Tag: marketing

4 steps to convince people they NEED to read your novel

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Photo by Leah Tautkute

Photo by Leah Tautkute

 

Did you take the leap with me last week and admit to yourself that your writing is what needs improving–not your friends’ tastes? Are you ready to find out how to fix it?

Meet AIDA.

No, AIDA isn’t the personal writing coach I’ve hired to help you turn your novel into a bestseller, but if you want to think of it that way, go ahead.

AIDA is an acronym for Attention > Interest > Desire > Action: a basic formula marketers and salespeople use to guide them through each phase of the sales process. It goes like this:

Attention: Get noticed. In a media-saturated world, this is hard to do.

Interest: Once you have their attention, prove you have something worth their time–by giving them the most compelling part of your message in as brief a form as possible.

Desire: Once you have their interest, show them how the product will meet a need they have.

Action: Once they know they want it, tell them how to get it.

How does it apply to your novel?

Attention:

Getting a friend’s attention could be as simple as letting them know you’re writing a book (“Really? What’s it about?”). For a literary agent you’re querying, it’s spelling their name right and following all the submission guidelines. But for your toughest audience—the book store customer who’s never heard of you—it’s a lot tougher. You need a cover and a title that stand out among hundreds of others. We’ll talk more about this in the coming weeks.

Interest:

What makes this worth the time of the friend, literary agent, or customer? This one’s a bit trickier, but it follows the question your friend asked you when you got their attention: what’s it about? You have to summarize your story in the most compelling way possible, in a few sentences. This is known as your elevator pitch or “hook”—it’s how you’ll describe your book to people at cocktail parties, how you’ll begin your query letter, and what you’ll give to the writer or intern who’ll craft the copy for your book cover. This is the part that makes your friend ask to read it, the agent to request a full or partial manuscript, and the customer to flip to page one. I’ve actually already covered the hook extensively:

Action:

I’m gonna do a flip-flop on you and talk about Action first, because before we can understand the Desire phase, we have to understand what action we want our audience to take. For a friend it might just be to finish reading the book. For an agent it’s to offer representation. For the book-store customer, it’s to buy the book. It seems like three very different stages, but really it all boils down to the same thing: you want them to keep reading. You have to suck them in fast. You have to make them want to know what happens next. Which brings us to:

Desire:

How do you convince a reader this piece of fiction is something they need? Ask yourself—why do you read? Is it an escape from reality? An alleviation of boredom? A hunt for truth? A search for someone who understands you?

It’s sure to be one of those reasons. It may be all of them.

Those are the needs. And it takes the whole book to meet those needs. But the promise—and the evidence—that you can meet those needs happen in the first few pages. That bookstore customer is not going to keep reading to see if it gets better—you must grab them in the first paragraph. And to keep all your readers reading, you have to keep sucking them in deeper and deeper throughout the entire book.

A variety of factors affect this “sucking in.” But there are two main things you absolutely can’t succeed without:

  1. A relatable protagonist.
  2. Conflict.

If your reader relates to, or identifies with, your hero, you’ve begun forging an emotional connection. When you add conflict—which usually involves threatening the thing that hero loves most—you create the reader’s need to find out: “What happens next? Does the hero overcome the conflict?” And, since the reader relates to this hero, the subconscious question: “Could I overcome that conflict?”

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Discover the Whole AIDA Series:

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

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man reading

How to get people to read your book.

Why no one is reading your work

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image by Proxy Indian

image by Proxy Indian

I was terrified. I was ecstatic. Sending my novel – my brainchild – out into the world for the first time. By “the world” I mean, to a few of my closest friends. My brother and best friend finished within a week. Probably due in part to a feeling of obligation. “It’s great!” they said, “Wouldn’t change a thing.”

Months went by. I checked in with my other best friend, who hadn’t gotten past chapter seven. “I’ve been busy,” she said. “That’s fine,” I said lightly, but felt hurt.

