Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing
I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Our topic today is Discoverability—what it is, what has worked in the past, and what works now. This is an article about strategic thinking, not about tactics. I want to teach you how to think about Discoverability. We’ll save the details for another day.
What is Discoverability?
“Discoverability” is the ability of people in your Target Audience to find your book, even if they never heard of you.
Why is it important for them to find you? Because you have limited time to find them. You could go out in the street and accost perfect strangers and tell them about your novel. But that’s very labor-intensive—it costs you a lot of time and energy and mortification—and it will have very little effect. A small fraction of people you meet might be in your Target Audience. But they’ll still be angry at you for invading their personal space. And so will the vast majority of people who aren’t in your Target Audience. So it’s really hard for you to go out and find your Target Audience.
Instead, you want to create a way for people in your Target Audience to find you. This requires you to spend a bit of time, energy, and possibly money up front. But after that, you want people in your Target Audience to do all of the work to find you. Sounds like magic? It is, kind of. But when you find an engine to drive Discoverability, it works fantastically well.
Discoverability is the Effect, Not the Cause
Please note that Discoverability is an adjective, not a verb. It describes a feature that your book has, not an action you can take. A book doesn’t have a “Discoverability knob” that you can turn up to 11.
If you want your book to be more Discoverable, there is a verb that describes the actions you can take to make it so. That verb is the least-popular word in the vocabulary of any writer. The verb is “Marketing.”
If you cringed when you read the word “Marketing,” that means you’re normal. It means you’re human. It means you have a soul. So congratulations on that. But if you want your book to be more Discoverable, you’ll need to find a way to get past that cringe.
That Time I Admitted I Hated Marketing
True story: I remember a time early in my writing career. I had a few books out, but they weren’t doing well. I was discouraged. Then I ran into an agent friend of mine at a writer’s conference. She asked how my marketing efforts were going. And I exploded. “I hate marketing! I hate book-signings! Everything I do fails! I don’t ever want to market my books again!”
My agent friend shushed me and said, “Be careful what you say. The walls have ears. You don’t want the publishers to know you don’t like marketing, or maybe they won’t buy your books anymore.”
She was right, and I was wrong. Hating marketing is not the answer. Soon after that, I found a course on marketing that really clicked for me. I spent a long weekend inhaling the course. And I learned the general principles of how to make myself and my books more Discoverable. I made a short list of ideas I could actually do. Within a few weeks, I started putting them into practice.
When I ran into the same agent at the next conference, she said, “Randy, have you gone crazy? What are you thinking? I’ve seen what you’re doing, and it’s way too much effort. Anyway, it won’t work. I’ve never heard of anyone doing things like that. You’re going to burn yourself out.”
But this time she was wrong. I’d found a way to do Marketing in a way that worked for me. The proof was in her own comments—she had seen what I was doing. I didn’t have to tell her. She found it herself. Just like thousands of other people. And I didn’t hate marketing anymore. When you’re doing something you like, you don’t burn out.
She was correct that she had never heard of the methods I was using. They were new. I didn’t invent them. I copied them from people who had already figured it all out. Those methods worked for a long time, but they work much less well now. Which brings me to the next point…
Most Marketing Methods Eventually Go Obsolete
The general principles of marketing always work. They never go out of fashion. But those principles have to be put into practice using tools and methods that are available right now. And most of those tools and methods eventually go obsolete. Let’s talk about some of those methods that don’t work nearly as well as they used to.
Search Engine Optimization. This was a big one for more than decade after Google became a thing. The idea was simple. You created a website, filled it with interesting articles, and used the methods Google suggested for making your articles Discoverable. These methods became known as Search Engine Optimization. SEO for short. And it worked for a long time. SEO is how I got famous. SEO has brought over 7 million people to my article on the Snowflake Method. But SEO works a lot less well now, for a lot of reasons.
Permafree books. This became huge not long after Amazon created its Kindle Direct Publishing tool and other retailers followed suit. Authors posted their e-books directly on Amazon and the other retailers. Amazon didn’t let you set the price free, but they would price-match a free book if it was free on B&N or on Kobo or on Apple Books. Readers loved free books. So authors with a series would make the first book in the series permanently free, put a link to the second book at the end of the first, and sell tons of copies of all the other books in their series. I moved over 170,000 copies of a permafree novel, which led to great sales of the other books in my series. But permafree doesn’t work so well anymore, because readers eventually decided that “free” is highly correlated with “low-quality.”
