Essentials of Book Marketing Strategy

All right, let's kick this off. Can you guys hear me well? Good, yes? All right. I'm actually, you know what, I'm going to take off my heels anyway. That will get me closer to the mic. As much as I love wearing these, it's a little much to stand in one place for that long. They can be there and be pretty, and we'll move on. Also, it's like the last day of presentations, so there's alcohol sitting on the table out front, out there, so if anyone just needs one. It's totally understandable. All right, so we're going to talk today about how to market to market. We've all, of course, heard about writing to market, but we don't think about marketing to market. We think about trying to market our books to the right people. but how do people perceive the market? What are expectations out there amongst readers and what imagery, what words convey what to them? And so how do we figure that out and then how do we capitalize on it? Most people probably know me as Mallory, the mistress of Facebook ads. I'm dressed for the part today, too, right? If I brought a riding crop, this would have been perfect. I said I moved away from the mic because that part's not recorded. But yeah, but I actually also have a background in graphical design. I started doing graphical design back in, like, 1997. I realized that I am a year away from having used Photoshop for 30 years, which is sort of a mind-blowing thing. Like, have we been computering? for 30 years? Like apparently we have. But I've designed over 160 book covers and I've done typography. Actually, this number is probably pretty low now. I probably should update this to be like 350, maybe 400 covers now I've done typography on. And I've worked with hundreds of authors on their covers, titles, and blurbs, and I've marketed thousands of books. And talking about this particular subject came about because at The Writing Wives, we work primarily with people writing Facebook ads for their books, but we found that a lot of books... weren't in a position that we could market them with Facebook profitably. We needed to do some surgery on the covers and the blurbs and the titles. So we started to sort of build out like an offering around that and sort of like build that into like our standard, our SOPs that we do when we're running Facebook ads. And this presentation was born out of that. So every book is a kaleidoscope. I've always pronounced it kaleidoscope, but just now I realized that maybe I'm supposed to pronounce the I more than, or the E more than I do. Anyway, you guys know what I'm talking about. So often you ask an author, you're like, what is your book about? And they're like, well, it's a bit of a mashup. And I feel like saying, they all are a mashup. If you wrote a book that only had like one genre and one trope in it, it would be really boring and probably about 10 pages long, right? So all of our books are collections of different tropes and genres that we've been exposed to that we like, that we enjoy, that we think will be a fun and interesting mix. And the benefit from that is that your book is likely... marketable and receivable, I guess if that's a word, to different people for different reasons. And you can leverage that. You can maybe, for example, right now, a particular trope is really popular that your book contains, and then maybe eventually that trope's gone. Another trope is popular that your book also contains. You can pivot your marketing to capitalize on those things. Of course, it has to be a major trope in your book. It can't be like, you know, there are friends in my books, therefore it's friends to lovers. actually be the trope, of course. But, yeah, Becca Syme wrote a really good rant about that recently. If you go on her wall, she did a fantastic job talking about how your book should actually contain the tropes you say it does. We're going to operate under the understanding that we've all done that homework and we know what tropes we have, but actually we'll talk a little bit about what tropes are too. We'll get to that. So the first thing you have to do is determine what they are, if you don't already know. Some people also think of tropes as a dirty word. They're like, oh, it's tropey, it's terrible, but tropes are good. And then we're going to study the market and identify what the bestsellers are pushing and then we're going to create a strategy for our own book. So a trope is, this is like the fancy definition, the use of figurative language via word, phrase, or image for artistic effects such as using a figure of speech. Keith and Lundberg described a trope as substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or... that's like, oh my god. It's shorthand. Trope is a shorthand for a common story element. I like, I put that first quote in there like intending to be able to read it seriously and I've never gotten through it without... This is so many words to say such a basic thing. Clearly, a writer was involved there, as we all know. So, the quarter-common trope examples. Tropes, by the way, sometimes they overlap directly with genre. Sometimes a certain genre is actually just a trope. Lit RPG is a great one. Lit RPG, you get trapped in a video game, which is a trope, and it's also the entire genre being trapped in a video game to some extent. Like Tron was the first. really big sort of like ...chopped into game litter, PG kind of thing, but in a way, it's actually just an extension of the old, I stepped into the wardrobe, you know, in the old mansion, and suddenly I'm in Narnia. It's the same idea, right? Like you're getting whisked away and taken somewhere. So that's obviously a common trope. rags to riches, found family, enemies to lovers, damsel in distress, the chosen one, femme fatale, mad scientist, and like the old man, the old wise mentor, old woman, you know, the crone. We were reclaiming the word crone earlier for those of you in that conversation about how we're all all very excited about being able to be crones someday. I think. Anyway. And some of these actually common tropes are even actually some of the fundamental story types, because there's only about seven to about 20, depending on who you ask, basic story types. And some of those are actually also standard tropes, like Hero's Journey. Rags to Riches is actually one of the basic story types that's out there. And so one of the things that's, I think, good to sort of come to. to grips with, if you haven't already, is that you don't have any new ideas in your book. I'm sorry. I mean, you might have a new combination of ideas, and you're going to have your own unique new spin on it, but you haven't come up with something that has never existed before in some similar form. And that's not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing. Because we're all readers, right? We don't sit down and say, like, hey, today I want to read something completely unlike anything I've ever read before that doesn't contain any of those warm, comfy feelings I'm used to having. I want to read something completely different that's going to challenge me and stress me out and stuff like that. And while we may do that sometimes, we don't do it every day, right? Sometimes we're like, you know what? I like a cheeseburger with nothing weird on it. I just want a cheeseburger, and that's what you want to come back to. And readers, as we know, because you should be a reader too, I imagine, that's how we are. We want to read those comforting things. So the tropes are great. The tropes help us in conveying that information to our readers and getting them to come back for that home-cooked meal that they know is what's going to happen, what they like. So you have to find your book's sub-genres and tropes. You're going to have to do a little bit of research on that yourself, and we'll talk a little bit about some places you can... Actually, I think I was on the last slide. Right, tvtropes.org. Who's been to tvtropes.org? Oh, yeah, you guys are good people. You know what you're doing. If you haven't, don't go there now, because you will miss the rest of my presentation, but you will be giggling to yourself as you read the ridiculous names that they have for tropes on that website. I didn't know about it until my readers actually made a TV Tropes page for me, and I was like, holy crap, I have so many of these really common tropes in my book that I never even thought... lot about. And it was really interesting to then read other people's descriptions for other people's books and shows and realize how many common tropes there are and how they're actually really loved. So definitely do that. Look for tropes. You can also just Google, you know, top 100 tropes in my genre, and you'll see lists of tropes and you can be like, oh, I have that trope, I have that trope, I have that trope, and build yourself a list of all of your tropes. So you'll do that and then you want to say like, okay, now that I know what I'm doing, what are the people who are selling well doing? And... To figure that out we're gonna take a look at espionage thrillers because espionage thrillers are completely different than anything I write and I thought it'd be fun to like take it to go on an adventure in a place I don't normally go to I mean I do to a certain extent because I run ads for lots of people who do espionage thrillers but Still though like I want to show what the what these things look like so these are At this point when I made this slide this was the number the top six espionage thrillers out there Saul Herzog is dominating and I believe still continues to dominate this indie author I don't even know if anyone actually knows for sure who this person is. I've talked around, talked in various circles before, and people are like, I don't know who this is. They just appeared, and they're just selling all the books now. But if you kind of look, the covers, in fact, I'll go over this next slide here. The covers that Saul Herzog had done broke the mold for thrillers. Thriller covers were always like the big, massive font, the huge text, always sans serif, unless, is Adam here? No, Adam's not here. Adam writes under D.D. Black. and he is like a really well-selling mystery thriller author who used a serif font for his name and it's like Adam you did it wrong he's like I'm like I always I said to him I said you did it wrong you should have had a sans serif font so doesn't have like little you know curls on the T's and all that jazz I'm like I never wanted to tell you that because you're it's working so well and he's like he's like yeah but maybe it'll work better if I try it the other way so he's gonna run an experiment and actually redo his author name on his book so that it's a sans serif font for his author name you know not a serifed font. Everybody knows what the difference is, right? So you go, okay, if you didn't, I'm sorry. You'll figure it out. So when Saul Herzog came onto the scene, everybody always did back of character or like a road with like...if you look at Lee Child books, it's like an intersection is like the cover of the book. And a lot of people were doing things like that, and it was always like a silhouette from the back, but now he's showing this action shot with a character from the front. And... He's positioning his text differently. He's not doing the standard, you know, text at the top like you see in the Mark Dawson cover there, or like the above and below. He's kind of like, he's shifting how he's doing things. And this was a genre that the covers were done in a specific way. And the interesting thing... that happened is the big names in the genre changed their book covers. When I meant to make this presentation, I was actually looking for David Archer covers because I know David Archer does his covers the old way. I can grab some screenshots of how people used to do their covers. I actually kept thinking that these newer covers on the side were Saul Herzog's books. I'm like, oh, Saul Herzog's everywhere. I'm like, oh, wait, these are David Archer books. So I had to go back on Goodreads to find his old cover to show what he had done. So even the big names in this genre shifted the way that they were presenting the genre, the tropes in their stories, so that they could match the reader expectations. Because reader expectations will change over time. Some of it just sort of organically, and sometimes because someone big comes along and reworks the way it's done. done. And I said to Adam, I said, maybe you should leave your name sans serif. Maybe that'll become the thing and you can lead the charge of this new way of doing covers. But he's still going to test, which is actually a good idea. And that's actually something that I think as authors, we need to think about. We're like, okay with changing out blurbs, and we can even periodically change titles and whatnot. Harder to do with print, obviously, because print's a title tied to your ISBN. But if you didn't use an ISBN for your ebook, you can just change the title. Um, but we tend to think of our covers as like as like this thing that like I paid $300 for this cover or whatever you paid for covers should like last for like five to ten years I'm gonna get the maximum use out of this cover it reminds me of like in shop class as a kid you'd be sitting there with the saw like working on something and your teacher come by like you pay I paid for the whole saw you