Today we are going to talk a little about the dreaded “M” word…marketing.
Every author needs it, but not every author is good at it. I’m one of those authors who is horrible at it. Every year I say I am going to be a better marketer, and every year, I fail. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand what I am supposed to do.
Let’s spend some time today talking about one of my favorite parts of marketing, and something I am actually good at.
Marketing quotes.
As a self-published author it is never too early to start thinking about marketing your book. In fact, you can start thinking about marketing while you are writing and editing, and I suggest you do.
What is a marketing quote?
My definition of a marketing quote is simply a great line or lines that you pull from your book and then use in a marketing campaign, paid ads or social media posts. They can be used for any kind of marketing that you do. They can even be used to entice readers to visit your table at author events.
Simply put, marketing quotes are one of the most valuable forms of marketing any author can have.
Why are they so important?
Marketing quotes are a simple, cheap, and effective way to showcase your writing to new readers and to give them a hint of what to expect when they pick up your book. And if you pick the right quotes, they will help you with sales.
How do you get marketing quotes?
Finding them is the easy part. As you are writing or editing, I suggest pulling out some of your favorite lines in your manuscript and placing them in a word document, so they are easy to find when you are ready to use them. And you will use them…frequently. Here are some I pulled for my vampire series as I was writing. I keep them in my files and add to the file and pull from the file as needed.
Here is an example of some that I have saved to my file.
I slid my dagger back into its sheath and replaced it with my stake. Righty had just bought himself a fast pass to hell.
When André had reentered my life after a fifty-two-year absence, I had imagined my days filled with brother and sister bonding. What I got was free porn on constant loop and dirty boxers on the bathroom floor.
I may be getting ready to meet a heavenly being, but that didn’t mean I needed to put on airs…just pants.
Delano was stoking the sparks of fear and prejudice that still lived inside the humans, hoping it became an out-of-control fire. A fire that would lead to craziness and chaos.
What do I do with the quotes after I have them?
Once you have your quotes, it is time to create graphics to use for promotional puposes. If you don’t have access to Adobe photoshop or illustrator, there are a couple of really great sites that you can use to create graphics. BookBrush and Canva are the two that come to mind. Both sites have limited free options and of course they have paid options as well. The price points aren’t that far off from each other and in the end, I think it depends on which site you are more comfortable using.
BookBrush
Bookbrush makes creating eye-catching marketing pieces easy. They offer background images, fonts, and 3D templates to place your book covers on and make them look like actual books. They even offer already designed templates that you can use if you don’t want to create your own.
But they don’t only make marketing material, you can also create video’s, social media headers, covers, and just recently they added the ability to create box sets.
Here are a couple of graphics I have created using BookBrush.
Canva
Canva has come a long way in the past few years. I used to prefer BookBrush, but now I find myself switching between the two depending on what I want to do design wise. I even belonged to a marketing service that would set up templates in Canva for everyone to plug their own graphics and text into to use for promotion.
The one thing missing from Canva is the ability to put your cover on a 3D book image, otherwise it really is a great program.
Here is the latest design I did in Canva.
I am sure I am missing a program that has popped up in the past few years, but you can’t go wrong with the tools and options that both BookBrush and Cava have to offer. Even someone without a background in graphic design can create something beautiful using either site.
No matter what you use, you can't go wrong with a good marketing quote to help readers one click the buy button and download your book on their Kindle.
I’d love to see some line from your WIP or even published books that are worthy of a marketing quote, so let’s fill the comments with all the well written lines!
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About Jenn
Sass. Snark. Supernatural Sizzle.
Award winning author of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance. Vampires, Greek gods, and a bit of Demon Destroyer fun for everyone.
Jenn Windrow loves characters who have a pinch of spunk, a dash of attitude, and a large dollop of sex appeal. Top it all off with a huge heaping helping of snark, and you’ve got the ingredients for the kind of fast-paced stories she loves to read and write. Home is a suburb of it’s-so-hot-my-shoes-have-melted-to-the-pavement Phoenix. Where she lives with her husband, two teenagers, and a slew of animals that seem to keep following her home, at least that’s what she claims.
I love Facebook. It has helped me launch a business, find old friends, document family memories, and engage with communities that otherwise I wouldn’t have connected with.
But a few days ago, Facebook decided to suspend my account without warning, without real appeal – permanently. I was on Facebook for 17 years without any infractions in those years. Being suspended on Facebook also gets you banned on Instagram (because Facebook owns Insta).
I have, in the past, taught writers how to use Facebook correctly to avoid Facebook jail or getting suspended. I’m typically a rule-follower. I’ve always warned people that Facebook is a game of roulette, and I guess I finally lost that game.
