Writing: The two traps that will cost you sales

As I prepared to go to the gym this morning, I scrolled through my marketing podcasts to see which one to listen to.

It struck me that they were all one of two varieties.

Type 1:

How to write a novel in 5 days
How to write 24 novels a year
How to write 5000 words while you’re on the loo

Type 2:

If you don’t advertise on Youtube, you’re missing out
If you don’t do all these things on Facebook, you’re killing your sales
You have to have a profile on all these new social media sites

Titles are made up of course, but you can see the trends. The first type is all production. The belief that if you write yourself to death, you will sell better.

The second are all marketing, and subscribe to the belief that you have to do this endless list of stuff (ads, optimise your profiles everywhere, check them every month, be in all the groups, etc. etc.) or your sales will die.

I’m saying: both of these routes are a pretty good way to kill all your momentum.

If you go the production route, but never stop to think whether a book is going to be worth your time writing, and, once you’ve written it, never spend any effort marketing it, you’re leaving a lot of sales on the table.

If you go the highly-strung advertising route and spend hours optimising everything and driving people to your page, your mailing list or whatnot, you lose out big time when people arrive at that page and you don’t actually have a decent arsenal of chunky series with full-price novels that they can buy.

With very few exceptions, successful writers do some of both. Authors who don’t produce regular books but do well usually sell additional things like courses. Authors who don’t advertise rely on an audience they might have built elsewhere.

That said, I’ve seen enough of either type, all-production or all-advertising writers fall on their faces to believe strongly in a combination. Writing and advertising augment each other. If your sale slow down, advertise a bit. If your ads fall flat, write another book.