better use the whole saw because he wanted to be like going up and down the whole saw to use all the teeth I feel like sometimes we feel that way about our covers too we're like over very precious about them I got this cover I paid for it but if your covers not working if it's not aligned with genre expect expectations and trope expectations from the readers, then you gotta change it. And we probably need to think a bit more like that. Like, I need to actually not just like get a cover, especially for your book ones. Later books in the series are a little bit less particular about this. But for book one, say like, I need to have a budget to actually get three covers done, and I need to test these three covers and see which one's going to work better, and then come up with the cover that you end up using. Or, I mean, another way of doing that too is just by doing omnibuses and special editions and giving them different covers and then seeing which one works better. You can kind of work at it from both angles. But we really do need to think about that. about that. We need to stop thinking about covers as a thing that we have to use the whole cover because we paid for it. If it's not working, we should stop doing it. So let's talk about authors to examine. Oh, I'm doing so well. I'm like on, I don't even know what slide I'm on. I'm like almost halfway through it and we still have 30 minutes. I might have time for questions. This is amazing. Okay. You guys, for anyone who's ever been in one of my talks before, they know what that's like. It's like, there's no questions. Find me later. Okay. So domestic thrillers. Now, when we're looking at these domestic thrillers, and my contacts are not working as well in Vegas here. I keep getting, like, I have a charge on seeing anything. Right. So we're looking at these domestic thrillers here, and a lot of these authors have, you know, 67,000 reviews on their books and stuff like that. And there's a certain point, and this threshold is different in every genre. Like, in military science fiction, it's very hard to get reviews in that genre. You get sometimes only, like, one review every thousand sales kind of thing. It never, it's not usually that. that bad, but it can be that bad. Other genres, you can get like a review every 15 sales. So you kind of have to know your genre to a certain extent and be like, okay, these people up here are clearly like their trad pub. People will buy their books if the cover was black and just had their name on it, right? So you need to not be looking at people like that. You need to be looking for the scrappy mid-listers who are pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and see what they're doing to convey genre and trope and how they're presenting what their book is about to readers because they're the ones where that description, that cover. that title is make or break as to whether or not their book sells. So don't spend too much time examining the really big authors. Always like kind of step yourself down a bit. You know, in romance, that's contemporary romance, for example, that's going to be people that are like maybe 5,000 reviews are the authors who are still like, you know, they're scrappy, they're doing it on their own. You know, and those authors are sitting there like 30,000, 40,000 reviews, you know, you know that those books are going to sell no matter what. Do check how long the book's been out, of course, because some brand new author, some big name author might have released a book yesterday and it has, you know, 5,000 reviews. reviews and you think it's just some some mid-lister but it's not so do take a look at that it is also interesting by the way just looking at these domestic thrillers how these are still thriller books right like they're still in the same genre as these oh my goodness the same overarching genre if everybody was asleep those of you watching at home i'm glad to have woken you up i don't normally have nails this long and my mind is not used to there being that much there but anyway like these are still thrillers between these two ones but you can tell just by looking at them. That, you know, there's less, these are obviously lower on the action department. There's not like a, there's not motion. Having a character in motion on your cover is one of the best ways of conveying action in the story. The color palettes have changed. You know, we're looking at a lot more high contrast types of things. We're looking at more artistic types of things versus just conveying something like a scene from the story. That tells us that we're moving into more emotional stories, more reflective emotional stories versus more aggressive emotional stories. Because you have to remember, anger is an emotion. you know, rage and all that stuff is an emotion. Sometimes we forget that both of those things are emotions. And as an author, by the way, it is our job to sell our readers on emotions. Readers don't read books because they, well, I mean, they read books for a lot of reasons. But the real reason why people read books is that they wanna have a particular feeling. In fact, that's why people come back to the same type of book so much. I mean, that's why contemporary romance sells so well, right, you're like, you think to yourself, like, it's kind of, like, you might think it's boring, right? It takes place in, like, regular, everyday life. and, you know, I'm already living everyday regular life. I want to go somewhere else. But at the same time, you read contemporary romance and you get, like, those heady feelings from, like, the beginning of a romantic relationship with zero risk, which works well for my books. I write military science fiction, and you can fly along in a spaceship with a bunch of people going pew, pew, pew, also with zero risk. You know, it's the same idea. We're selling the emotion, we're selling the thrill. Or the not thrill, depending on the emotions that we're trying to sell, and you have to keep that in mind when you're looking at your cover. cover? What emotion is it evoking? And get as much of that as possible. And of course, cover set expectations. This is like one of my favorite arrays of covers, because we've got no home for killers, right? Like the font, the font says thriller. We've got like the sort of disinterested young woman looking there, but there's a silhouetted figure reflected in her sunglasses. Like you can get a lot of information about that. We know, you get the feeling almost that it's a one-on-one sort of situation, because we only see these two characters. The fact that the word killer. is in the title, we know that there's going to be murder or attempted murder in here. You know probably at a glance whether or not that book is interesting to you, just on what's been shown on that cover. C.N. Crawford's Frost, that's a romantic fantasy. This one's a little bit interesting because if you've sort of been asleep for the last 10 years, you might not have realized that what used to look like a regular fantasy book now is what romantic fantasy books look like, what regular fantasy books looked like a year ago, 10 years ago. And so you might not be like, oh, this kind of looks like a cool, like, you know, winter elven kind of fantasy story, and it is. It just is also romantic fantasy. Although I think what a lot of people are starting to realize is that we've all been reading romantic books forever, and just they weren't billed as romantic books. I always joke that Anne McCaffrey, like, tricked an entire generation of men into reading sci-fi romance. Which, you know, and I'm just like, because these are all romances. Every single book she wrote was a romance that just happened to take place in space. And they were all amazing too, which helped a lot. But I remember the first time I read The Rowan, I was like, okay, all right, this is just all about her getting together with this guy. And then you read Damia, and you're like, looking back, and you're like, Damia was age gap romance. Oh my God. And I read that book for the aliens, but apparently that's not what I was there for. You've got Dark Elf Secret Baby. This one's amazing, right? It just says right on the tin what this book is about. And that's great marketing though, right? You're like, I want to read this. read about a dark elf secret baby look at those look at those pecs you could you could practically breastfeed that baby himself right there right it's amazing you know but you're like you're like you're like you're into that you immediately know right like all of the correct signals have been sent to you that that's the book that you want to read and then this other one into the stars you know you see the starship you see the big pew-pew in space and then if you look closely you'll see like a bunch of soldiers in the back of that ship you can't see it too well here which then someone who reads this kind of genre would convey to them that okay okay, it's not just all big ships shooting each other from like 10,000 kilometers away in space. There's going to be some ground-pounding action. There's going to be boots on the ground, soldiers fighting in corridors kind of thing. And if that's what you want, you know that's there as well. So all of these covers are doing a very good job of conveying the genre and trope information that's in them. And they are both pulling in the right people and pushing away the wrong people. And that's the other thing you have to keep in mind too, of course, is you don't want the wrong people reading your book because they're going to one-start, and then you're going to cry, and you're going to eat chocolate in the bathtub, you know. So I don't know. I don't know anything about that particular sort of event. It's chocolate and ice cream, right? It's got to be chocolate and ice cream, which is not good because we have this amazing homemade ice cream shop across the street from where we live. It's like three houses down and across, but they're open every day of the year except for Christmas, and they have the best ice cream ever. It's why I wear corsets. It's necessary. All right. And certain genres can get all the way down to font and color. If you're writing bad boy, mafia... bully romance. Then you basically can use one of three colors on your title. I mean there are exceptions, but it's pretty close, right? It's going to be gold and white or gold and red or white and red or white and gold. And you can see that. This is like, this is the extent of how these things are done. Actually one of these covers is... I did too, which I'm always proud of, but I won't tell you which one it was and you can just wonder. But we know by looking at these that we can tell just by looking at them what kind of angle we have going on because of things like the fact that they've got the badass look. looking guy, there's tattoos, you know, the shirts aren't done up all the way, or if the shirt is done up all the way, you still make sure you see the tattoos and the muscles bursting out of everything. The men look classy, but they look like they'll also, like, you know, break your nose if they have to. And that's going to be, like, your mafia romance, where if you want to move into bad boy romance, suddenly you get a different thing. The fonts and the colors are all still the same, but suddenly now the guys have changed, where apparently they're all touching their mouths. Apparently that's a thing. It's not universal, but the screenshots that I picked were all happened to be ones where the guy's like, hmmm, you know. A little bit of smolder there. And of course they usually have nicer looking suits a lot of the time, but there's no tattoos. Okay, this is billionaire. And some of them just say it. Obviously, that's one way to handle that problem too. But these subtle cues are actually really important in conveying to the reader. And as readers, we and readers who are also not writers, we... pick up on all of this, we just don't realize it at the time, you know? But as marketers, as authors, we have to be deliberate about it. We have to understand what am I conveying? Because too often we're like, oh, I want to convey a scene from the story or something like that, not realizing that maybe that scene is not emblematic of, like, the major themes in your book. It's just a cool scene or something like that. So you got to keep in mind that it's really all about... Your cover is like an emblem and it's less about the specific events and whatnot. It's trying to convey sort of overarching tones about... about your book. So, you know, some of the big things are typeface and font size. We talked a bit about that. Actually, these ones are really interesting too because they'll...you'll see a lot of times the...like any sort of like romantic thriller is going to use a sans-serif font like Prince of Hate to show that this has a thriller element. There are action elements in the story because they're pulling from that what people expect to see from thrillers. But then they're also doing things, a lot of them, not all of them, but mixing in a serif font or a script font. So, like, hey, it's still romance. you know, it's okay. And that's actually one of the ways they're doing that, by mixing those two fonts. It happens a little bit less in billionaire romance, but they're still, it's still because it's so focused on the guy and he's obviously not like standing there with like an M4 