MARKETING SHMARKETING

Boy, I am in a mood today. I just read ANOTHER blog post about marketing and branding. This post didn’t say anything new, nothing I haven’t read in every other blog about those same subjects: Persistence is key. But you won’t sell books unless you market them.

Perhaps I should stop reading blog posts about marketing because I’m starting to feel badly about myself every time I do. Basically, the conventional wisdom is it doesn’t matter how good your book is. No one will ever see it or read it unless you market the hell out of it. This does not bode well for writers like me who are terrible at marketing.

Unite with other writers. Yeah, I could do that. Maybe it would help. But would it? I suck at marketing but I’m not that great in groups, either. I’m always out there questioning everything. My mother used to call me the original why child.

I question it because I doubt it. I’m skeptical. I’m from Missouri so you’re going to have to SHOW ME. Show me something that really truly works and I’m on board. But all those expert marketers out there can’t do that. They can only reiterate the same thing over in different words and invite guest bloggers to say it a different way. No one says, do A, B and C in exactly this way and your book will hit the bestseller list in X amount of time. And how many times has a so-called “expert” been wrong?

Marketing is hype. Most people recognize hype when they hear it. I especially can’t stand authors hyping their own books. I think, boy does she have an ego. Right behind that I think, her book can’t be that good or she wouldn’t be doing this over-the-top sales pitch about it. Subsequently, I will never buy that author’s book.

Because really, what, of late, has lived up to its hype? What can you point to and say, yep, this is as great as they told me it would be? Oh, please, think of something, I’m begging you. I so want to believe that marketing really does work.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I hate marketing. I don’t believe in it. Because everybody does it. And if it worked then everybody would be a bestseller, wouldn’t they? Well, probably not, because some of them would be better at marketing than others. So if you’re better at marketing, but your book isn’t as good as mine or a thousand other authors like me, what does that say about you as a writer?

It’s not that we’re all peddling crap. Certainly not. Again I say there are many truly wonderful authors out there you’ve never heard of, never read and probably will never hear of and never read. Likewise, there are some mediocre authors (or below mediocre in some cases) who will make bestseller lists with every book.

I come back to is that because readers can no longer judge a quality piece of fiction against an inferior one? Or because they believed the hype and bought the book?

Every time I get a bee in my bonnet about this, it pisses me off. I HATE being told it isn’t enough to write a good book. I DESPISE being told if I don’t market well my wonderful book will go nowhere.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to turn the people telling me that into liars. Any suggestions?

#marketing #books #experts