Years later, she (and the few others I sent that draft to) still haven’t finished reading it.

Oh, I was hurt for awhile. Angry. I distinctly remember telling some of them off in a forum message about eight months after that draft went out.

See, I had poured my soul out into that book. My soul. And my soul wasn’t interesting enough to even tempt the attention of my closest friends? I told myself the writing wasn’t the problem – after all, no one could tell me a thing that needed changing, aside from a typo or two. No, my friends just didn’t understand how important this was to me.

Awhile later, I realized chapter seven was possibly the worst combination of English words ever typed on paper, and I began a complete overhaul of the novel (one of countless overhauls). It occurred to me that the people close to me are naturally going to look at my book differently from one they’d pick up at Barnes & Noble – they’re not going to notice much wrong with it, specifically. But if they can’t finish it – that’s a sign it ain’t too good.

I started to realize that the problem was the writing, not my friends.

But I didn’t fully realize what that meant until a few years later, after I had been in marketing for awhile. You see, if an advertisement doesn’t get any attention, nobody blames the audience. It’s not a shortcoming of the product advertised, either – it’s a shortcoming of whoever created the ad.

If people aren’t reading your stuff, it’s not because your soul is boring.

It’s because your writing is boring.

There, I said it. Don’t get offended; I’m in the same boat.

It doesn’t mean we have to get depressed and self-deprecating. It just means we have to get better.

See, I discovered something copywriters use, that few aspiring novelist even think about.

Strategy.

An example: What do most novelists think about? Grammar. Punctuation. Plot. Character development. Poetic descriptions.

Copywriters, on the other hand, are asking: Who is the target audience? What part of my message will resonate with them on the deepest emotional level? What’s the quickest way I can convey that message? How can I grab their attention and keep their attention? How can I make them feel a certain way? How can I make them take action?

Funny how a lot of those questions could be applied to a novel, huh?

Oh, we’re told a lot of the same things copywriters are told. Show, don’t tell. Create relatable characters. Keep the action moving. But if you’re like me – if you’re experiencing the same kind of thing I described at the beginning of this post – you’re just not getting it. Not really.

So I propose this: we step back and look at our work from a different perspective. From a marketing perspective. In the next few weeks, I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned, some of the things I’m implementing in my own novel right now – all while digging deeper into how basic marketing principles can be applied to fiction. We’ll learn together.

You see, I want to write a novel that no one can put down.

Who’s with me?

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UPDATE: READ THE WHOLE SERIES

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

What it’s like to be a copywriter

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It was St. Patrick's Day. I don't wear that hat all the time. I swear.

 

Considering a job as a professional copywriter? Here’s a quick rundown of the day to day pros and cons.

There’s plenty of variety. Any given day, I might be working on billboard headlines, radio scripts or website copy. I might be writing about whiskey, fecal incontinence, or the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Good job for an introvert. I have just the right balance of sitting in my office working alone in blessed peace, and collaborating, brainstorming, and joking around with my coworkers.

You need an organizational mind. Not that every slip of paper on your desk has to be alphabetized, but you have to be able to decipher a garbled mess of notes, identify main points, and rework it until it not only makes sense, but it’s easy and fun to read. And you have to enjoy it. For hours on end.

You have to work under deadlines. This scared me at first, but I soon discovered it isn’t so bad. You get in the habit of writing for long periods of time. You discover new ways to tap into your creativity. And it sparks your imagination like crazy. I had to get an Evernote just to keep track of all the ideas that come to me randomly throughout the day.

Burnout does happen. I was afraid writing copy full time might mean I’d be too burned out on the weekends to work on my novel. It happens sometimes – last week, by Saturday, just thinking about writing made me kind of sick. But most weeks I can start writing around two on Saturday afternoon and work into the evening (with a few breaks). I take Sundays off.

You’ve got to have thick skin. People are going to ask you to change your work. But it’s a lot easier to distance yourself emotionally from copy than from, say, your novel. I mean, you’re passionate about the copy you write (otherwise you’re doing it wrong), but it’s not your soul on paper (like your novel is).