or something like that, you know that okay, this is clearly romance and not action. But yeah, font colors are really important, overall coloring, the character look, the clothing, the actions, are they still, are they in motion? And then lastly, of course, title and subtitle. One note, by the way, if you do want to convey action in a story, then your cover should incorporate orange and blue. Orange and blue have somehow become the action colors. No other genre out there has like defined colors. Okay, I take that back. One other genre out there has defined colors for about, I'll get to that one next, but if you actually look up orange blue movie poster theory, you'll actually see that like every single Marvel poster is orange and blue, with like I think like two exceptions. And if you actually get into something like the detailed analysis of it, you'll actually see that they tint the movie itself orange or blue. or blue in different scenes to convey action and different elements like that. The other genre that seems to be actually sort of coalescing around a specific color set up is domestic thrillers and mysteries are very often blue with yellow text. The fonts are yellow and the background is very blue. And that's not quite as universal as action. Action is very orange and blue and mystery is kind of moving into that. But you can even look at those color palettes and be like, wow, I see this color palette repeating so much. If I did that, I could like, it's an easy way to signal to my reader. readers that I have a certain thing going on. All right, so your title needs to add clues as to what your genre and tropes are. People are going to see your cover first, and then they're going to look for that title to double down on the genre and tropes that they've seen and, like, reinforce expectations. So we've got these sci-fi books up here. The first one is The Alpha Protocol. The Alpha Protocol is an okay title. The book actually is doing all right, but the thing I always look at this one is the This one's called The Alpha Protocol, and the series name is The Alpha Protocol Book. No, yeah, Alpha Protocol Book One, yeah. Oh, that said code for a second. You have an opportunity to share additional information, like is this Earth's last defense? Are you fighting aliens? Is it just hunting pirates? Did a rogue AI get loose? What's happening? What is The Alpha Protocol related to? We know it's like some sort of like, it feels very Doomsday-y, right? Like we kind of get that vibe when we've got this lone ship, but there's so much more you could. convey with a series name that would then like help double down on what this one's about. And it's a bit of a missed opportunity. So anytime you're doing that, you give a... You give your book and your series basically the same name and you don't use that opportunity to convey a whole new trope and genre information, you're missing out on an opportunity. Jeffrey Haskell, who is here, and his wife does his covers for him, and she does an amazing job. is Against All Odds and the series name is Grimms War Book One. So now we know, we get like these cool words right like against all odds okay this is this is one ship against insurmountable odds it's the it's like you know the lone soldier standing in the breach sort of storyline. which a lot of people love, and in science fiction right now is the biggest storyline that is going on. Pretty much every single book in the top 100, with maybe 10% of them don't match this. It's all like a lone warrior, or a last ship, or a last stand of some sort, or a book in a series about that. And they really capitalized on this really well. And even just the Grimm's War. Grimm is a great word to use in and of itself. And then the fact that it's possessive, it's Grimm's War. It's like, oh, this really is like this last... last guy just doing whatever he can to make things work. The Monroe Doctrine is a fantastic title for those of you who know what that is. And this is a really good one, because if you don't know what the Monroe Doctrine is, this doesn't mean anything to you. But for the people who do know what the Monroe Doctrine is, this immediately is just like, oh, this is a really cool title, and it's got all this action. It's orange and blue, you'll notice. So it's actually against all odds. And Alpha Protocol, actually all of these have the orange and blue to some extent. And this is one of those situations where I think I know know what something means, but I did this presentation a while ago, and now I can't remember the exact nature of the Monroe Doctrine. I'm going to say it and be wrong, and someone will correct me. That's actually the best way to find out the right answer for anything. Just say the wrong answer on the internet, and someone will come along and correct you. But I'm pretty sure it has to do with, like, the, you attack, it's the United States policy of if you attack any one of our allies, you attack us, and we will respond as though you attacked us. Right, the affairs of our allies and stuff. Yeah, oh that's right, thank you, yeah, yeah, that's the policy, like yeah, no one else can screw with the Americas, it's ours to mess up. Yes, that's the one, yeah, thank you. And so I think that was like the whole Cuban Missile Crisis too thing, right, like another power mess. settling in the Americas and we have to respond as though they were attacking America. There's obviously a lot more nuance in that. But for anybody who knows what that means, who's like a military history buff, it's going to immediately convey all sorts of really good information to them. And then Too Old to Die, which I think it's, there's like three or four series now that are like a dude that built a spaceship in his backyard or found one in a junkyard or something like that. It's like this huge trope right now. And it's actually, it's a great one too because it's got that, again, that whole like lone battle against all odds kind of thing going on there. And each one of these series, with a little bit less than the Monroe Doctrine, is actually kind of conveying that feeling. And they did a really good job and they were all selling incredibly well at the time that I made these. these slides and that's a great angle of how those covers are doubling down on the imagery that the book has. You're getting an extra level from that with the exception of the ELF protocol which sort of wastes the series line. I guess you could say Too Old to Die does too because there's no series listed. But I think there is a series on the actual page that did double down. So that brings us to keyword stuffing. I'm sure...actually, who does not know what keyword stuffing is? Okay, so a couple of people don't and everybody was too shy. Well, not everybody else, but some of the people out there were too shy. So the whole idea is that you put a bunch of extra words in your title. You can do it in your title or your subtitle. It has about the same effect. I prefer to do it in my title because I just like being able to manage the formatting more directly. But like one of mine is Out System, a military science fiction space opera epic, or like The Sinner, a dark college romance, or 100 Eternal Masterpieces of Literature, 100 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I've always thought that one was like kind of wild. It's like, it's like... It feels like you're on a death march and you now must read these and then you'll die. This will be the end of your life. You'll walk around the corner. Someone will have unveiled the painting. You see yourself and then that's it. But yeah, and that's a thing that actually I really recommend doing. But doing it in a way that actually makes a sentence. Don't just like jam a bunch of words in there in the hopes that the Amazon algorithm gods will help you. Put words in there that are doubling down and cementing in people's minds the genre and trope elements that your book embodies so that they see the cover, they read the title. then they see the additional words you've written in there and they're like, this book does or does not contain the thing that I want it to have. Other big thing is sort of an advantage of that too is that of all the keyword and metadata stuff that you put into Amazon, your title has the highest rank. So you have like those keyword categories, the seven boxes you fill in plus the three major categories that you pick. If someone searches for those terms, your book could come up, but your title is actually weighted higher in search results. So by getting these words into your title, you actually stand a better chance of coming... coming up when someone searches for those things. You cannot keyword stuff your print books. You can only do it to your e-books. Your print book, they're very particular about the cover. The text on the cover has to match the text that you put in the box, but on the e-books they're more forgiving. Every now and then they crack down on romance. They only seem to do this to romance where they're like... like you've keyword stuff and your title can only have what's on your book cover. And some people get freaked out. I'm like, just put those words on your book cover then. Problem solved, right? And you totally could. You could just have them written in small underneath the title on your book cover and no one would notice them. But they help a lot and they're really useful to do. and I highly recommend doing it. And again, write it as a sentence, and it will definitely help with people converting better when they come to your book page. And then lastly, we need to talk about your blurb. Your blurb has to really reinforce all of these things, and it has to align. Like, I remember talking to... I've talked to a couple of authors about this exact issue, so if you think, like, it me, it might not be you. I've talked to others about this too, but I've encountered a number of times where there are dragons in a book, and there's no dragon on the cover. and there's no dragon in the blurb. And I'm like, dragons are a big deal. People who like reading about dragons like reading about dragons. Why are you not selling the dragon angle that you've got going on here? Or if you have a cover that has a dragon on it and your blurb doesn't mention the dragon at all, that's also a misstep. Because then people are like, wait, well, I'm here for the dragon that I saw on the cover and the blurb does not mention a dragon. And you don't need a lot of uncertainty for people to just go away, right? Like you've kind of like reeled them in. You get the fish on the lure there on the line. line and you're reeling it in very carefully and the moment, man, I'm scaring myself for it, I'm scaring you guys with that. The moment that you do something wrong, they're going to get away. So you really have to make sure that you don't make missteps like that. But a blurb has to do five things. I've written a lot of blurbs, many of them from my own books since I have 130 some odd books out, but I've written a lot of blurbs for other people too and really found this to be true across the board, plus studying blurbs, et cetera. But the first thing your blurb has to do is it has to establish the status. status quo. Where is the character now? Because the books are all about conflict and something has to change to create conflict. So you have to establish the status quo. And that can be done really quickly. You could be like, you know, Jane was sick of her day job in the accounting firm. Boom, that's your status quo. It's been established. You've introduced the character and now we can move on. Hopefully, we'll do it a little bit more artfully than that, but that's like a really basic example. How does the status quo break? What happens? Jane gets fired. What is she going to do about it? She's going to get fired. to get a new job or maybe she tries to get her old job back, right? Because that's the two things. You either establish a new status quo or you try to go back to the old status quo. One of those two options is basically how every main character tries to resolve whatever conflict appeared in the story. And then, of course, here's the thing that you really have to do, and this is where a lot of blurbs fall down, what happens if the character fails? Because people read books for the stakes, right? If you don't feel like there's any stakes, you're just kind of like, I mean, one, I'm hungry and I want to spit. I always think of that. right? I say this word and I'm just thinking about Gordon Ramsay's steak and how I want to go there and have one. We were there last night and it was amazing. But what happens if they fail? If there's no steaks, if the character's just going through their day and if they get a job again, that's fine. If they don't get a job again, that's fine. You're like, well, why am I reading this? Why do I care? And you care because they're supporting their mother and they're going to get kicked out of their house and something else terrible is going to happen, right? You want to root for them to win for something that's going to make their lives. better and gonna make you feel good. And without those stakes, then there's no... Other than maybe like people being like, okay, this has a lot of tropes I like and I might want to read it for that, but they're still not gonna have that emotional connection. And people one-click a book because of the stakes that the main