What Did I Do To Get Banned
I commented on a post shared by a writer friend. I didn’t post the photo. Many people commented on that near-viral post, or made a very similar comment. Here’s the photo in question:
I checked with Snopes – this is a legit label for One Night Cough Syrup from the 1800s. I made the joke that all they were really missing was cocaine – then they’d have had something really fantastic.
Now, keep in mind that Coca (the plant cocaine is made from) was a key ingredient in Coca-Cola in the 1800s and became popular because of its euphoric effects and boosted energy (source here). Sigmund Freud wrote the “Cocaine Papers” and prescribed it as a miracle drug.
I was joking, but the regular accepted legal use at the time this cough syrup was being marketed of Coca and cocaine is very well documented.
I was not promoting drug use. I was not trying to sell or make drugs, and (in my opinion) the sarcasm about the helpfulness of cocaine in this recipe was blatant. It wasn’t a positive endorsement of the drug. What I did was use a banned word: “cocaine.” That was the real infraction. Yes, technically I was allowed to appeal, but the appeal was denied within one minute.
There were no human eyes involved in that appeal. And what adds to the sting is when speaking with a friend who’s a cop and sharing this experience, they laughed. They personally know of several cocaine dealers who use Facebook to move their product and have multiple Facebook accounts. *sigh*
May the odds be ever in your favor!
The Problem With AI Censors
Censorship is a problem, generally IMHO, but Facebook’s punitive use of banned words has been a recognized reality for a long time. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook), announced just this week that the platform would no longer censor users and instead promote free speech and is backing away from the banned words filtering.
The problem in tasking a computer to simply catch words that are banned means false positives (as in my case), and that any personal bias on the part of the developer, “fact-checkers”, or high-level execs filters down and silences voices that hold differing opinions. The Zuck openly admits this in his announcement this week (Here’s the announcement the Zuck made on the very same day I lost my account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSHpYHncNxw )
You Could Lose Your Facebook And Instagram Accounts Too
Here’s the stark reality (and this hasn’t changed in the 17yrs I’ve used Facebook): you don’t own any real estate on Facebook, or Instagram, or Tiktok or any other platform. That means you can be restricted, censored, and removed without any meaningful way to appeal or get human eyes or ears on your plight. There’s not really even any point in trying in my opinion.
Facebook has known for many years that their filters are punishing and suspending accounts wrongfully, and there was never any real mechanism put in place to deal with it. They don’t care:
how long you’ve been on Facebook.
that you’re losing access to a genuine community you’ve spent ten years building.
that you’ve lost precious photos and family memories.
how much money you spend on ads.
Tough luck.
Fooling The Filters
If you are using Facebook to promote your books or create a community, you’ve probably already been warned about the banned words filters. Many writers avoid the filters by asking for advice on how to “unalive” a character in a particular setting or historical time. Some replace characters with symbols to try and escape the AI: de@d for instance.
Posting book covers that reveal any amount of skin is problematic. I’m hearing of people having accounts restricted or suspended for posting a pic of a baby’s face for crying out loud. A friend got thrown in Facebook jail for using the word “fairy” in the context of talking about the Nutcracker Ballet’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Posting book covers or book titles that show any kind of weapons can get you in trouble. I heard of another who landed in Facebook jail for mentioning they were “hanging” a photo.
Filter Sensitivity
The filters are so sensitive it’s ridiculous. (I’ve heard many many similar complaints about Amazon filters on book covers, titles, and descriptions as well.)
If you’re writing content that others may find objectionable (language, nudity, sexuality, violence), you’re playing Facebook roulette. If the AI filters don’t nab you, all it can take is one complaint. And don’t be naïve and think that complaint system isn’t used punitively by others because it absolutely is.
Don’t neglect building community on space you do own – like a website, or an email list. For years, writers have been told not to rely on social media and make sure they build an email list. And that’s really hard as a fiction author because:
What do you blog about?
Should you go to the time and expense of a website if you haven’t got a book out yet, but realize you need to build community if you’re going to sell the book once it’s out?
If you’re not publishing a new book every month, what do you include in a newsletter?
I get it. It’s a catch 22. Keep writing more books. It’s still true that the best way to sell the last book you wrote, is to publish another.
An email list may be the only way you have to communicate with people should the worst happen. Include links to an email list inside book matter for new releases and such. Try giving away free content in exchange for an email: extra chapters, prequel short stories, maps and other resources, etc.
Why Losing Facebook And Instagram Isn’t A Huge Problem
As someone who’s a news junkie, Facebook forced me over to X simply to stay on top of world events and to engage with local news. This move drastically reduced my Facebook usage. Perhaps for the better, given the events of this week. (As a Canadian, I’ve been barred from seeing any news links from anywhere around the world for a year and a half - see that announcement from Meta here.)
