part of this book is new material, it is convenient packaging of essays that span several years. And if you don’t regularly read the New Yorker…well then I guess it is new content. How’s the book doing? It’s currently the #13 bestseller on Amazon and #1 in the categories of Clinical Psychology and Essays (United States, Classic Literature & Fiction).

Shall we do one more? Here’s an author you might not know—Cory Doctorow. He’s a science fiction author and co-editor of the very popular blog Boing Boing. Doctorow is an advocate for liberal copyright laws and digital rights management. He has released each of his books under a Creative Commons license, which gives readers the right to download a free copy of his work and create noncommercial, derivative fan fiction.

Doctorow’s publisher, Tor Books, has serialized his latest novel, Maker, on their blog site. They’ve divided the book into 81 posts. In a way, you could say that Tor Books has just taken a cue from the old Saturday Evening Post, which often serialized novels, and freshened it up a bit.

Doctorow’s unconventional publication and distribution methods certainly have not stood in the way of his recognition. He’s an award-winning author, many times over:

• 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
• 2004 Locus Award for Best First Novel (for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom)
• 2004 Sunburst Award (for A Place So Foreign and Eight More)
• 2007 The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award
• 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Little Brother)
• 2009 Prometheus Award (for Little Brother)

I’m not sure the methods of Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell or Cory Doctorow are immediately transferable to the average author. Each of these men has a well-established platform (Wired, New Yorker, Boing Boing respectively) from which to build a large and loyal reader base. But then, what’s to stop any of us from building a popular blogging platform? That will be the topic of my next post.

And One Last Takeaway

As many of you may already know, Matilda Butler and I will be teaching the two-hour, pre-conference workshop at Story Circle Network’s Stories from the Heart V national writing conference (February 5-7, 2010, in Austin, TX). This workshop represents the national launch of our Writing Alchemy technique and the precursor to our new book of the same name (to be published by Knowledge Access Books in 2010).

In our workshop, entitled “Writing with Heart: Five Easy Steps to Writing with Emotion, Energy and Color” we will explain our Writing Alchemy technique as well as give attendees plenty of time to write and test our methods. If you’ve been thinking about attending, I advise you not to delay. Our class is close to legal capacity (the room can’t hold any more people, and there are no larger rooms available…as it is we have half of the ballroom). Students will receive a free copy of Writing Alchemy just as soon as it’s published.

By loading this workshop with lots of good content and writing exercises, Matilda and I will definitely be creating a buzz for Writing Alchemy. I guess you could say we’ll be creating a community of readers. Hmmm, maybe there are variations on these marketing methods for all writers.

I’ll be exploring this theme in great detail in the months to come. For now, Happy Holidays.

Tagged as: Book Marketing, marketing your book, Memoir Writing and Authorship