character is gonna be facing. And then, of course, the last thing they have to do is they have to reinforce those genre and trope elements that we talked about. So this is like my second last slide and we have nine minutes left. This is amazing. So your genre and tropes are clearly displayed on your cover. your title and subtitle will reinforce those genre and tropes, and your blurb layers on additional elements. And that's sort of the cycle of how you need to be thinking about this. You need to look at that Amazon product page or other retailer, and look at those things and be like, how do they reinforce this? Someone's going to see my cover, they're going to think it's cool, they see the title, they go down, they read the blurb, and they come back up to the cover and they're like, yeah, that all fits. Or they're like, what the heck? These are like wildly different things, right? Which experience do you want them to have? So I'm going to show one last slide here. Whoops. I've taught this class and given this talk in a variety of different forms, and all the while, I used that cover on the left to show how to do it wrong. And those of you who are eagle-eyed might notice that's one of my covers. That's a book that I released back in 2017, and the genre and trope expectations were wildly different back then. This was set back then. It was saying, like, cool action series with hot chicks. And now it says lesbian romance. And a lot of people, and they're not, and I mean there are a lot of lesbians in my book, but these two particular women are just friends, and one of them just happens to enjoy being naked all of the time. And I have a logical reason for that, right? Like she's like, I live on a spaceship, it's always 21 degrees Celsius, and there's no weather. Why am I always wearing clothes? That's her whole thing. So she just changes her skin color and moves on from there. But the cool thing is that for people who are thinking about like what are material sciences changes gonna, how are material sciences and the changes that those bring about in our lives gonna impact us thousands of years in the future, They think that's actually kind of a cool thing. Like, nerdy side note, if you were to actually take a bunch of humans and put them on a starship and send them to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, at a sublight speed, each person would have to bring about 500 pounds of clothing to handle that time or be able to recreate 500 pounds of clothing. So the question is, maybe we should just not wear clothes. Because if you have like 2 million people, everyone bringing along 500 pounds of clothing, that's a lot, right? And you're like, we could just not do that. So, it's kind of fun to think about scenarios like that and how that would happen. But anyway, long story short, this wasn't really conveying what I wanted to convey anymore. And I always give this example of like, look, times have changed and my book cover doesn't work anymore. And then one day I thought, I should do something about that. And I just, it was actually, so the only time I've given this presentation was at Superstars. And it was just this past February. And I'm like, this is the last time I'm talking about this and using myself as an example of what not to do. to do. So knowing that in science fiction, it's all about the one person against all odds thing, which is actually a major trope that exists in my book, because the character is actually trying to get back to her people and reunite with her people, who are also under extreme duress at the time. I realized I could do that trope. And so I figured I would both change my title, and I would show this. I would just basically make a picture that shows this situation happening. And that was actually an interesting thing, too, the changing of the title, because I'd always talked about in my books how there's... there's this lost, or my ads, how there's this lost colony ship, and people found the lost colony ship, and it had like amazing technology that no one had ever seen before, and now there's this big race to try and control this lost colony ship, and then people are like, what does it have to do with Destiny Lost? They're like, where's this lost colony ship? The people literally say, like, I think this ad links to the wrong book, is what people say, and for the longest time, like a fool, I tried to educate people in my ad about how this is the correct book, and I thought, maybe I should just change the title of the book to actually be the thing I say it's about? So that's like a real-world example. Change this cover, sales doubled within a week. And it was night and day, the amount of the effect that that had. So totally something that you can consider. And this is where the whole thing...I was in this like, I bought this book cover by George, I'm going to use this book cover. And I realized that was dumb and I need a new book cover that will convey what I want. So this is...I forgot to change my last slide. This should be the writingwives.com slash Vegas. So, actually, let's just fix that right now. There's some more. There's actually my same two characters again. See, they're friends. They're not lovers. I swear. All right. Oh, now I'm all the way at the end. That's not what we wanted to do. There's a way to start from the current slide, I think, right? All right. Well, anyway, here's the easy way of doing this. Oh, can I mouse around while I do this? I mean, you guys don't need to know it. You can think through the writingwives.com. You can figure that out. But we have a couple of offers there. One of them is for our Solaris software that I wrote that helps authors analyze whether or not their ads are working. You can get that. $5 off, which doesn't seem like that much until I tell you it's only $20 and you pay once and you have it forever. We also have a discount on an upcoming Facebook, basic Facebook ads class that we're teaching on November 17th. There'll be a live webinar, it'll be about three hours long, and then a couple other offers too on some other classes that we teach. They're available on that page too. So I have four minutes and 20 seconds for questions. So. So we've got some questions from our streaming viewers. Okay. First one's a cover question. Should we try and stick to the genre expectations while still adding a new spin slash element on covers or just stick with the genre? expectations that is make the cover look the same but find a way to stand out from the crowd yeah that is like the difficult thing right like make it the same but different and I think that's sort of that's I'm of the opinion that it should should still look different enough that it looks unique to you, that people can look at it and say, like, oh, this isn't actually... Like, don't make the David Archer mistake, right, where, like, I thought that those were Saul Herzog books because his covers looked exactly like Saul Herzog's books. Make them different enough that they stand out, but they still deliver on the expectations that the people have. Go ahead. Oh, you, sorry. Hi, I love your class. I love all of them. I write contemporary romance and it is so all over the place with Manchest, illustrated covers, discrete covers, or just images, you know, like a horseshoe or a flower. And every time I try to study the top 100 or all the... I'll try to implement all the things you're saying. There is not really like a blue and orange like there is with action. Yeah, there's not. What is your recommendation for how to... So it used to be that for contemporary romance... thing about the man chest is that the amount of man chest that you show conveys heat level really well. It's always been like a really great way of doing that, right? If the man's got his shirt on, the shirt's a little bit unbuttoned, the shirt's gone, there's hands coming over, you know, like all these things can convey heat level really well. But the problem is everybody got tired of...they got tired of it because it was just hard to tell them apart. And for a little while, only like the really big names were doing the object covers. But it's really turned around that I think that object covers are the way to go now in contemporary romance. I think that's what people want. People want like a pretty cover. you know and if the cover is pretty and catches their attention then they'll dive into the title and the blurb and then that's where you have to make sure you convey that trope and genre so that's where i'm tending to go but then it looks so much like women's fiction too like they use object cover so it's right there's like wild west so you have to make sure that some of the imagery looks spicy you know okay you've got like you've got like a heart maybe you got a dash of red maybe you got it like i mean you okay there's better things than like hearts and roses but you get my idea like you want to have something in there whereas women's fiction covers don't show romantic items so that's kind of what how you have to make that differentiation. Thank you. You're welcome. Yes. I've heard anecdotally that young people are not learning to write in script. And so that they don't recognize, that if you put a script word in your title, you know, a handwriting font, they won't be able to read it. That is true. Yeah. That's what I wanted to know, if that was true. Yeah, so if your market is people under 30, you probably shouldn't have cursive on your book cover. And I actually personally kind of... of agree with that. I'm like, we don't need cursive anymore, but they've also stopped teaching typing in school. And I'm like, if you're going to take out cursive, you got to teach typing. That's a whole other rant. So I do...I'm on the fence about it a little bit because I kind of feel like the title is repeated in black and white next to the book, on Amazon at least, which is where most books are sold, be they print or e-books. But I do think that if you are going to be writing, trying to break into the Japanese light novel market or something like that, you definitely want to be aware of that, that, yeah, younger people can't read cursive. And so for most of us, most of our audience is over 30 years old. But for those of you who are YA targets, new adult, young adult stuff, middle grade, yeah, don't use cursive. That's really good advice. Yes. Another streaming question. When choosing tropes to write about, should we focus only on books by indie authors, or should we also include trad pub books? Definitely use trad pub books because if they're selling well, a lot of times those big trad pub authors... especially in romance and thrillers, they set sort of the expectations for what people are reading. What they write about sort of drives the market. In other genres, less so. So you kind of have to know your genre a little bit and be like, are the trad pop people just disconnected and just selling on their name, or are they actually kind of setting the stage? But as far as how the drama and tropes are being conveyed, definitely look at the mid-listers. Don't look at the people at the tippity-top, because like I said, they can just have a black cover and they'll sell just fine. Yes? When you changed your book from the title and everything, did you relaunch it as a new book? And then what happened, because you have obviously reviews on your old book, it's like starting new. What's your thoughts? Yeah, I did not actually. I just went into KDP and changed the title and uploaded a new cover. And I did that because I didn't want to lose my reviews, because I had like 2,000 or 3,000 reviews on that book. There is a way of getting around that. You can do a dance where you can... I could have unpublished the e-book, published a new e-book, and then... and connected the ebook and the print book together, and then the reviews would have like, they would have stuck on the print book from before, then they would have flown to the new ebook, and then I could make a new print book, and it works like 87% of the time, but I didn't kind of want to risk that, so I just figured, I'm just gonna change the title and be done with it. And I did have to do a new print book because the ISBN is connected to the title, but other than that, I just went for it. That's brilliant, thank you. And it really probably comes down to like, how many reviews do you have, and do you want to save them, is kind of how I would look at that. If you don't like your reviews, or you don't have that many, then launch again. You know, but if you want to keep them then do it the other way. And I should mention as well, by the way, that you can take a book that's been out for a while and relaunch it without actually like republishing it. The very first books that I wrote, OutSystem, I published it in July of 2012. I had no idea what I was doing. I did every marketing misstep you can imagine. And... And then in 2016, my wife Jill and I figured out how to market it, and we took that book into the top 1,000 on Amazon for seven months. And it was a four-and-a-half-year-old book at that point. So it was entirely possible to take old books and breathe new life into them, bring them back. And I've done it since then for many other authors as well. So you don't have to have that new launch juice to take an existing book and push it up there. So there you have it. All right, and that's it. We're done. Thank you very much for attending. Thank you.

