Amazon has put together some nice promo features for classic genre books. Here’s 100 Mysteries and Thrillers to Read in a Lifetime.

This list is selected by Amazon Books editors, but there’s a link from Amazon to Goodreads where readers can vote on their own favorite mysteries and thrillers.

Since these are older books, PG didn’ t see any indie titles.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The usual formula goes something like this: Marketers and advertisers spend huge budgets to craft their campaigns, then refine them over weeks or months until they find just the message that will reach their target audience.

Now some companies are trying to squeeze all of that work into mere minutes.

These advertisers are watching Twitter and other social networks to see what topics are getting the most attention, and putting together short blog posts, tweets and videos that match those themes—in hopes that the online audience will become more aware of the brand and see it as relevant to their interests and needs. Then, if one topic isn’t getting attention anymore, the companies can drop it without much fuss, and switch gears quickly to follow the next hot discussion.

. . . .

“The data comes into the room from many sources, and you have to use that data like a modern-day orchestra leader, blending the inputs in real time in a combination that is as much an art as a science,” says Louis Paskalis, Bank of America senior vice president.

The bank’s attempt to use the [Davos] conference to promote its brand seems to have paid off—97% of people who clicked on BofA’s content on social media during the economic conference were engaging with the bank for the first time, Mr. Paskalis says.

. . . .

Companies should look for people who are tweeting about the company’s core strengths and see what’s on their minds.

Ms. Boff’s team, for instance, searches on Twitter for hashtags and conversations about science. When the companies have a sense of the kind of content that these communities care about, they can craft similar content and tweet it, perhaps using the same hashtags these communities are using.

“We try to behave the way you would if you were meeting somebody in a social gathering—you don’t accost them, instead you try to find a commonality of interest,” Ms. Boff says.

. . . .

Rather than publish content on a huge range of topics, focus on where your brand has built expertise and can add the most value to a conversation. GE, for example, sticks to messages about science and technology on social media—rather than try to sell its products or take shots at competitors.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire)

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

So, here’s the promised post on how you measure success for your promotions or your discoverability campaign.

. . . .

Before I give you my list, add an early step. Figure out if you’re going to do any kind of promotion or if you’re going to let word of mouth happen and write the next book. (Most of you know that I recommend if your time is short to write the next book and forget all of this promotion stuff.)

How do you measure the success of that? Slowly. Patience is the watchword for this method.

If you continue to write and publish the next book, followed by the same routine for the next book and the next, eventually—over a period of years (not months), you’ll see a slow and steady increase in readership. Particularly if you have a static website so that your readers know what order the series is in or what other books you have (which is especially important for standalone titles).

Okay, you’ve decided for whatever reason that for your next book, you’re going to do a bit of promotion.

Here’s how you measure success.

1. Decide What You Want Out of Your Promotion Campaign

2. Figure Out How To Measure The Results (if you can)

3. Measure The Results at Various Points During and Post Campaign

4. Determine If the Campaign Is Worth Repeating

5. Make Notes About What You Learned—Good and Bad

Note I do not say anywhere in here that success is increased sales or that it’s in winning awards or anything that specific.

Success (or failure) is always based on your expectations of your campaignand nothing more. So let’s start there.

1. Decide What You Want Out of Your Promotion Campaign

This sounds so simple and so obvious, yet no one in publishing ever does it, not even the Big Boys. The Big Boys throw money at their bestsellers, but as I’ve said in previous posts, that money is spent in a wasteful and unconscious manner.

In fact, at our weekly professional writers lunch this past weekend, we were discussing the various campaigns that all of us had with our traditional publishers, and we realized that the publishers paid for those campaigns out of “advertising dollars.”

In other words, they had a big pool of promotion and advertising dollars, and they bought group promotions with that money.

But they never allocated the money to each individual book title. So, for example, that promotions campaign that I mentioned last week which Sourcebooks did on A Spy To Die For most likely never had the cost of the Kindle promotion charged against Spy. That cost just went into the overhead cost for the book.

. . . .

You, however, are running your own business. So you must allocate your advertising dollars per project. That’s how sensible businesses run anyway.

If you’re going to plan your promotions per title, then you do the same with the money you spend and the results you want. You determine everything per title—or, in some cases, per series.

. . . .

