Weeks 11-12: Marketing First Steps for Amazon and Print

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The Skinny

To celebrate the launch of SPMurphyauthor.com on Friday, this week's post is a special edition on book marketing. The insights here are from Perfect Bound by Katherine Pickett and 5-Minute Book Marketing for Authors by Penny Sansevieri. The topics will be:

  • The Target Audience

  • Amazon: Genres, Categories, Themes, and Keywords

  • Visual Design

Know Your Reader

The first and most important step in marketing is to know whom you are trying to reach. "Everyone" is not a workable answer. There are nearly 1000 books published each day (350,000 estimated per year), and I have yet to hear of even a classic that is universally loved.Genres can simplify the problem. "Mystery readers" is a better answer than "Everyone," but it comes with baggage, and that baggage is the set of expectations these readers will have for your book. We've all endured movies that promise different things in the trailer than the movie delivers. Even if the movie is good, I feel a little deceived. Don't call your romance a mystery.To better understand your reader, research the competition. Read the "Top Ten Mysteries of All Time." Read the bestsellers. You can do this for literary works too. What works are most similar to yours? For both genre fiction and literature: What is the emotional experience that readers are seeking from these books?

The Economics of Amazon

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After you've identified your ideal reader, and the selling points for your book that the reader will like, open a private browser to Amazon.com and select "Kindle Store" as your search category. (The private browser ensures the search results you see are not influenced by your Amazon search history.) Hit enter without typing any search keyword.These are Amazon's categories. Click the option that applies to your book.I selected Mystery & Suspense. Now on the left of the page there are a few subheadings that can be selected to refine your search. As a subcategory for Mystery and Suspense, I selected Mystery, then International Mystery and Crime.The next set of search parameters are Moods & Themes, and Characters. Choose the theme closest to that of your book and select a character if one of the choices applies. Since none of the moods applies for me, I only chose the "Amateur Sleuths" box.Check the search results in the top left of the page for the total number of matches. With 1000 books published a day, my book is only in competition with 543. The lower the better, and when I first saw that, I was thrilled.(An aside: This exercise is also useful for ensuring that your reader's expectations will not be betrayed because of your book description. For example, if I discovered that all "International Mystery & Crime" books had characters like "Auntie Poldi," I would need to ensure that the description isn't only used for cozy mysteries.)The final step is to research keyword strings. Reset the search option to "Books" and type the keyword that most directly applies to your book. Amazon will suggest the top searches related to that keyword.This list gives a good depiction of what people are looking for when they search for your first keyword. Try adding a few specific keywords and performing the search. I searched russian mystery books.There are over 5,000 titles that match the keyword search. Stiff competition.The next step is to select the very first search result and examine the "Product Ranking" in the Product Details section of the page. The lower the ranking, the better. My first result is The Kremlin Conspiracy, which has the following rankings:Ranked seven, nine, and thirteen - fairly high. I may need to examine other keyword strings.The goal in all of this is to make sure your book marketing conforms the laws of supply and demand. The suggested keywords inform you about demand, showing what readers are looking for. The total results of your keyword search show the book market's supply in response to that demand: maybe there are already thousands of titles, or perhaps if you are lucky there are very few. Furthermore, the ranking allows you to analyze how likely it is that your book becomes a top hit for the search term, which would drastically increase sales. Similarly, the combination of category and theme in refining search results shows how many books there are like yours. The fewer the better, so long as there is demand.

A Book by Its Cover

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This last section requires that you have a physical book in hand, or take a trip to Barnes & Noble or your local independent bookstore.In searching through Amazon, you likely have identified a few competitors for your book. Pick a few. Find them in the bookstore. Where are they shelved? Literature? Mystery? The display tables?To get space on the Barnes & Noble display table, a publishing company forfeits a portion of its earnings per book to the store. The better the location of the display, the higher the cost. So if your competitor is on a display table, you'll be fighting an uphill battle against a book the publisher is sure will sell.Next consider the cover of the book. The cover and the title are the first opportunity to sell your book to someone who's browsing. And they should convey something about the emotional experience that your book will give the reader.

For example, which of these two books has the lighter tone? It is immediately clear, from the title and the image of the bird with watercolor bleeding from its edge, that See What I Have Done is darker. The cartoonish figure of the dog detective, as well as the self-aware description of "a MacGuffin or two" and the seemingly low-stakes title of Lost Cat promise a somewhat lighter tale.Look for the other titles on your list of competitors. What are the commonalities between the covers? I looked through all of my "Russian mystery" authors, and saw a lot of covers with black, white, and red in the design.Look at the rest of the visual design elements. What is on the back cover? Are the authors smiling in their photos? The thriller authors I saw are serious, unsmiling. Inside, what font does the author use? Are there any visual design flourishes at chapter openings, or in the header and footer?

All of these decisions are made for those readers identified in the first section. All of these elements tell the readers that your book promises to give them the emotional experience they seek.

Further Reading

Perfect Bound by Katherine Pickett

5-Minute Book Marketing for Authors by Penny Sansevieri

The 53 Best Mystery and Thriller Book Covers of 2017

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