Are you a marketing expert?
A GUEST POST written by Gordon MacKinney
Me neither. Now that we've established our common cluelessness, I'll share the three greatest events in my fourteen-year "career" writing fiction, with emphasis on number three. I hope it provides learning, or schadenfreude.
BTW, thank you, Kim, for the opportunity. Sharing is healing. I kid. Sort of.
Number one: www.sixfold.org, a fabulous way to learn (and teach) via a fast-paced contest. For five dollars, writers submit their short fiction or poetry; the same writers read, comment, and vote on each other; and higher vote-getters rise through a three-round friendly competition.
Eventually, after some brutal—i.e. valuable—feedback, my story rose to fourth place and got published online. Dayam! For the first time in my life, I'd received real validation and hope. Forget kudos from family and friends, which Stephen King reminds us to ignore anyway.
Could I buckle down and write a novel? Maybe, just maybe.
Number two: publishing my first novel? No! I joined a critique group of seven skilled writers who neither knew me nor liked me enough to bias their feedback (not that anyone should strive to curtail bias by becoming unlikable). Every month, my work gets evaluated by people who know that two semicolons don't add up to a full colon. The real learning began.
Number three: $20,000 dollars left on the table. Actually, that's not accurate, merely a cynical take by a certain teenager on a free giveaway I joined. Here's what happened…
My then-publisher (more on "then-" in a moment) came to me with an idea: split the cost ($660 total) of a BookBub "featured deal." I was skeptical because I disliked the publisher's business model, but the editor-in-chief is likable and honest, and I'm a team player, so I said go for it. I viewed the promotion as a means to reach readers, my only goal since realizing the folly of trying to earn money hawking books.
For a single day in late 2019, the promo offered my e-book free to the world in all markets. The event played out like a horse race…
"Eight thousand downloads thus far, a great start," read the publisher's first email.
Second email: "In Kindle Store, No. 1 in Suspense, Literature & Fiction, and Crime Thrillers."
Third email: "No. 2 ranked FREE e-book in the entire United States. Pretty impressive."
By cocktail hour, I'd given away twenty thousand e-books, prompting my teenage daughter to say, "If you'd charged a dollar, we'd have $20,000 now."
Buzzkill.
Meanwhile, I was thrilled. Imagine SO MANY people reading my work, even if only a portion cracked open the virtual cover. But many folks must've because my count of Amazon and Goodreads ratings went from the thirties to the three hundreds, with a respectable numeric average.
BookBub giveaway opportunities aren't given away to authors. Competition for limited slots is fierce, so hats off to my then-publisher for making a compelling pitch.
While I never recouped my $330 investment in dollars, I did in readership. That's good stuff, at least for me and my goals. Your goals may vary.
Why do I keep inserting "then-" in front of "publisher"? I don't regret the partnership, which helped me get a book out there when I had few viable options.
But I came to understand the publisher's business model as high volume—many authors, many books—with a consequential low bar for entry. Pretty good royalties (20-30%) were more than offset by cost-sharing of marketing—fifty-fifty best case, with some campaigns funded 80-90% by the author. In my alone-time grumblings, I characterized the business model as I spend my money to help you make money. To me, the publisher was a middleman taking their cut of marketing services also available to self-published authors.
So, I created my own publishing company (Trailmark Media) for my first, second, and soon, third books. Will BookBub listen to my pitch for a "featured deal"? Dunno yet.
Please connect via gordon@gmackinney.com. We're in this together. I love trading observations, gripes, and revelations with fellow authors, even though none of us really knows what we're doing.
Gordon MacKinney's first published novel, Follow Me Down (Trailmark Media), received a Literary Titan Gold Award and 400+ Amazon ratings with a 4.4/5 score. His short story about a murdered Detroit talk jock was ranked #4 out of 340 competitors and published in Sixfold. His latest thriller, Tell Anyone You Want That I Was Here (Trailmark Media), received 5-star ratings from Readers' Favorite and Reader Views. Coming soon: speculative fiction inspired by the brilliant Margaret Atwood, exploring an alternate near future with very different attitudes about death on one's own terms. Visit www.gmackinney.com and join his mailing list for advanced updates.
Kim Catanzarite is the author of the award-winning sci-fi thriller series The Jovian Universe. She is a freelance writer and editor for publishers and independent authors, and she teaches copyediting for Writer’s Digest University. Her Self-Publishing 101 blog discusses the ins and outs of indie life as well as all things writing craft (www.authorkimcatanzarite.com/blog). She lives on the east coast USA with her husband and daughter.