All right, let's kick this off. Can you guys hear me well? Good, yes? All right.

I'm actually, you know what, I'm going to take off my heels anyway. That will get me closer to the mic. As much as I love wearing these, it's a little much to stand in one place for that long.

They can be there and be pretty, and we'll move on. Also, it's like the last day of presentations, so there's alcohol sitting on the table out front, out there, so if anyone just needs one. It's totally understandable. All right, so we're going to talk today about how to market to market. We've all, of course, heard about writing to market, but we don't think about marketing to market.

We think about trying to market our books to the right people. but how do people perceive the market? What are expectations out there amongst readers and what imagery, what words convey what to them? And so how do we figure that out and then how do we capitalize on it? Most people probably know me as Mallory, the mistress of Facebook ads.

I'm dressed for the part today, too, right? If I brought a riding crop, this would have been perfect. I said I moved away from the mic because that part's not recorded.

But yeah, but I actually also have a background in graphical design. I started doing graphical design back in, like, 1997. I realized that I am a year away from having used Photoshop for 30 years, which is sort of a mind-blowing thing. Like, have we been computering? for 30 years? Like apparently we have.

But I've designed over 160 book covers and I've done typography. Actually, this number is probably pretty low now. I probably should update this to be like 350, maybe 400 covers now I've done typography on. And I've worked with hundreds of authors on their covers, titles, and blurbs, and I've marketed thousands of books. And talking about this particular subject came about because at The Writing Wives, we work primarily with people writing Facebook ads for their books, but we found that a lot of books...

weren't in a position that we could market them with Facebook profitably. We needed to do some surgery on the covers and the blurbs and the titles. So we started to sort of build out like an offering around that and sort of like build that into like our standard, our SOPs that we do when we're running Facebook ads. And this presentation was born out of that.

So every book is a kaleidoscope. I've always pronounced it kaleidoscope, but just now I realized that maybe I'm supposed to pronounce the I more than, or the E more than I do. Anyway, you guys know what I'm talking about. So often you ask an author, you're like, what is your book about?

And they're like, well, it's a bit of a mashup. And I feel like saying, they all are a mashup. If you wrote a book that only had like one genre and one trope in it, it would be really boring and probably about 10 pages long, right? So all of our books are collections of different tropes and genres that we've been exposed to that we like, that we enjoy, that we think will be a fun and interesting mix. And the benefit from that is that your book is likely...

marketable and receivable, I guess if that's a word, to different people for different reasons. And you can leverage that. You can maybe, for example, right now, a particular trope is really popular that your book contains, and then maybe eventually that trope's gone.

Another trope is popular that your book also contains. You can pivot your marketing to capitalize on those things. Of course, it has to be a major trope in your book. It can't be like, you know, there are friends in my books, therefore it's friends to lovers. actually be the trope, of course.

But, yeah, Becca Syme wrote a really good rant about that recently. If you go on her wall, she did a fantastic job talking about how your book should actually contain the tropes you say it does. We're going to operate under the understanding that we've all done that homework and we know what tropes we have, but actually we'll talk a little bit about what tropes are too. We'll get to that.

So the first thing you have to do is determine what they are, if you don't already know. Some people also think of tropes as a dirty word. They're like, oh, it's tropey, it's terrible, but tropes are good. And then we're going to study the market and identify what the bestsellers are pushing and then we're going to create a strategy for our own book. So a trope is, this is like the fancy definition, the use of figurative language via word, phrase, or image for artistic effects such as using a figure of speech.

Keith and Lundberg described a trope as substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or... that's like, oh my god. It's shorthand.

Trope is a shorthand for a common story element. I like, I put that first quote in there like intending to be able to read it seriously and I've never gotten through it without... This is so many words to say such a basic thing. Clearly, a writer was involved there, as we all know.

So, the quarter-common trope examples. Tropes, by the way, sometimes they overlap directly with genre. Sometimes a certain genre is actually just a trope. Lit RPG is a great one. Lit RPG, you get trapped in a video game, which is a trope, and it's also the entire genre being trapped in a video game to some extent.

Like Tron was the first. really big sort of like ...chopped into game litter, PG kind of thing, but in a way, it's actually just an extension of the old, I stepped into the wardrobe, you know, in the old mansion, and suddenly I'm in Narnia. It's the same idea, right? Like you're getting whisked away and taken somewhere.

So that's obviously a common trope. rags to riches, found family, enemies to lovers, damsel in distress, the chosen one, femme fatale, mad scientist, and like the old man, the old wise mentor, old woman, you know, the crone. We were reclaiming the word crone earlier for those of you in that conversation about how we're all all very excited about being able to be crones someday.

I think. Anyway. And some of these actually common tropes are even actually some of the fundamental story types, because there's only about seven to about 20, depending on who you ask, basic story types.

And some of those are actually also standard tropes, like Hero's Journey. Rags to Riches is actually one of the basic story types that's out there. And so one of the things that's, I think, good to sort of come to. to grips with, if you haven't already, is that you don't have any new ideas in your book.

I'm sorry. I mean, you might have a new combination of ideas, and you're going to have your own unique new spin on it, but you haven't come up with something that has never existed before in some similar form. And that's not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing.

Because we're all readers, right? We don't sit down and say, like, hey, today I want to read something completely unlike anything I've ever read before that doesn't contain any of those warm, comfy feelings I'm used to having. I want to read something completely different that's going to challenge me and stress me out and stuff like that. And while we may do that sometimes, we don't do it every day, right? Sometimes we're like, you know what?

I like a cheeseburger with nothing weird on it. I just want a cheeseburger, and that's what you want to come back to. And readers, as we know, because you should be a reader too, I imagine, that's how we are.

We want to read those comforting things. So the tropes are great. The tropes help us in conveying that information to our readers and getting them to come back for that home-cooked meal that they know is what's going to happen, what they like. So you have to find your book's sub-genres and tropes. You're going to have to do a little bit of research on that yourself, and we'll talk a little bit about some places you can...

Actually, I think I was on the last slide. Right, tvtropes.org. Who's been to tvtropes.org?

Oh, yeah, you guys are good people. You know what you're doing. If you haven't, don't go there now, because you will miss the rest of my presentation, but you will be giggling to yourself as you read the ridiculous names that they have for tropes on that website.

I didn't know about it until my readers actually made a TV Tropes page for me, and I was like, holy crap, I have so many of these really common tropes in my book that I never even thought... lot about. And it was really interesting to then read other people's descriptions for other people's books and shows and realize how many common tropes there are and how they're actually really loved.

So definitely do that. Look for tropes. You can also just Google, you know, top 100 tropes in my genre, and you'll see lists of tropes and you can be like, oh, I have that trope, I have that trope, I have that trope, and build yourself a list of all of your tropes. So you'll do that and then you want to say like, okay, now that I know what I'm doing, what are the people who are selling well doing? And...

To figure that out we're gonna take a look at espionage thrillers because espionage thrillers are completely different than anything I write and I thought it'd be fun to like take it to go on an adventure in a place I don't normally go to I mean I do to a certain extent because I run ads for lots of people who do espionage thrillers but Still though like I want to show what the what these things look like so these are At this point when I made this slide this was the number the top six espionage thrillers out there Saul Herzog is dominating and I believe still continues to dominate this indie author I don't even know if anyone actually knows for sure who this person is. I've talked around, talked in various circles before, and people are like, I don't know who this is. They just appeared, and they're just selling all the books now.

But if you kind of look, the covers, in fact, I'll go over this next slide here. The covers that Saul Herzog had done broke the mold for thrillers. Thriller covers were always like the big, massive font, the huge text, always sans serif, unless, is Adam here?

No, Adam's not here. Adam writes under D.D. Black.

and he is like a really well-selling mystery thriller author who used a serif font for his name and it's like Adam you did it wrong he's like I'm like I always I said to him I said you did it wrong you should have had a sans serif font so doesn't have like little you know curls on the T's and all that jazz I'm like I never wanted to tell you that because you're it's working so well and he's like he's like yeah but maybe it'll work better if I try it the other way so he's gonna run an experiment and actually redo his author name on his book so that it's a sans serif font for his author name you know not a serifed font. Everybody knows what the difference is, right? So you go, okay, if you didn't, I'm sorry. You'll figure it out. So when Saul Herzog came onto the scene, everybody always did back of character or like a road with like...if you look at Lee Child books, it's like an intersection is like the cover of the book.

And a lot of people were doing things like that, and it was always like a silhouette from the back, but now he's showing this action shot with a character from the front. And... He's positioning his text differently.

He's not doing the standard, you know, text at the top like you see in the Mark Dawson cover there, or like the above and below. He's kind of like, he's shifting how he's doing things. And this was a genre that the covers were done in a specific way.

And the interesting thing... that happened is the big names in the genre changed their book covers. When I meant to make this presentation, I was actually looking for David Archer covers because I know David Archer does his covers the old way.

I can grab some screenshots of how people used to do their covers. I actually kept thinking that these newer covers on the side were Saul Herzog's books. I'm like, oh, Saul Herzog's everywhere.

I'm like, oh, wait, these are David Archer books. So I had to go back on Goodreads to find his old cover to show what he had done. So even the big names in this genre shifted the way that they were presenting the genre, the tropes in their stories, so that they could match the reader expectations.

Because reader expectations will change over time. Some of it just sort of organically, and sometimes because someone big comes along and reworks the way it's done. done.

And I said to Adam, I said, maybe you should leave your name sans serif. Maybe that'll become the thing and you can lead the charge of this new way of doing covers. But he's still going to test, which is actually a good idea.

And that's actually something that I think as authors, we need to think about. We're like, okay with changing out blurbs, and we can even periodically change titles and whatnot. Harder to do with print, obviously, because print's a title tied to your ISBN.

But if you didn't use an ISBN for your ebook, you can just change the title. Um, but we tend to think of our covers as like as like this thing that like I paid $300 for this cover or whatever you paid for covers should like last for like five to ten years I'm gonna get the maximum use out of this cover it reminds me of like in shop class as a kid you'd be sitting there with the saw like working on something and your teacher come by like you pay I paid for the whole saw you better use the whole saw because he wanted to be like going up and down the whole saw to use all the teeth I feel like sometimes we feel that way about our covers too we're like over very precious about them I got this cover I paid for it but if your covers not working if it's not aligned with genre expect expectations and trope expectations from the readers, then you gotta change it. And we probably need to think a bit more like that. Like, I need to actually not just like get a cover, especially for your book ones.

