Dear O'Abby: What should I know about marketing before self-publishing my book?

Dear O'Abby,

I've decided to self-publish my novel and while I'm super-excited about it, I'm also really nervous because I've never done any marketing.  Are there any essential things I need to know about marketing and publicity before I start making plans?

Yours,

Clueless

Dear Clueless,

You've gone and opened a can of worms with this one.  It's not a small topic and I probably can't answer it in full in a single post.

But let's look at the basics.

Marketing and publicity are actually two different things, but they do go hand in hand.  Marketing is about how you reach your potential customers, while publicity is about how you raise awareness of your product to the public.

So the first thing you need to do is identify who your market is.  Not every person likes every book, so you need to break down the population to find the people who are most likely to love it.  Anyone who presents a marketing plan saying their book will appeal to men and women between nine and 90 is deluded.

Demographics are one way to do this.  For example, if your main character is an older woman, your first target demographic might be women 40 or 50+.  Then you need to break down that large demographic even further.  If your book is a murder mystery, you add murder mystery-readers to your breakdown.  And maybe your book is set in a rural town, so you can then add rural-town dwellers/lovers to your list.

Eventually you will find exactly who your primary audience is.  And probably, along the way, a few subsets you can define as your secondary and tertiary audiences.

One thing you need to have very clear in your mind before you start any kind of publicity or marketing is why someone should pick your book over any other book.  What makes your story unique?  What makes it special?  Why will it stand out from other books in its genre or category?

To figure this out, you will need to be familiar with other books in your genre.  It's useful to be able to compare your book with other recent titles.  And by recent I mean books published in the last two or three years.  There is no point comparing your story to something published 10 or 100 years ago because trends change, and what worked in 1990 or even 2015, may not work in today's climate.

Another thing you need to have clear in your own head before you start is the core ideas and themes in your book.  This is not what happens in the book, or details of the characters, but the broader ideas and themes on which the story is built.  There should not be more than three or four things in this list, so you will need to drill deep to find these.  Your campaigns will be built on these underlying themes and ideas as the people who respond to them will be your core readers.

That's about all we have time for this week and is probably enough to get your head around to begin with anyway!

Next week I'll follow up with some of the essential materials you need to have to create a successful marketing campaign.

If anyone has questions, please post them in the comments and I will endeavor to answer them either there, or in a future post if they are more complex.

X O'Abby

#AtoZchallenge Young Adult

The first thing to remember when talking about Young Adult in relation to books is that YA is not a genre, but an age-group. YA books are available across genres – fantasy, literary, mystery, sci-fi, contemporary – just the same as adult books.

What makes a book YA is the age of its protagonists and its appeal to readers of the same or similar age. While there are some arguments about exactly what age this is, personally I would say anywhere from around 14 –19 would sit comfortably within YA. Which is not to say that any book with a protagonist of this age is a YA book....

Confusing, huh?

YA books tend to have a coming-of-age theme, regardless of genre. Protagonists often experience first love, first sexual experience or come to terms with something about themselves they discover in the course of the book.

Historically, the YA category only really came into existence in the 1960s. At that time, YA tended to focus on contemporary stories dealing with the kind of social issues and problems young people were facing. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is widely considered the first YA book despite Salinger not intending it to be for young adults. Its popularity among the 12 –18 age-group urged other writers to explore writing for this age-group and a new category was born.

Over the years the category has grown and changed, and continues to do so. Which is important because the world we live in is constantly changing and the problems and concerns young people are facing today are complex and different to the ones they were facing in years gone by. Perhaps this finger on the pulse of modern society is the reason why so many adults are reading books aimed at teens.

But what really makes a book YA is its ‘voice’. YA books are often written in the first person to allow the reader to really get into the head of the protagonist, see the world through their eyes and feel what they are feeling. And those feelings are teen feelings, the perspective on the world one that a teenager would recognize.

I am a YA writer myself, and I always find myself falling back into that teen perspective, even when what I start out working on is supposed to be for adults. I believe strongly that the teen years are the most important, the time you become the person you will be for the rest of your life. It’s the period in which you try on personalities, develop tastes and discover the beliefs that will guide you through your adult years. It’s the time you develop significant relationships outside your own family.

It’s a confusing and messy time and any little event can invoke a massive emotional response.

As an author, this is dynamic material to work with. Teens are such a contradictory mixture of child and adult and there can be a huge range of maturity levels, even within a single group of friends, and those are compelling voices for an author to play with. And these days, with YA publishers willing to publish books on increasingly difficult subjects, it’s an opportunity to really make a difference, to share stories that teenagers can relate to and see themselves in.

What's Your Story About? Exploring Theme in Fiction

That’s the question we get any time we tell someone we’re writing a (insert your form here – story, novella, book, space opera…) And that’s the question we’re told to have a ready answer to, just in case we bump into our dream agent in line for a McMuffin on the way to work, or in the elevator at a writing conference. It’s the log line, the pitch, the meat of the matter. But what is this critical nugget really? If the piece we’re writing has a shot at capturing the hearts and minds of an audience, it’s the theme.

When someone asks what your story is about, how do you answer? Do you give a brief summary of the action?

For example, “my story is about this poor girl who is harassed by her evil stepsisters until her fairy godmother comes and turns her into a princess so she can go to the ball and meet her prince and live happily ever after.”

That is, after all, what Cinderella is about. Isn’t it? Maybe not.

Try this: “my story is about the belief that by putting goodness and love out into the world, goodness and love will be returned to us. It’s an exploration of the golden rule, set in the world of princes and fairy godmothers.”

Which one do you want to read?

The first tells us what the story is about in terms of action. The second, though, tells us what the theme of the story is.

The Importance of Theme

Let’s look at the idea of theme for a moment. Have you ever finished a book and put it down, asking yourself what the point was? Maybe there was great action, and a rollicking plot, but at the end you’re left feeling like it was hollow somehow. That, writers, is the absence of theme.

All stories should have a theme – from literary (where sometimes the themes seem to take over all action and bring the plot a standstill) to genre (where occasionally theme suffers for the sake of the plot.) It was easy to identify a theme in fables or parables – the theme was the moral or teaching. But in fiction, we don’t always seek to teach.

Think about it this way – the theme of your work is the concept that links the story to the audience. It’s what makes the story universal. It’s what elevates it from a good story to a story that will keep readers thinking long after they’ve put the book down.

As I’ve written more, I’ve learned to build theme into my work somewhat organically. I’ve even discovered that I have themes where I didn’t intentionally place them. But the best work, I think, develops when a writer has a theme in mind as they craft the story, allowing it to work in and out of the words, wrapping itself intricately through the scenes and chapters and adding an extra layer of complexity to the story.

How do you approach theme? Do you build it in intentionally, or have you discovered your themes after the fact? Can you think of any books you’ve read recently that have done a nice job with building on a theme?