I have guest-posted here and in other places for many years, always leaving the same link to the same Facebook group. I’ve got a very good, organically-grown, audience there. And the reality is that the majority of those won’t sign up for my email list. And that sucks.
I have always relied on organic reach for my blog. I took a really fantastic course on organic growth a few years ago, and it has paid me back three times over. It doesn’t run anymore, but if you connect with Rachel Miller (www.rachelmiller.com) on her blog or other socials, she gives away a lot of free content.
Diversify!
All my eggs aren't invested in one social basket. I invested a moderate amount of time into Pinterest. I get very little traffic on blog post links from Facebook (the algorithm changes from time to time, but blog links have had seasons of very dismal reach). A great majority of the social traffic to my blog comes from Pinterest. Now, my blog’s audience is mostly writers, but even if your blog audience are genre fiction readers there is a lot of opportunity on Pinterest to engage and drive traffic.
If there’s one type of content I’ve been asked for more than another other from readers, it’s video content. So, I’ll be launching my YouTube channel very very soon.
Does YouTube have similar maddening censorship? Absolutely. I’m exchanging one roulette gun for another – I’m aware of that. So, I’ll be building in whenever possible links to the blog which encourages people to sign up for the emails. Creating unique content on each channel helps people see the need to get email even if they follow on Pinterest or subscribe on YouTube.
I’m waiting to see what happens with TikTok in the United States. That may be a platform I dive into learning if there’s a positive outcome there.
Backup Everything
I’ll be doing videos of my blog posts, and posting the short tutorial videos I had been posting infrequently on my Facebook group. I have a lot of those short tutorial videos saved offline (you can download even the live-streamed videos). That’s another key. Save everything offline (or at least the popular content), so if you have to start over, you have the content your audience resonated with to get you started.
Make a point of saving your email list offline at regular intervals.
Don’t rely on website platforms to buy your URLs. Make sure you own them, and can take them with you should something happen to your website platform (I use WordPress, but there’s a learning curve with that).
Invest In Learning SEO
Search Engine Optimization is always a great investment of your time, in my opinion. If you’re not hiring out your social media posting or blogging, then learning SEO is going to deliver really great bang for your buck. There are a variety of free and paid resources out there to help you do this, but understanding SEO means you’ve got a better understanding of keywords as they’re used as hashtags, or search features on social media or Amazon.
Learn Google Analytics for your blog or book data on retailer platforms. Know where your traffic is coming from, and focus on those platforms.
Don’t try and do it all. Learning these features means you’re better positioned to take advantage of organic discovery and algorithm recommendations (which cost you nothing).
I may try and create a new profile in a bit. Afterall, Facebook was the primary way I kept in touch with family. My first attempt got shut down almost immediately. I had a new email, used a device I’ve never used for Facebook, but it didn’t matter. You need a new email and phone number (unless you’ve somehow been able to avoid giving your phone number to Facebook), and restrict posting any photos of yourself because those were all mapped and catalogued and will be flagged on future profiles.
How do you feel about using Facebook to build community or drive traffic?
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About Lisa
Lisa Hall-Wilson is a writing teacher and award-winning writer and author. She’s the author of Method Acting For Writers: Learn Deep Point Of View Using Emotional Layers. Her blog, Beyond Basics For Writers, explores all facets of the popular writing style deep point of view and offers practical tips for writers.
Every time I speak to a fellow author, we end up talking about how frustrating and time consuming—not to mention money consuming—promotion on social media is.
Let’s be honest, when you are a writer all you want to do is write. Not edit, not think about blurbs or promotion. We just want to write and everything else just feels like a huge imposition, an obstacle standing in our way.
That’s exactly how I felt in the beginning and I bet this has happened to you as well.
The journey begins.
Years ago, when I started the publishing journey, I met this wonderful lady online in a book club group on Facebook. She messaged me in private and said, “My dear, you’re doing it all wrong. That’s not how you promote your work.” I literally fell off my chair. I had no idea what I was doing.
I’d simply wrote my first romance book and felt pretty happy with myself—that I’d managed to complete it without tearing it apart, for one thing.
Was I suppose to do more besides clicking ‘publish’ on KDP?
That’s how I was introduced to things like
‘group takeovers’
marketing concepts such as logos
branding
sharing social media handles and amazon links
having a readers group and a street team.
It was just after writers like Colleen Hoover became known and successful, when bloggers influenced what people clicked and read.
I’m sure I’m not alone when I say this. I was just a girl who wanted to write and was trying to catch on fast on how be noticed and hopefully read. That’s all I wanted, isn’t that what we all want? To be considered and our work read. Hopefully appreciated.
