It’s horn-tooting time at TKZ. I am pleased to announce that the new Mike Romeo thriller is now up for Kindle pre-order. ROMEO’S WORLD is the title, and the publisher has generously agreed to give it a pre-pub price of $2.99 (reg. $4.99). The marketing department has also spent weeks drafting the following: “Grab your copy today!”
You can do that by going HERE. If you’re outside the U.S., go to your Amazon store and search for: B0HJSNCX13
The text above is called marketing. For an author, it used to be so simple. You got a contract with a publisher (happy day!). But because you were not a household name, your publisher expended few dollars (if any) to publicize your book. Perhaps a small ad in a newspaper or trade journal…if you were lucky.
So what could you do? You could start making the rounds of local bookstores, and try to set up a book signing. There were lots of local bookstores back then. And when one of them gave you the space, you showed up and sat at a table with your stack of books, two or three of which you sold…if you were lucky. If the store gave you a place to speak, you gave a little talk to the three people who came, one of whom was your mom, another your close friend, and the last one a stranger who just wanted to rest her feet.
And that was about it. Today, however, marketing has morphed into a tangled web of bits and bytes, drilling deeper and deeper into the subterranean world of the algorithm. A few years ago it was all about learning SEO—Search Engine Optimization. Your primary aim was to up the visibility of your website in the various search engines.
This year all the talk is about GEO—Generative Engine Optimization, which is explained thus:
GEO goes beyond traditional SEO by focusing on creating content that is not only easily understood by search engine crawlers but also by advanced AI language models. By understanding the intricacies of how AI processes information, businesses can optimize their content to rank higher in search engine results and attract more organic traffic.
Now we are told to spend our time trying to to leverage the power of the bots. I am no expert in how to do that, but if you want to get into it you can start with podcasts by Thomas Umstattd Jr. and Joanna Penn.)
I am old-school enough to believe that the most important marketing tool, the one that never changes, is the book itself. Ricardo Fayet of Reedsy agrees, as he stated in conversation with Joanna Penn (see above link):
One of my big mantras when it comes to marketing is that product is more important than marketing. So having a great book is going to be more important, in my opinion, than being a great marketer.
Thus, I spend 90% of my book time on the writing. The other 10% is for prep work—formatting (with Vellum), cover, back matter. When I’m ready to publish, I announce the pre-sale to my email list and prepare a blog post about it (check). When the book is live, I claim a new release announcement on BookBub (free). After that, I mostly leave it to word-of-mouth to do the heavy lifting, because that’s always the best driver of sales.
That’s how I see it, anyway. What about you? What are your thoughts about marketing books in this brave crazy new world?