“How much time do you spend marketing?” is a pretty typical question a self-publisher gets asked by those weighing both paths. The unspoken fear, of course, being that there will be no time left for writing.
“As little as possible,” is what I like to answer—because I’m always trying to find the leanest, most efficient systems for building an audience and selling books. Which is a fancy way of saying I’m lazy.
Seriously though, I don’t have any ghostwriter-dachshunds stacked up inside this authorial trench coat, and I’m not the fastest writer in the world—especially when it comes to fiction. I need to manage my time well.
The truth is a little more complicated than that glib response above, of course. There are lots of things that take time away from writing, although classifying them as “marketing” might be inaccurate. Admin is probably the biggest time-suck. Just digesting and organizing all your… business bits. And while I am sure there is more of that when you self-publish, I doubt it disappears when you don’t.
Getting Amazon to do the selling for you is a pretty neat way to spend less time marketing—it also saves you a dollar or two, as you can imagine, and I think we can say at this point that Amazon is reasonably good at shifting a book or two. Achieving this isn’t so easy, but even falling short can reap huge benefits. This is far from theoretical, in case you’re wondering. This approach—Visibility Marketing—has been followed by a whole slew of successful authors for some time now.
I wrote a book several years ago called Let’s Get Visible, which is out of print now (and has been superseded by this book anyway, in case you are the intrepid type who might try to hunt it down, or pay the crazy prices being asked on Amazon for second-hand copies). It was the first attempt—to my knowledge—at someone breaking down how the Kindle Store works in a comprehensive way and investigating the make-up of the algorithms powering the giant recommendation engine behind it, that force which generates millions of book recommendations to readers every single day.
Let’s Get Visible came out way back in 2013 and hasn’t even been on sale for a few years, but I still get people coming up to me telling me that it changed their life or made their careers. Often, they buy me drinks, which I accept… and then confess that they really owe thanks to a few hardy pioneers who mapped out this territory before I came along, paving the way for a veritable horde of self-publishers to take their corporate counterparts to the cleaners.
Until self-publishers began eating into the profit margins of large publishers, these corporate giants showed exactly zero interest in how Amazon worked, or what went into something like Sales Rank, or why some books got continual love from Amazon in the form of email pushes or on-site recommendations, while other, sometimes worthier, books got no love at all. To them it seemed like some kind of impenetrable mystery—a capricious Greek deity who would bestow favor on one but smite another, with no rhyme or reason behind it, certainly none perceptible to the hoi polloi. In reality, it was the publishers who were being a touch snooty, not wanting to sully themselves by caring how heathens like Amazon operated. And they certainly wouldn’t lower themselves to examine what self-publishers were doing or—heaven forbid—consider emulating them.
The truth is that all these things are at least somewhat discernible. While the exact formula behind Sales Rank might be unknown outside Amazon, the broad strokes of it are readily deducible, and have been for several years. Large parts of the inner workings of the Kindle Store and that lucrative recommendation engine have already been mapped out, and we can guess reasonably well at the rest—enough to tailor our marketing campaigns to gain Amazon’s favor, that’s for sure.
This approach of Visibility Marketing is not a new way of reaching readers per se, but a way of positioning yourself and your books for maximum impact.
Imagine you wanted to open a hardware store. You could just blindly choose a location and hope for the best. Maybe go with your gut feeling as you are walking around the space, imagining where your shelves will be, where you might set up the cash register, and so on. You could even take a stroll down the street at different times of the day, maybe even take a coffee and watch the people go by, trying to get a sense of whether this is the right location for your enterprise.
Or you could be a bit more methodical. Take a footfall survey and see which location gets the most passing traffic. Build customer profiles and estimate which street your customers are more likely to take, and in which numbers. And so on. The point is, you can wing it, or you can use the information right at your fingertips to give your books a better chance of reaching readers.
To use another analogy, Visibility Marketing is less about exploring new tools for generating sales, and more about rearranging the pieces on the board for maximum effect. And if that sounds weak, let me introduce you to the game of chess, where changing the position of those pieces is the difference between success and failure.
Visibility Marketing is a two-step process, with the second step being much more challenging.