BookBub. This was a great tool, when e-books were new and exciting. BookBub.com is a site where authors can buy a listing for their book at a greatly reduced price. BookBub sends readers a customized daily email with great deals on books in exactly the categories each reader is interested in. Readers love a bargain, and BookBub is pretty good about vetting books. So a BookBub daily deal is usually a good quality book, and it’s cheap. I once moved 25,000 free copies of one of my novels in a single day on Amazon. And I reaped the rewards for months. But the prices have gone up for authors to list a book on BookBub, and it’s very hard now to even get your book accepted on BookBub. If you can, it’s still worth it. But authors can’t depend on this anymore, because there’s so much competition.
TikTok. Five years ago, marketing gurus started talking about how amazing the Discoverability engine was on TikTok. The app was no longer just a place to show off your teenage dance moves. It became a powerful video-blogging tool where a person with good content could quickly find an audience. Because TikTok’s algorithm found the audience for you. I created a TikTok account and began making videos. My first 6 videos each got 500 to 800 views. My 7th video had 211,000 views over a long weekend. Within a few months, I had almost 10,000 followers. I stopped making videos when my day job got more demanding. For several years, TikTok was a fantastic place to build an audience. But TikTok creators have been complaining for the past year or so that the platform has become much less useful. The algorithm is not reliable anymore. And TikTok users know that the FYP feed has gotten clogged with ads and AI slop.
Some Current Marketing Engines to Boost Discoverability
So what marketing methods work for authors? There are several.
SEO still works, sorta kinda, if you have an older site with “authority.” My site at AdvancedFictionWritig.com has been around for 20 years, so it has a bit of authority, and it still gets about 10,000 page views per month. SEO is a major factor in that. But the site used to get 100,000 page views per month. Traffic is way down, because the internet changed.
BookBub still works pretty well, if you can afford the price, and if your book gets chosen. It’s just really hard to get chosen. And I hear that the “halo effect” of a BookBub deal doesn’t last nearly as long as it used to. (I had a BookBub deal in August of 2014 that prompted a wave of good sales that lasted about 3 months.)
Facebook ads work, or so I’m told. About 10 years ago, Mark Dawson made a very big splash with his course Ads for Authors. Many professional novelists bought this course (I did), and many people put it to good use (I never had the time). David Gaughran runs an excellent newsletter on marketing books, and he often talks about Facebook ads. I’ve never met David, but I’ve followed his newsletter for years, and I highly recommend him. If you’re interested in running “pay-per-click” ads on Facebook, Amazon, and BookBub, he’s your go-to resource. He’s also very knowledgeable about running email newsletters, which are a powerful marketing tool, even though they’re not focused on Discoverability.
Substack appears to work. I’ve only recently completed my transition into the Substack system, so I can’t give you any numbers from my personal experience. But Substack is a place where serious content is prized by readers, and Substack makes it easy to add a paid tier. (I haven’t created a paid tier yet, but I will, once I figure out what “extra stuff” I can create for you, my Loyal Fans, that will go beyond the free content I give out.) Substack also has some nice Discoverability tools built in—an internal social media feed called “Notes,” and a recommendation engine for creators to recommend other creators. I recommend the Substack publication named “Write, Build, Scale”, which is published by Sinem Gunel, Philip Hofmacher, and Jari Roomer. They teach how to use Substack effectively, and I like their content enough that I joined their paid tier.
Is This The Right Time In Your Career to Boost Discoverability?
Let’s be clear that there is a right time and a wrong time for boosting your Discoverability. I talk about this in one of my cornerstone articles, The Success Equation, which explains what drives author success. If you are just starting your writing career, you should focus on getting your Quality up to snuff. After that, work on your Production. When your Production is ticking along nicely, you can work on your Discoverability.
Of course, it’s never too early to start learning about Discoverability. Knowing what drives Discoverability will help you in mapping out your career. But there’s a difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it. There’s no point in working on your Discoverability until you have at least one book available for your Target Audience to discover.
Homework:
- Read my article, The Success Equation, if you haven’t already.
- Where are you on the highway to Success? Do you know your Target Audience? Is your Quality where it needs to be? How’s your Discoverability?
- Pick your next step. It’s different for different writers.
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