Lies, More Damn Lies and Book Marketing

This year I published my second novel, Where Liberty Lies, an exploration of the deceit and illusions underpinning societies. As sad as it is, we function in a world full of lies or half-truths and a lot of that is legitimised under a veneer of ‘necessity’: a propaganda of selective info. A train company, for example, charging a fortune for tickets but failing to deliver a value-for-money service, will promote a new fleet of trains while making no mention of a continued failure to keep its services to time. We all know this to be the case but how strange it would feel were they to release a press release stating, ‘new train fleet introduced but only 65% will run on time.’ Instead, we expect other corners of the media world to highlight the negative, while companies with a ‘product’ to sell should only give us the positive. This means you can easily miss the full picture, while judging everything either with a cynical eye or through rose-tinted glasses.

Book marketing is no exception to this practice. You will likely buy a book without ever having read a single line from it. Your decision will be based on familiarity with the writer or from a nudge by a marketeer or friend. Any artistic product is judged subjectively, leaving a lot of flexibility when marketing it. Would the tagline ‘bestseller’ reassure you of a quality product or perhaps ‘award-winning’? Perhaps a quote from a review will sway you or a glitzy book cover filled with action and excitement? Then again, you may wish to see at least a hundred positive reviews via Amazon before you take the plunge. All very sensible but are you being given the full picture?

For marketing purposes, books get categorised into genres and then into sub-genres and, with so much choice these days, into sub-sub genres. While an author may not make it on to the New York Times bestsellers list, there are a multitude of other lists in this digital age of publishing to match these fine-tuned genres. The threshold for reaching the top is considerably lower when your book is, for example, in the Fiction-20th Century Historical Romance genre than it might be for just Romance, but your tagline can still utilise the term ‘bestseller’. You may not have even sold many books. I once did a giveaway campaign ‘selling’ over a thousand eBooks but didn’t make a penny from it! People ‘bought’ my book for no other reason than it being free.

There are hundreds of book awards out there, an industry unto itself, and industries in the service world can have a habit of creating business to justify their own existence (just think conferences - how many are essential?). Publishers or authors will pay to enter competitions, occasionally sponsors, generating the income, and, to keep the coffers full, the organisers need them to come back for more. Again you will see those sub-sub genres utilised, increasing the odds of winning an award. Certain unscrupulous awards will almost guarantee an award, less concerned with a robust and fair judging process, and for an author who’s won an award, why, they’ll offer to sell them a badge to promote their success. This muddying of the water corrupts the whole industry. Why should a reader have to research to determine the legitimacy of an award? I’ve won a fair few awards for my books and I use that fact to promote their quality. However, even I’m in the dark when it comes to the standards in place for judging from most of them. How many people entered? Did they judge the book cover, which the author rarely created, out of the same score as the narrative? Did a qualified editor judge or just a keen reader (either is fine but always good to know)?

Did you know there are services out there offering authors guaranteed online reviews in exchange for cash, and for a few thousand quid you can secure a hundred or so reviews. Now, I’m not saying they offer only positive reviews, but again it’s a service industry that thrives on attracting its customers back. It also favours those with a marketing budget. How many of those reviews seen on Amazon have been generated by a slick, costly marketing campaign, with a ton of giveaway books to dedicated readers? Giveaways are big business, particularly for the companies. Authors will be charged a nice sum to have access to a readership and then under 10% of recipients will bother to leave a review. And when an author/publisher utilises a review with a quote on their promo, it is a mere snip from the full critique. Several positive words taken from a few hundred, to convince the reader the reviewer loved it all. Maybe they did, but you’ll never know without some further leg work.

‘Never judge a book by its cover.’ A wise adage we all learn growing up but, come on, who doesn’t get drawn in by an intriguing cover? More to the point, who doesn’t get dissuaded by a naff cover? The cover can often have very little to do with the content but it is an important marketing angle. There are competitions just for book covers. You can tell an amateur author by an amateur cover, but, for those that can afford it, there is another industry out there providing professional looking covers for everyone. Illustrated book covers are a relatively recent concept, the technology not existing in the time of Austen or Dickens. So, what did they add to the mix on introduction? Well, the visual is a powerful tool. With mass market paperbacks introduced in the 1930s, having a book stand out from the crowd was a critical marketing ploy. And if you want to refresh the market with a new edition of an old favourite? Why, change the cover! While you have classic record/CD covers, I’m not sure the same can be said for book covers. It’s odd we put so much trust in them.

So, you see, the world of book publishing functions with its own ‘lies’ and half-truths. If you publish a book with no marketing it won’t sell a copy. You have to put it in front of potential readers, shout louder than the competitors, sell your artistic soul to gain some commercial traction. The only truth lies in sampling the product and, with artificial intelligence on the horizon, even that may succumb to a deceitful illusion. But until that time, enjoy reading your novels and reward a good book with an honest review.

Nathaniel M Wrey