Four Things Book Marketing Bloggers Aren’t Telling You

On its surface, the internet is a wonderful resource to learn about how to sell your book. With a huge variety of book marketers sharing their tips and winning strategies, alongside a sparkling resume of accomplishments, it can be easy to be sucked into their rhetoric and believe that they have all the keys to book marketing success. The issue is, they don’t. More often than not, knowingly or unknowingly, they are leaving out important realities about book marketing and trying to convince you that, like the Jackson 5, it’s as easy as one two three. Sorry to say, but it’s not, so next time you read a top ten list of tips and strategies, bear in mind these four things they’ll often ignore.

Specificity

The internet is awash with recommendations on book marketing strategy, but how detailed are they? Smartauthorslab.com ran a survey of authors and book marketers and found that the number one frustration behind selling books is not knowing where to focus time, effort and resources. While marketing bloggers are great at suggesting tips and tricks, when it comes down to numbers they’re falling short.

How many social media posts a day? When is the best time to advertise? How much money should I spend on targetted ads? Questions like these are rarely answered in these short form blogs, and it’s because the answers are more complicated than they’d like to let you believe.

What perseverance really means

Read any book marketing blog and they’ll likely mention that marketing a book is all about perseverance. Keep at it, and you’ll get there eventually. While this is certainly true, they rarely talk specifically about what this perseverance means, and how long you may need to keep it up to get your book out there.

Many marketing bloggers will gloss over the sheer amount of time they take to implement their ‘tips’. For example, when a blog tells you to test your market, they rarely mention the authors that take years learning about their audience, testing their ads, and drafting and redrafting book covers before making a sale. Much like requesting reviews: this is something every blogger will recommend, but few will acknowledge that you might have to send your book to hundreds of reviewers before they even read them, let alone give you a collection marketable favourable reviews.

“This is the problem with success stories. So many bloggers focus on the ones who made it, often despite seemingly insurmountable odds. What they seem to overlook is that, for every champion, there are thousands of similar cases that ran out of time, money or patience,” warns Camilla Vitali, a marketer at Big Assignments and UKWritings.

The Luck Factor

Part of the reason so many book marketers don’t succeed is that they were simply unlucky, another part of book marketing most bloggers won’t mention. Now, marketing a book isn’t just about luck. Putting more effort into the marketing process certainly will make it more likely to sell than if you didn’t work at it at all, that’s obvious. But not every great book becomes a classic, or even a bestseller. When it comes down to it, there’s a lot of luck in book marketing.

“There are countless examples from the classics of literature that prove the importance of luck time and again. The Great Gatsby only sold 20,000 copies when it was first released, 50,000 fewer than expected,” says Tom Barry, a business writer at Via Writing and Essay Writing Service.

There is no winning strategy

Probably the biggest lapse in book marketing blogs is that there is no winning strategy to get your book sold. At the end of the day, no matter how respectable and accomplished a marketing writer is, all they can do is suggest strategies that can point you in the right direction.

They can tell you to open up social media accounts, they can implore you to learn about targeted advertising, they can give you reams and reams of lists of book reviewers to approach. But when it comes down to it, none of that will actually sell your book. You will sell your book, in your own particular way.

Beatrice Potter is a professional copywriter at Best Writing Services and Academized review. She specializes in all kinds of topics from marketing to business to social pursuits. She is always open to sharing her personal experience at Boomessays Review and likes to give advice to beginner writers on innovative ways to create content that sells.