A Sabbatical From Social Media

            One of the most famous advertising aphorisms ever has been attributed to many people; the first time I came across it, it was credited to F. W. Woolworth: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

            It’s been coming into my mind lately as I’ve been thinking about the ways I’ve been promoting my mystery novels. Before self-publishing the first, The McHenry Inheritance, on Amazon, I hired a social media consultant to teach me the ins and outs of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin. I don’t like those things, but they’re not going away soon, so I figured I’d better learn the basics.

            For the past two years, I’ve been aggressively promoting my two books on social media to the best of my learned ability. They seem to be slowly gaining a modest audience and helping sell each other, but the one thing about which I have no idea whatsoever is how much, if at all, my social media efforts have helped sell the books. I haven’t an atom of hard information on that point.

What if No One Advertised?

            Back in 1989, when I had just become editor of a daily newspaper, our corporate group, Scripps-Howard, held a gathering of all the editors and publishers. A featured speaker was Christopher Whittle, who at the time was attempting — unsuccessfully, as it turned out — to launch a TV channel aimed at schoolchildren.

            In the course of his presentation, Whittle said something I’ve always remembered for its boldness. I’m paraphrasing, but it was that the dirty little secret of advertising is that it doesn’t work. He maintained that Ford, General Motors, Procter and Gamble, et. al. could eliminate their advertising budgets altogether. If they did, he claimed, the worst that would happen is that they would lose about 1 percent of their sales, but the money saved on advertising would more than compensate for that on the bottom line.

            Was he right? I don’t know, but he certainly could be. And lately, I’ve been entertaining the heretical question of what would happen if I stopped using social media to promote my books. If nothing else, I’d certainly have time for more writing.

Try It for a Month

            To hone in on one area, I looked at Twitter. Do I see more book sales on days when I tweet about a book and get retweeted extensively? Some days yes, some days no. But even on a day when Twitter is kind to me and the sales are good, I still have no way of knowing whether there’s any causation behind the correlation.

            The one conclusion I’ve drawn from running free-book promotions on Kindle is that how well my book moves seems to depend on how many people are shopping in the Kindle store that day. I’ve been in the top 50 of Kindle free crime fiction on days when I had 50 downloads, as well as on days when I had over 500 downloads. The number of people looking for free books on any given day seems to matter more than what I tweet.

            In any event, I’ve decided to take a sabbatical from social media for a month, and will not be posting anything in October. I doubt that anyone will notice, and I doubt that it will give me any relevant information on the impact on book sales, but it may clear my mind a bit and help me go back to using it more effectively.

            And if nothing else, I’m hoping to get more work done on my third Quill Gordon mystery.

Giving Away What You Can Sell

            In the bad old days of self-publishing — less than ten years ago, actually — an author looked at a pile of his or her books and saw dollar signs. Not so much the dollars the books would bring in the unlikely event they ever sold, but rather the dollars in outlay they already represented.

            Having gone to a so-called vanity press and shelled out a significant sum of money for a couple thousand books, the author was beginning deep in the hole, financially speaking. The mere act of giving away a book to crazy Aunt Kate was painful because it represented a loss of money already spent and diminished the limited supply of inventory that could potentially be sold to recover some of the investment.

            Giving away a bunch of books as free promotions to attract readers? Unthinkable. Might as well start a fire in the fireplace and start throwing U.S. currency into it. Only a wealthy author with an outsized ego (do authors have any other kind of ego?) could even consider it.

Giving Away Pixels

            The e-book revolution and Amazon have changed all that and made free book giveaways a part of the new author’s marketing strategy. With no ink, paper and shipping costs to cover, it’s no problem to give your book away, and probably a good idea from a marketing standpoint. It took me a while to realize that, but now I’ve embraced it with a vengeance.

            When I published the e-book version of my mystery novel The McHenry Inheritance on Amazon last summer, the outsized-ego part of me was expecting it to be greeted with a parade and a White House reception, even as the rational part of me knew that was ridiculous. To the great American public, I’m just one of thousands, if not millions, of unknown authors.

            I had, however, signed up for Amazon’s Kindle Select program, which allows authors to offer the book free five days out of every three months. A couple of self-published authors I contacted through Twitter recommended doing that. Figuring it would be worth a try, I put my book up as a free promotion the second day it was on Amazon, and before I began notifying my friends, who I figure would be willing to pay the $2.99 it cost otherwise.

            On that first free promotion day, 250 people bought the book, which was a very respectable showing, and I’ve run several free promotions since.

Establishing What It’s Worth

            At this point, of course, a cynic could argue that all I’ve done is establish what my book is worth, namely nothing. But I don’t see it that way. As an unknown author, my first challenge is to find readers and start generating some word of mouth among those who like the book. If a free promotion gets me a few readers I otherwise wouldn’t have had, I consider myself ahead. Financially, I’m certainly not behind.

            My thinking has turned from the original idea of making a little money on the first book to the notion that the first book is the loss-leader that will set up sales for the second one. Hence, the more freebies that get snapped up, the better. Last weekend I did a free promotion day and moved 156 copies.

            Who knows how many of the people getting my book that way are actually reading it? I suspect that fewer than half will ever so much as start it. But a few who do, and who like it and tell their friends, can do me a lot of good. My fingers are crossed.