Your writing improves. Fast. Practice makes perfect, after all.

You’re not allowed to lie. Forget the stigma that all advertising professionals are spin doctors. We tread carefully with every word we write. We don’t make any claims we can’t back up with solid evidence. Even if I know my client makes the best cowboy boots, I can’t say so, because it hasn’t been scientifically proven. Sure, we make our clients sound as awesome as possible, but we’re only telling the truth.

You learn something new every day. I know more than the average Joe about a dozen different subjects, including rodeo clowns (those guys are freaking awesome), banking legislation (you lost your free checking because of restrictions on overdraft protection), and where to get heavily discounted home improvement materials while helping struggling families become homeowners (Habitat for Humanity’s “ReStores”)!

You can believe in your clients. Maybe I’m just lucky to work at an agency that pursues the best clients, but the more I learn about my clients, the more I believe in them, and the more excited I get about telling their stories and showing the world how great they are.

You get to tell people you’re a writer. At a party, when somebody asks what you do for a living, you get to say “I’m a writer.” That never really gets old.

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Do you write for a living? What kind of work is it, and do you enjoy it?

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3 reasons to self-publish

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We all want to see our names in print, to hold bound pages in our hands, filled with words we wrote. Some want it so badly, they forego the lengthy, discouraging process of traditional publishing to publish their own work through vanity publishing or print on demand. Sometimes it works. More often it doesn’t.

If you’re struggling over which road to take, check out these reasons to self-publish.

Good Reasons to Self-Publish

  1. You only want something to sell to family and friends.

If you just want a few copies to sell to parents, grandparents, and neighbors, and you don’t care about getting your story out to the world, a print-on-demand service like Lulu.com could be great. They only print a copy if someone has ordered it, which means you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars up front for a box of books that will collect dust in your garage. And you’ll get a real, bound and printed book with your name on it.

  1. You are already famous

If you are a politician, actor, musician, or blogger/twitterer/vlogger with hundreds of thousands of followers, self-publishing could be a great idea. You already have your marketing channels in place, you’ll have total creative control of the publishing process, and you’ll make more money per copy than you would through a traditional publisher (depending on the prices you set).

  1. You know a lot about marketing and are willing to spend as much time marketing as writing.

Amanda Hocking sold enough self-published ebooks to become a millionaire in less than a year. But her success is something of a fluke. Thousands of writers have tried the same and failed.

You have to work to get your name out there. Christopher Paolini, for instance, promoted his self-published Eragon by touring the country for an entire year, speaking at schools and libraries in full costume, before it was picked up by Knopf.

But perhaps the biggest clue is this: both Hocking and Paolini ended up signing traditional book deals. Self-marketing, even when successful, is exhausting, even if you aren’t traveling around the country, and have opted to focus on online marketing. There’s as much (if not more) competition for attention on the web as in real life. You have to hit all the major social networks, make an impression, build an audience, and keep producing good content—all in addition to writing that sequel.

I’m in marketing, for crying out loud, and I wouldn’t want to market my own novel. Every day, I see the work it takes, and the number of highly intelligent, highly talented people required to make it work. It is a full-time job. Know that if you take this route, you will absolutely be sacrificing writing time. And even with all that, it still takes luck.

Self-publishing isn’t out of the question. In fact, the increasing popularity of ebooks means that self-publishing is a more viable option than ever. But look at the points above and consider carefully before you decide to abandon traditional publishing. You’ve been rejected. So what? Everyone gets rejected. Get back on the horse in the swivel chair. Successful people are just the ones who didn’t quit.

More Resources:

 A closer look at indie publishing with Tracey Marchini on Nathan Bransford’s blog.

Agent Rachel Gardner explains why self-publishing won’t hurt your chances for traditional publishing (anymore).

If you decide to talk the plunge into indie publishing after all, better start learning about marketing.