Later books in the series are a little bit less particular about this. But for book one, say like, I need to have a budget to actually get three covers done, and I need to test these three covers and see which one's going to work better, and then come up with the cover that you end up using. Or, I mean, another way of doing that too is just by doing omnibuses and special editions and giving them different covers and then seeing which one works better.

You can kind of work at it from both angles. But we really do need to think about that. about that.

We need to stop thinking about covers as a thing that we have to use the whole cover because we paid for it. If it's not working, we should stop doing it. So let's talk about authors to examine. Oh, I'm doing so well. I'm like on, I don't even know what slide I'm on.

I'm like almost halfway through it and we still have 30 minutes. I might have time for questions. This is amazing. Okay.

You guys, for anyone who's ever been in one of my talks before, they know what that's like. It's like, there's no questions. Find me later. Okay.

So domestic thrillers. Now, when we're looking at these domestic thrillers, and my contacts are not working as well in Vegas here. I keep getting, like, I have a charge on seeing anything. Right.

So we're looking at these domestic thrillers here, and a lot of these authors have, you know, 67,000 reviews on their books and stuff like that. And there's a certain point, and this threshold is different in every genre. Like, in military science fiction, it's very hard to get reviews in that genre.

You get sometimes only, like, one review every thousand sales kind of thing. It never, it's not usually that. that bad, but it can be that bad. Other genres, you can get like a review every 15 sales. So you kind of have to know your genre to a certain extent and be like, okay, these people up here are clearly like their trad pub.

People will buy their books if the cover was black and just had their name on it, right? So you need to not be looking at people like that. You need to be looking for the scrappy mid-listers who are pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and see what they're doing to convey genre and trope and how they're presenting what their book is about to readers because they're the ones where that description, that cover.

that title is make or break as to whether or not their book sells. So don't spend too much time examining the really big authors. Always like kind of step yourself down a bit. You know, in romance, that's contemporary romance, for example, that's going to be people that are like maybe 5,000 reviews are the authors who are still like, you know, they're scrappy, they're doing it on their own. You know, and those authors are sitting there like 30,000, 40,000 reviews, you know, you know that those books are going to sell no matter what.

Do check how long the book's been out, of course, because some brand new author, some big name author might have released a book yesterday and it has, you know, 5,000 reviews. reviews and you think it's just some some mid-lister but it's not so do take a look at that it is also interesting by the way just looking at these domestic thrillers how these are still thriller books right like they're still in the same genre as these oh my goodness the same overarching genre if everybody was asleep those of you watching at home i'm glad to have woken you up i don't normally have nails this long and my mind is not used to there being that much there but anyway like these are still thrillers between these two ones but you can tell just by looking at them. That, you know, there's less, these are obviously lower on the action department.

There's not like a, there's not motion. Having a character in motion on your cover is one of the best ways of conveying action in the story. The color palettes have changed. You know, we're looking at a lot more high contrast types of things. We're looking at more artistic types of things versus just conveying something like a scene from the story.

That tells us that we're moving into more emotional stories, more reflective emotional stories versus more aggressive emotional stories. Because you have to remember, anger is an emotion. you know, rage and all that stuff is an emotion.

Sometimes we forget that both of those things are emotions. And as an author, by the way, it is our job to sell our readers on emotions. Readers don't read books because they, well, I mean, they read books for a lot of reasons. But the real reason why people read books is that they wanna have a particular feeling. In fact, that's why people come back to the same type of book so much.

I mean, that's why contemporary romance sells so well, right, you're like, you think to yourself, like, it's kind of, like, you might think it's boring, right? It takes place in, like, regular, everyday life. and, you know, I'm already living everyday regular life. I want to go somewhere else. But at the same time, you read contemporary romance and you get, like, those heady feelings from, like, the beginning of a romantic relationship with zero risk, which works well for my books.

I write military science fiction, and you can fly along in a spaceship with a bunch of people going pew, pew, pew, also with zero risk. You know, it's the same idea. We're selling the emotion, we're selling the thrill. Or the not thrill, depending on the emotions that we're trying to sell, and you have to keep that in mind when you're looking at your cover.

cover? What emotion is it evoking? And get as much of that as possible. And of course, cover set expectations.

This is like one of my favorite arrays of covers, because we've got no home for killers, right? Like the font, the font says thriller. We've got like the sort of disinterested young woman looking there, but there's a silhouetted figure reflected in her sunglasses.

Like you can get a lot of information about that. We know, you get the feeling almost that it's a one-on-one sort of situation, because we only see these two characters. The fact that the word killer.

is in the title, we know that there's going to be murder or attempted murder in here. You know probably at a glance whether or not that book is interesting to you, just on what's been shown on that cover. C.N. Crawford's Frost, that's a romantic fantasy.

This one's a little bit interesting because if you've sort of been asleep for the last 10 years, you might not have realized that what used to look like a regular fantasy book now is what romantic fantasy books look like, what regular fantasy books looked like a year ago, 10 years ago. And so you might not be like, oh, this kind of looks like a cool, like, you know, winter elven kind of fantasy story, and it is. It just is also romantic fantasy.

Although I think what a lot of people are starting to realize is that we've all been reading romantic books forever, and just they weren't billed as romantic books. I always joke that Anne McCaffrey, like, tricked an entire generation of men into reading sci-fi romance. Which, you know, and I'm just like, because these are all romances. Every single book she wrote was a romance that just happened to take place in space.

And they were all amazing too, which helped a lot. But I remember the first time I read The Rowan, I was like, okay, all right, this is just all about her getting together with this guy. And then you read Damia, and you're like, looking back, and you're like, Damia was age gap romance.

Oh my God. And I read that book for the aliens, but apparently that's not what I was there for. You've got Dark Elf Secret Baby.

This one's amazing, right? It just says right on the tin what this book is about. And that's great marketing though, right? You're like, I want to read this. read about a dark elf secret baby look at those look at those pecs you could you could practically breastfeed that baby himself right there right it's amazing you know but you're like you're like you're like you're into that you immediately know right like all of the correct signals have been sent to you that that's the book that you want to read and then this other one into the stars you know you see the starship you see the big pew-pew in space and then if you look closely you'll see like a bunch of soldiers in the back of that ship you can't see it too well here which then someone who reads this kind of genre would convey to them that okay okay, it's not just all big ships shooting each other from like 10,000 kilometers away in space.

There's going to be some ground-pounding action. There's going to be boots on the ground, soldiers fighting in corridors kind of thing. And if that's what you want, you know that's there as well. So all of these covers are doing a very good job of conveying the genre and trope information that's in them. And they are both pulling in the right people and pushing away the wrong people.

And that's the other thing you have to keep in mind too, of course, is you don't want the wrong people reading your book because they're going to one-start, and then you're going to cry, and you're going to eat chocolate in the bathtub, you know. So I don't know. I don't know anything about that particular sort of event. It's chocolate and ice cream, right?

It's got to be chocolate and ice cream, which is not good because we have this amazing homemade ice cream shop across the street from where we live. It's like three houses down and across, but they're open every day of the year except for Christmas, and they have the best ice cream ever. It's why I wear corsets. It's necessary. All right.

And certain genres can get all the way down to font and color. If you're writing bad boy, mafia... bully romance. Then you basically can use one of three colors on your title.

I mean there are exceptions, but it's pretty close, right? It's going to be gold and white or gold and red or white and red or white and gold. And you can see that.

This is like, this is the extent of how these things are done. Actually one of these covers is... I did too, which I'm always proud of, but I won't tell you which one it was and you can just wonder.

But we know by looking at these that we can tell just by looking at them what kind of angle we have going on because of things like the fact that they've got the badass look. looking guy, there's tattoos, you know, the shirts aren't done up all the way, or if the shirt is done up all the way, you still make sure you see the tattoos and the muscles bursting out of everything. The men look classy, but they look like they'll also, like, you know, break your nose if they have to.

And that's going to be, like, your mafia romance, where if you want to move into bad boy romance, suddenly you get a different thing. The fonts and the colors are all still the same, but suddenly now the guys have changed, where apparently they're all touching their mouths. Apparently that's a thing.

It's not universal, but the screenshots that I picked were all happened to be ones where the guy's like, hmmm, you know. A little bit of smolder there. And of course they usually have nicer looking suits a lot of the time, but there's no tattoos. Okay, this is billionaire. And some of them just say it.

Obviously, that's one way to handle that problem too. But these subtle cues are actually really important in conveying to the reader. And as readers, we and readers who are also not writers, we...

pick up on all of this, we just don't realize it at the time, you know? But as marketers, as authors, we have to be deliberate about it. We have to understand what am I conveying?

Because too often we're like, oh, I want to convey a scene from the story or something like that, not realizing that maybe that scene is not emblematic of, like, the major themes in your book. It's just a cool scene or something like that. So you got to keep in mind that it's really all about... Your cover is like an emblem and it's less about the specific events and whatnot.

It's trying to convey sort of overarching tones about... about your book. So, you know, some of the big things are typeface and font size. We talked a bit about that.

Actually, these ones are really interesting too because they'll...you'll see a lot of times the...like any sort of like romantic thriller is going to use a sans-serif font like Prince of Hate to show that this has a thriller element. There are action elements in the story because they're pulling from that what people expect to see from thrillers. But then they're also doing things, a lot of them, not all of them, but mixing in a serif font or a script font.

So, like, hey, it's still romance. you know, it's okay. And that's actually one of the ways they're doing that, by mixing those two fonts. It happens a little bit less in billionaire romance, but they're still, it's still because it's so focused on the guy and he's obviously not like standing there with like an M4 or something like that, you know that okay, this is clearly romance and not action.

