On a whim I read an email sent to me on my website. I don’t get a lot there. Mostly people trying to market to me. This one was intriguing. It was a form letter but one written by a human. The service they offered was something I was looking for. A marketing service. I have been struggling. Trying to get the word out there about my book.
So I scheduled the meeting.
It was a cheerful real person not a series of videos. They started out explaining the way they work is they send people to a landing page that collects their info then you can have an email list. I held up my hand when he was done. I probably scowled. “The thing is when a website does that I don’t trust it and I don’t engage with it.”
He looked at me and said, “If you don’t have that, people think you are unprofessional. The only people who are actually going to be of value for you are the people willing to do that.”
I winced, “The thing is if I do give a site like that an email it is a junk email I don’t check unless I am looking for receipts.”
He looked at me shocked. “You’re part of the problem.” He slipped then added more rhetoric about how this is the only way things work.
Internally, I wondered. I did assume everyone else treated this obvious fishing the way I did. But, he was right, I could be wrong. So I asked the price point. It is out of my budget. But it left me with this question and this growing frustration. Do others fall for this crap?
I posted a question on Twitter: I have a question? When you are presented with a website that won’t show you the site unless you give up email info do you engage? How do you feel about unsolicited email from websites?
I only got one response but the recipient said the same thing I had told the marketer. I also asked my son, a generation z person and my step-brother another gen x like me. They gave me the same response: all ad follow up emails end up in trash and never get read. Sites that require personal info just to look at are Scams with a capital S.
The thing with these marketing “trends” that is flummoxing for me is they aren’t really how book popularity works. I am not writing a bestseller. I am writing a book geared toward someone with interests like me. And we are a cynical lot. Most bestsellers don’t interest us. I like to find things I have never seen or read before that get really surreal and mind bending. The things that make you think in a hilarious, entertaining yet non-didactic way. Profound and fun at the same time and I learn something I never knew as I escape into a story. If the plot totally surprises me I am more likely to tell someone about it.
I also explained to the marketing person, I had tried ads. On Amazon and Facebook. Facebook for engagement and Amazon for sales. (Weird thing on Amazon my card expired and I keep updating it and I can’t seem to do ads anymore…need to call but that is a problem solving thing that would take half the day so I never call.) To get one engagement from an ad. I need it in front of 3000 people of those engagements, every ten I get one sale. Right now the profit on my book is usually a dollar and to get in front of 30,000 people is 1000.00. That doesn’t make sense as a marketing strategy. Meanwhile if I have a conversation with a person one on one every three people out of 5 I will get a sale. The pandemic has not helped me and the people boycotting online social sites either. I will get a groove going and some restructuring will happen and I lose all the momentum I have. It was dubious to me that the salesman selling the marketing firm was telling me I needed to be on these social media sites and seemed unaware that Elon Musk buying twitter changed all the people I was engaging with. I had built an interaction and they all left because they were mad about Musk. Same thing happened when people got upset with Facebook spying on them.
The nice thing is that the people who have read my book want the next one and they keep asking when it will be published. The other tactic I am constantly told is you need to get 50 people to review your book. I am also a person who never reads reviews when looking for a book. I don’t know anyone else who does. (Well I guess my son does, found that out by reading this out loud.)
The way I look for a book is I listen when people talk to me about it and I go looking. I will sometimes click on the links Amazon recommends. But sometimes I just start trying to find other things. I don’t just want to read what an algorithm puts in front of me. It is wrong a lot of the time. I will when frustrated and want something new to talk to people or go to a bookstore to find something different.
Currently I have 10 reviews and my sales are over 500. I remind people they can write how they hate it and just a sentence. But it remains where it is at. Shrug. I am in the middle of getting the second book out and a novella.
I am amused that I said I never read ad email but I read this one. And it put me into the same recursive loop I have been in looking for a way out of.
JBach
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