If this is what they’re doing for Stephen King, they most certainly cannot help you market your book.
THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS.
You either need to spend 3,000 hours learning and getting your PhD in online marketing, or you need to hire a marketing expert.
Marketing your book, with the end goal of getting your book seen, read, and reviewed, is not the job of your agent, nor your publisher. It used to be the publisher’s job, in conjunction with the local bookstores, because they had the distribution channels, physical shelf space and the market share.
All of that is gone now. The marketing and distribution channels of publishers have dried up, as well as the actual physical purchasers who would walk into a book store and buy a book.
Largely, they no longer have a book store to sell books in, millions of them have gone out of business and closed down, empty retail space now remains.
For over a decade now, the percentage of people who wanted to walk into a book store and buy a book has plunged dramatically. They all want to do it online.
Publishers themselves, as well as book agents are going out of business because they no longer have the revenue streams from the past and they have not kept up with the times.
They may display a thin veneer of pseudo digital knowledge, such as they might say, “We’ll create a video for your book and a page on our publishing site,” but scratch the surface a bit and it’s fool’s gold, gold plated, underneath hiding the ugly truth that your book will sit on dusty digital shelves with no readers, no traction and no visibility.
Great, they give you a video, now what? Who sees it? No one except your aunt who you send a direct link to. Great, they give you a page on their site, who sees it? Is it set up correctly to create sales? No.
Marketing a book is a highly skilled enterprise that involves multiple digital platforms interplaying with each other.
This is a field that the traditional publishers and agents have not kept up with, have no expertise in, and cannot help you with.
The truth is, they are like the towns in old Western movies; nothing but a cardboard storefront with empty space behind it. They have nothing to offer you. They can’t even guarantee you shelf space in a book store. So what are they doing for you exactly, to market your book?
If you don’t believe me, take a recently published book, any book, and look at its marketing strategy. Let’s take Stephen King as an example. Here’s a writer who has sold millions of books, yet have you seen his website? www.StephenKing.com
It’s terrible. His agents and publishers have not even thought about the fact that he needs a great website, and he himself hasn’t either.
It looks like it was made 15 years ago and actually, as it turns out, it was. Looking at the copyright in the footer, 17 years ago to be precise.
There are no e-mail harvesting funnels, no social media integration, no calls to action, nothing that remotely depicts what the modern digital age can bring you as a writer. Huge blank spaces on the home page, it’s an absolute mess, even just from a design standpoint.
If this is how publishers are marketing their prized writer who generates actual revenue streams for them, how do you think they are going to be able to help you? They can’t. They cannot help you because they do not have the skills, knowledge or even desire to do so. Desperately trying to still appear relevant, they are clinging with a death grip to an old business model and are in mid-stride over the edge of a cliff.
It’s a whole new world and you need a digital expert to show you the way. Do you know what is possible with digital marketing? Anything your heart desires. You can reach for the stars, lasso them and put them in your pocket. You just have to want it badly enough.
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