But yeah, font colors are really important, overall coloring, the character look, the clothing, the actions, are they still, are they in motion? And then lastly, of course, title and subtitle. One note, by the way, if you do want to convey action in a story, then your cover should incorporate orange and blue.

Orange and blue have somehow become the action colors. No other genre out there has like defined colors. Okay, I take that back. One other genre out there has defined colors for about, I'll get to that one next, but if you actually look up orange blue movie poster theory, you'll actually see that like every single Marvel poster is orange and blue, with like I think like two exceptions. And if you actually get into something like the detailed analysis of it, you'll actually see that they tint the movie itself orange or blue.

or blue in different scenes to convey action and different elements like that. The other genre that seems to be actually sort of coalescing around a specific color set up is domestic thrillers and mysteries are very often blue with yellow text. The fonts are yellow and the background is very blue.

And that's not quite as universal as action. Action is very orange and blue and mystery is kind of moving into that. But you can even look at those color palettes and be like, wow, I see this color palette repeating so much. If I did that, I could like, it's an easy way to signal to my reader. readers that I have a certain thing going on.

All right, so your title needs to add clues as to what your genre and tropes are. People are going to see your cover first, and then they're going to look for that title to double down on the genre and tropes that they've seen and, like, reinforce expectations. So we've got these sci-fi books up here. The first one is The Alpha Protocol. The Alpha Protocol is an okay title.

The book actually is doing all right, but the thing I always look at this one is the This one's called The Alpha Protocol, and the series name is The Alpha Protocol Book. No, yeah, Alpha Protocol Book One, yeah. Oh, that said code for a second. You have an opportunity to share additional information, like is this Earth's last defense? Are you fighting aliens?

Is it just hunting pirates? Did a rogue AI get loose? What's happening? What is The Alpha Protocol related to?

We know it's like some sort of like, it feels very Doomsday-y, right? Like we kind of get that vibe when we've got this lone ship, but there's so much more you could. convey with a series name that would then like help double down on what this one's about. And it's a bit of a missed opportunity. So anytime you're doing that, you give a...

You give your book and your series basically the same name and you don't use that opportunity to convey a whole new trope and genre information, you're missing out on an opportunity. Jeffrey Haskell, who is here, and his wife does his covers for him, and she does an amazing job. is Against All Odds and the series name is Grimms War Book One. So now we know, we get like these cool words right like against all odds okay this is this is one ship against insurmountable odds it's the it's like you know the lone soldier standing in the breach sort of storyline. which a lot of people love, and in science fiction right now is the biggest storyline that is going on.

Pretty much every single book in the top 100, with maybe 10% of them don't match this. It's all like a lone warrior, or a last ship, or a last stand of some sort, or a book in a series about that. And they really capitalized on this really well. And even just the Grimm's War. Grimm is a great word to use in and of itself.

And then the fact that it's possessive, it's Grimm's War. It's like, oh, this really is like this last... last guy just doing whatever he can to make things work. The Monroe Doctrine is a fantastic title for those of you who know what that is. And this is a really good one, because if you don't know what the Monroe Doctrine is, this doesn't mean anything to you.

But for the people who do know what the Monroe Doctrine is, this immediately is just like, oh, this is a really cool title, and it's got all this action. It's orange and blue, you'll notice. So it's actually against all odds. And Alpha Protocol, actually all of these have the orange and blue to some extent. And this is one of those situations where I think I know know what something means, but I did this presentation a while ago, and now I can't remember the exact nature of the Monroe Doctrine.

I'm going to say it and be wrong, and someone will correct me. That's actually the best way to find out the right answer for anything. Just say the wrong answer on the internet, and someone will come along and correct you.

But I'm pretty sure it has to do with, like, the, you attack, it's the United States policy of if you attack any one of our allies, you attack us, and we will respond as though you attacked us. Right, the affairs of our allies and stuff. Yeah, oh that's right, thank you, yeah, yeah, that's the policy, like yeah, no one else can screw with the Americas, it's ours to mess up.

Yes, that's the one, yeah, thank you. And so I think that was like the whole Cuban Missile Crisis too thing, right, like another power mess. settling in the Americas and we have to respond as though they were attacking America. There's obviously a lot more nuance in that.

But for anybody who knows what that means, who's like a military history buff, it's going to immediately convey all sorts of really good information to them. And then Too Old to Die, which I think it's, there's like three or four series now that are like a dude that built a spaceship in his backyard or found one in a junkyard or something like that. It's like this huge trope right now. And it's actually, it's a great one too because it's got that, again, that whole like lone battle against all odds kind of thing going on there.

And each one of these series, with a little bit less than the Monroe Doctrine, is actually kind of conveying that feeling. And they did a really good job and they were all selling incredibly well at the time that I made these. these slides and that's a great angle of how those covers are doubling down on the imagery that the book has.

You're getting an extra level from that with the exception of the ELF protocol which sort of wastes the series line. I guess you could say Too Old to Die does too because there's no series listed. But I think there is a series on the actual page that did double down. So that brings us to keyword stuffing. I'm sure...actually, who does not know what keyword stuffing is?

Okay, so a couple of people don't and everybody was too shy. Well, not everybody else, but some of the people out there were too shy. So the whole idea is that you put a bunch of extra words in your title.

You can do it in your title or your subtitle. It has about the same effect. I prefer to do it in my title because I just like being able to manage the formatting more directly. But like one of mine is Out System, a military science fiction space opera epic, or like The Sinner, a dark college romance, or 100 Eternal Masterpieces of Literature, 100 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

I've always thought that one was like kind of wild. It's like, it's like... It feels like you're on a death march and you now must read these and then you'll die.

This will be the end of your life. You'll walk around the corner. Someone will have unveiled the painting. You see yourself and then that's it.

But yeah, and that's a thing that actually I really recommend doing. But doing it in a way that actually makes a sentence. Don't just like jam a bunch of words in there in the hopes that the Amazon algorithm gods will help you.

Put words in there that are doubling down and cementing in people's minds the genre and trope elements that your book embodies so that they see the cover, they read the title. then they see the additional words you've written in there and they're like, this book does or does not contain the thing that I want it to have. Other big thing is sort of an advantage of that too is that of all the keyword and metadata stuff that you put into Amazon, your title has the highest rank.

So you have like those keyword categories, the seven boxes you fill in plus the three major categories that you pick. If someone searches for those terms, your book could come up, but your title is actually weighted higher in search results. So by getting these words into your title, you actually stand a better chance of coming... coming up when someone searches for those things. You cannot keyword stuff your print books.

You can only do it to your e-books. Your print book, they're very particular about the cover. The text on the cover has to match the text that you put in the box, but on the e-books they're more forgiving.

Every now and then they crack down on romance. They only seem to do this to romance where they're like... like you've keyword stuff and your title can only have what's on your book cover.

And some people get freaked out. I'm like, just put those words on your book cover then. Problem solved, right? And you totally could. You could just have them written in small underneath the title on your book cover and no one would notice them.

But they help a lot and they're really useful to do. and I highly recommend doing it. And again, write it as a sentence, and it will definitely help with people converting better when they come to your book page.

And then lastly, we need to talk about your blurb. Your blurb has to really reinforce all of these things, and it has to align. Like, I remember talking to...

I've talked to a couple of authors about this exact issue, so if you think, like, it me, it might not be you. I've talked to others about this too, but I've encountered a number of times where there are dragons in a book, and there's no dragon on the cover. and there's no dragon in the blurb. And I'm like, dragons are a big deal.

People who like reading about dragons like reading about dragons. Why are you not selling the dragon angle that you've got going on here? Or if you have a cover that has a dragon on it and your blurb doesn't mention the dragon at all, that's also a misstep.

Because then people are like, wait, well, I'm here for the dragon that I saw on the cover and the blurb does not mention a dragon. And you don't need a lot of uncertainty for people to just go away, right? Like you've kind of like reeled them in. You get the fish on the lure there on the line.

line and you're reeling it in very carefully and the moment, man, I'm scaring myself for it, I'm scaring you guys with that. The moment that you do something wrong, they're going to get away. So you really have to make sure that you don't make missteps like that.

But a blurb has to do five things. I've written a lot of blurbs, many of them from my own books since I have 130 some odd books out, but I've written a lot of blurbs for other people too and really found this to be true across the board, plus studying blurbs, et cetera. But the first thing your blurb has to do is it has to establish the status. status quo. Where is the character now?

Because the books are all about conflict and something has to change to create conflict. So you have to establish the status quo. And that can be done really quickly.

You could be like, you know, Jane was sick of her day job in the accounting firm. Boom, that's your status quo. It's been established.

You've introduced the character and now we can move on. Hopefully, we'll do it a little bit more artfully than that, but that's like a really basic example. How does the status quo break? What happens?

Jane gets fired. What is she going to do about it? She's going to get fired. to get a new job or maybe she tries to get her old job back, right?

Because that's the two things. You either establish a new status quo or you try to go back to the old status quo. One of those two options is basically how every main character tries to resolve whatever conflict appeared in the story.

And then, of course, here's the thing that you really have to do, and this is where a lot of blurbs fall down, what happens if the character fails? Because people read books for the stakes, right? If you don't feel like there's any stakes, you're just kind of like, I mean, one, I'm hungry and I want to spit. I always think of that. right?

I say this word and I'm just thinking about Gordon Ramsay's steak and how I want to go there and have one. We were there last night and it was amazing. But what happens if they fail?

If there's no steaks, if the character's just going through their day and if they get a job again, that's fine. If they don't get a job again, that's fine. You're like, well, why am I reading this?

Why do I care? And you care because they're supporting their mother and they're going to get kicked out of their house and something else terrible is going to happen, right? You want to root for them to win for something that's going to make their lives. better and gonna make you feel good. And without those stakes, then there's no...

Other than maybe like people being like, okay, this has a lot of tropes I like and I might want to read it for that, but they're still not gonna have that emotional connection. And people one-click a book because of the stakes that the main character is gonna be facing. And then, of course, the last thing they have to do is they have to reinforce those genre and trope elements that we talked about. So this is like my second last slide and we have nine minutes left. This is amazing.