But it was hard, incredibly demanding and time consuming,
with a fulltime job
a family
little time to write
spending time on social media to share my work
living in Europe and trying to be active online when people in the US were online…
At some point I even hired a personal assistant to help me out. I had friends sharing daily in groups. I got little sleep and some writing done. Eventually I collapsed. Slowly, steadily I started to dislike what I was seeing, this world I was getting sucked into. In the end I called myself out.
Here’s what I discovered.
1) Most of the things you see on social media are construed. Unhealthy, toxic. People attack you for the silliest reasons. If you have an opinion, you’re trouble. If you don’t have an opinion, nobody even notices you. So many use social media strategically to fit their needs. They make up situations, post drama or salty messages deliberately to gain likes or sympathy. Drama becomes their fortune. Plotting at its finest.
2) It can make you question your talent. I faced authors who wrote one book a month, yes you read that right. One book a month, when I was struggling to write one a year. How in the hell were they doing this? And why?
People kept telling me I needed to work fast, get a new story out constantly to stay in the spotlight but I just couldn’t. The more I learned about promotion, about the book community, the more I felt different, not part of the trend.
Fast stories to keep swimming, construed drama to get attention. I saw people, writers jumping on the safe side of the drama bandwagon just to get a few likes, earn popularity. Naming and shaming others, getting people to write bad reviews on books by said authors… toxic doesn’t even begin to describe this scenario.
What the hell had I gotten myself into? I wasn’t like that. I could never be like that. This is not writing, this writing community is nothing like they said it would be—it’s neither kind or supportive, it’s mostly harsh, fake, and could possibly end with a ‘friendly’ backstabbing.
So I did the only thing I could do.
I called myself out.
I took not a step back, but a whole mile back, and it just happened to coincide with the downfall of takeovers and self-promotion.
There was a shift on which posts were seen and those that weren’t. The algorithm became the enemy and soon we were all trying to understand how to get around it.
All of a sudden, it’s either you pay social media to promote your work through ads or you’re invisible, you’re doomed.
Money to stay afloat, money to stay visible.
Don’t get me wrong, ads work, to some extent. If you gamble with them for a bit, you can get them working. They actually help you sell, help you climb those amazon charts. But to be able to make money, make a profit, it takes more than pretty words lined up in an ad. Or the right picture to go with your snippet from the book. You need time and money.
So, this is where I started asking myself the inevitable question, the one I think most writers in our era, having so much material and so many authors out there, ask ourselves.
What happened to talent?
Writing not because you want to make a profit, but because it’s who you are, what you do? It’s what you were born to do. What happened to picking up a book not because an ad tells you to, but by word of mouth, because it inspires you, as you flipped through the pages and enjoyed the first snippet?
Independent publishing has been a fantastic tool for wannabe writers out there and I’m so grateful I’ve had the chance to use it myself, but I do wonder if all this material available online has made us all dramatically invisible. To be seen you have to climb, step over others, be creative in how to emerge. It’s not a question of talent, but rather about creating the perfect stunt, or knowing your stuff when it comes to algorithm. Or paying.
I called myself out.
I got myself an agent and I try to focus on writing more than anything else. Which doesn’t mean I won’t be promoting my work in the future, but I’m one hundred percent out of this rat race where everyone pretends to be friends, pretends to be supportive of other women, when in reality it’s just a matter of time before it backfires, hard.
Ask yourself these questions, does:
Stephen King promotes himself on social media?
write a book a month?
take part in any sort of drama?
Does JK Rowling spend time online sharing her work? Sure, I’ve just mentioned two very famous writers, who surely don’t need introductions or paid ads. But that’s the kind of writer you should aspire to be, someone so well-known because of their talent that they don’t need all the fluff, all that nonsense to get around.
Social media is just a blur, it hides the truth. It’s a detour to what is really important.
Final thoughts.
Write your stories, make sure they’re the best you can do, and look for someone—a professional, like a literary agent—who can make the difference, who believes in you, who falls in love with your words and supports you.
Don’t get tangled in the jungle. It will make you want to quit and keep you from writing the book that needs to be read.
What are your thoughts on using social media for promotion? What has worked for you? Have you felt the need to call yourself out?
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About Laura
Laura Rossi is an Italian multi-genre writer. Raised in the US and in the UK, where she graduated in Psychology and Criminology, she now resides in Italy with her family.
Devotedly interested in the human mind, Laura likes to scare people saying she goes ‘from sweet to psycho in a matter of seconds’ with her characters. One day she’s writing something sweet and funny, the other she’s crafting dark, flawed characters for edgy, twisted stories.
When she’s not busy working in her family business or being a mom, she loves to travel and attend rock shows. If you see her wandering around town with a wicked smile on her lips, she’s probably thinking of putting you in one of her novels, plotting a new thriller in her head or figuring out which character needs to get the bullet.
For any rights or sub-rights query, Laura is represented by agent Nikki Groom at SBR Media.