So your genre and tropes are clearly displayed on your cover. your title and subtitle will reinforce those genre and tropes, and your blurb layers on additional elements. And that's sort of the cycle of how you need to be thinking about this.

You need to look at that Amazon product page or other retailer, and look at those things and be like, how do they reinforce this? Someone's going to see my cover, they're going to think it's cool, they see the title, they go down, they read the blurb, and they come back up to the cover and they're like, yeah, that all fits. Or they're like, what the heck? These are like wildly different things, right?

Which experience do you want them to have? So I'm going to show one last slide here. Whoops.

I've taught this class and given this talk in a variety of different forms, and all the while, I used that cover on the left to show how to do it wrong. And those of you who are eagle-eyed might notice that's one of my covers. That's a book that I released back in 2017, and the genre and trope expectations were wildly different back then. This was set back then.

It was saying, like, cool action series with hot chicks. And now it says lesbian romance. And a lot of people, and they're not, and I mean there are a lot of lesbians in my book, but these two particular women are just friends, and one of them just happens to enjoy being naked all of the time. And I have a logical reason for that, right?

Like she's like, I live on a spaceship, it's always 21 degrees Celsius, and there's no weather. Why am I always wearing clothes? That's her whole thing.

So she just changes her skin color and moves on from there. But the cool thing is that for people who are thinking about like what are material sciences changes gonna, how are material sciences and the changes that those bring about in our lives gonna impact us thousands of years in the future, They think that's actually kind of a cool thing. Like, nerdy side note, if you were to actually take a bunch of humans and put them on a starship and send them to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, at a sublight speed, each person would have to bring about 500 pounds of clothing to handle that time or be able to recreate 500 pounds of clothing.

So the question is, maybe we should just not wear clothes. Because if you have like 2 million people, everyone bringing along 500 pounds of clothing, that's a lot, right? And you're like, we could just not do that. So, it's kind of fun to think about scenarios like that and how that would happen.

But anyway, long story short, this wasn't really conveying what I wanted to convey anymore. And I always give this example of like, look, times have changed and my book cover doesn't work anymore. And then one day I thought, I should do something about that. And I just, it was actually, so the only time I've given this presentation was at Superstars.

And it was just this past February. And I'm like, this is the last time I'm talking about this and using myself as an example of what not to do. to do.

So knowing that in science fiction, it's all about the one person against all odds thing, which is actually a major trope that exists in my book, because the character is actually trying to get back to her people and reunite with her people, who are also under extreme duress at the time. I realized I could do that trope. And so I figured I would both change my title, and I would show this. I would just basically make a picture that shows this situation happening. And that was actually an interesting thing, too, the changing of the title, because I'd always talked about in my books how there's...

there's this lost, or my ads, how there's this lost colony ship, and people found the lost colony ship, and it had like amazing technology that no one had ever seen before, and now there's this big race to try and control this lost colony ship, and then people are like, what does it have to do with Destiny Lost? They're like, where's this lost colony ship? The people literally say, like, I think this ad links to the wrong book, is what people say, and for the longest time, like a fool, I tried to educate people in my ad about how this is the correct book, and I thought, maybe I should just change the title of the book to actually be the thing I say it's about? So that's like a real-world example. Change this cover, sales doubled within a week.

And it was night and day, the amount of the effect that that had. So totally something that you can consider. And this is where the whole thing...I was in this like, I bought this book cover by George, I'm going to use this book cover.

And I realized that was dumb and I need a new book cover that will convey what I want. So this is...I forgot to change my last slide. This should be the writingwives.com slash Vegas.

So, actually, let's just fix that right now. There's some more. There's actually my same two characters again. See, they're friends. They're not lovers.

I swear. All right. Oh, now I'm all the way at the end.

That's not what we wanted to do. There's a way to start from the current slide, I think, right? All right.

Well, anyway, here's the easy way of doing this. Oh, can I mouse around while I do this? I mean, you guys don't need to know it.

You can think through the writingwives.com. You can figure that out. But we have a couple of offers there.

One of them is for our Solaris software that I wrote that helps authors analyze whether or not their ads are working. You can get that. $5 off, which doesn't seem like that much until I tell you it's only $20 and you pay once and you have it forever. We also have a discount on an upcoming Facebook, basic Facebook ads class that we're teaching on November 17th.

There'll be a live webinar, it'll be about three hours long, and then a couple other offers too on some other classes that we teach. They're available on that page too. So I have four minutes and 20 seconds for questions. So.

So we've got some questions from our streaming viewers. Okay. First one's a cover question.

Should we try and stick to the genre expectations while still adding a new spin slash element on covers or just stick with the genre? expectations that is make the cover look the same but find a way to stand out from the crowd yeah that is like the difficult thing right like make it the same but different and I think that's sort of that's I'm of the opinion that it should should still look different enough that it looks unique to you, that people can look at it and say, like, oh, this isn't actually... Like, don't make the David Archer mistake, right, where, like, I thought that those were Saul Herzog books because his covers looked exactly like Saul Herzog's books.

Make them different enough that they stand out, but they still deliver on the expectations that the people have. Go ahead. Oh, you, sorry.

Hi, I love your class. I love all of them. I write contemporary romance and it is so all over the place with Manchest, illustrated covers, discrete covers, or just images, you know, like a horseshoe or a flower.

And every time I try to study the top 100 or all the... I'll try to implement all the things you're saying. There is not really like a blue and orange like there is with action. Yeah, there's not. What is your recommendation for how to...

So it used to be that for contemporary romance... thing about the man chest is that the amount of man chest that you show conveys heat level really well. It's always been like a really great way of doing that, right?

If the man's got his shirt on, the shirt's a little bit unbuttoned, the shirt's gone, there's hands coming over, you know, like all these things can convey heat level really well. But the problem is everybody got tired of...they got tired of it because it was just hard to tell them apart. And for a little while, only like the really big names were doing the object covers.

But it's really turned around that I think that object covers are the way to go now in contemporary romance. I think that's what people want. People want like a pretty cover. you know and if the cover is pretty and catches their attention then they'll dive into the title and the blurb and then that's where you have to make sure you convey that trope and genre so that's where i'm tending to go but then it looks so much like women's fiction too like they use object cover so it's right there's like wild west so you have to make sure that some of the imagery looks spicy you know okay you've got like you've got like a heart maybe you got a dash of red maybe you got it like i mean you okay there's better things than like hearts and roses but you get my idea like you want to have something in there whereas women's fiction covers don't show romantic items so that's kind of what how you have to make that differentiation.

Thank you. You're welcome. Yes.

I've heard anecdotally that young people are not learning to write in script. And so that they don't recognize, that if you put a script word in your title, you know, a handwriting font, they won't be able to read it. That is true. Yeah.

That's what I wanted to know, if that was true. Yeah, so if your market is people under 30, you probably shouldn't have cursive on your book cover. And I actually personally kind of...

of agree with that. I'm like, we don't need cursive anymore, but they've also stopped teaching typing in school. And I'm like, if you're going to take out cursive, you got to teach typing.

That's a whole other rant. So I do...I'm on the fence about it a little bit because I kind of feel like the title is repeated in black and white next to the book, on Amazon at least, which is where most books are sold, be they print or e-books. But I do think that if you are going to be writing, trying to break into the Japanese light novel market or something like that, you definitely want to be aware of that, that, yeah, younger people can't read cursive.

And so for most of us, most of our audience is over 30 years old. But for those of you who are YA targets, new adult, young adult stuff, middle grade, yeah, don't use cursive. That's really good advice. Yes.

Another streaming question. When choosing tropes to write about, should we focus only on books by indie authors, or should we also include trad pub books? Definitely use trad pub books because if they're selling well, a lot of times those big trad pub authors... especially in romance and thrillers, they set sort of the expectations for what people are reading. What they write about sort of drives the market.

In other genres, less so. So you kind of have to know your genre a little bit and be like, are the trad pop people just disconnected and just selling on their name, or are they actually kind of setting the stage? But as far as how the drama and tropes are being conveyed, definitely look at the mid-listers. Don't look at the people at the tippity-top, because like I said, they can just have a black cover and they'll sell just fine. Yes?

When you changed your book from the title and everything, did you relaunch it as a new book? And then what happened, because you have obviously reviews on your old book, it's like starting new. What's your thoughts?

Yeah, I did not actually. I just went into KDP and changed the title and uploaded a new cover. And I did that because I didn't want to lose my reviews, because I had like 2,000 or 3,000 reviews on that book.

There is a way of getting around that. You can do a dance where you can... I could have unpublished the e-book, published a new e-book, and then...

and connected the ebook and the print book together, and then the reviews would have like, they would have stuck on the print book from before, then they would have flown to the new ebook, and then I could make a new print book, and it works like 87% of the time, but I didn't kind of want to risk that, so I just figured, I'm just gonna change the title and be done with it. And I did have to do a new print book because the ISBN is connected to the title, but other than that, I just went for it. That's brilliant, thank you. And it really probably comes down to like, how many reviews do you have, and do you want to save them, is kind of how I would look at that.

If you don't like your reviews, or you don't have that many, then launch again. You know, but if you want to keep them then do it the other way. And I should mention as well, by the way, that you can take a book that's been out for a while and relaunch it without actually like republishing it.

The very first books that I wrote, OutSystem, I published it in July of 2012. I had no idea what I was doing. I did every marketing misstep you can imagine. And...

And then in 2016, my wife Jill and I figured out how to market it, and we took that book into the top 1,000 on Amazon for seven months. And it was a four-and-a-half-year-old book at that point. So it was entirely possible to take old books and breathe new life into them, bring them back. And I've done it since then for many other authors as well. So you don't have to have that new launch juice to take an existing book and push it up there.

So there you have it. All right, and that's it. We're done.

Thank you very much for attending. Thank you.

Transcript for:Essentials of Book Marketing Strategy

Transcript for:
Essentials of Book Marketing Strategy