Your promotion campaign needs a set purpose. You might want to increase your sales numbers. You might want to introduce your series to a new audience. You might want to enter a new market.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

PG agrees with Kris that much of the advertising and promotion he’s seen from Big Publishing is extraordinarily lame. But, of course, most of these people are located in New York where, if you’re any good at advertising, you can walk down the street to a real advertising agency and earn serious money with your talent.

From author and regular TPV visitor M. Louisa Locke:

For the past year there has been a good deal of hand-wringing over the question of KDP Select free promotions. Have they de-valued fiction, do they attract negative reviews, do they even work anymore? As anyone who regularly reads my blog posts knows, I have been a strong proponent of offering ebooks free for promotional purposes, and free promotions have been very good to me in terms of increasing my reviews and keeping my books visible and selling.

However, I also believe one of the distinct advantages we have as indie authors is our ability to use our own sales data to respond innovatively to changes in the marketing environment. As a result, in the past year I followed a number of different strategies to keep the books in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series visible, including beginning to experiment with the new promotional tool, theKindle Countdown, that has been introduced as part of KDP Select.

. . . .

Conclusions: 1) Free promotions are still very effective under certain circumstances. In fact, the BookBub-backed promotion of Maids of Misfortune in May 2013 was slightly more effective than the November 2012 promotion of this book in terms of total downloads, increased visibility, and long-term increase in sales. 2) This didn’t hold true with all books under all circumstances. For example, my free promotions without a BookBub ad had no significant effects on subsequent sales, and the first book in my series consistently did better in subsequent sales (not in total downloads) than the sequel. 3) Because BookBub is expensive, doesn’t accept every book, and now will only promote a book every six months, authors, myself included, need to continue to look at alternative methods of keeping our books visible. Which is where the Kindle Countdown becomes important.

. . . .

October 31, 2013, KDP announced its Kindle Countdown option for books enrolled in KDP Select. This confirmed my feeling that Amazon was systematically nudging indie authors away from depending on free as a promotional tool. I am not going to describe the details of the program, but I am going to report on the four Kindle Countdown promotions I have done so far and draw some conclusions about how they compare to KDP Select free promotions. Since I was experimenting, each Kindle Countdown I did went for a slightly different number of days and used different combinations of promotional ads. However, in all of them I kept the price at 99 cents throughout the promotion. The data also just represents sales in the US store, since my sales in the UK store remained minimal in all the promotions (even the one that was backed by BookBub).

. . . .

1. Based on post-promotional sales, free-book promotions are definitely superior to a Kindle Countdown 99 cent sale (at least at this point in time). Not only did the KDP Select free promotions increase the sales of the promoted book, but they also increased the sales of the other books in the series. In comparison, Kindle Countdown promotions had weaker and less consistent effects on post promotional sales of all books.

. . . .

2. Kindle Countdown promotions—like free promotions––do have a positive effect on increasing the number of reviews. But again, as one would expect, the difference in volume between the two kinds of promotions will have an impact. Nevertheless, I must note that my Kindle Countdown promotions produced a greater number of reviews than I anticipated.

. . . .

3. While Kindle Countdowns are not as effective at this point in producing sales after the promotion, at least you make some sales (and money) during the promotion. For people who have used free-book promotions and then had negligible post-promotional sales, this can make a Kindle Countdown a less risky proposition.

Link to the rest at M. Louisa Locke and thanks to Carol for the tip.

From author Tee Morris at Agent Savant:

 Dawn’s Early Light, the third book in the award-winning Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series, was released into the wild today.

Welcome to the glamorous life of a modern-day author.

I would love to say “Life goes on…” but this is the part where people think “Okay, the book’s out, let’s kick back, bury our toes in the sand, and drink Mojitos until the sun stops setting and the tide ceases to roll in and out.”

. . . .

See, the hard part has only begun. It’s not writing the book. It’s not getting the book published. It’s getting people to buy your book.

Yes, young Padawan, your journey has only begun. In today’s modern world of the blue collar author, amidst the dinosaurs bemoaning technology and lamenting for the days of wine and roses, we young upstarts of science fiction, fantasy, and things that go boom in our books, are refusing to go gently into that good night. What you should have done up to this point, as the modern-day author, is build up anticipation and momentum on your title. You wanted to get people excited about your new book; and depending on how you look at the activity on your social media channels, you should be getting pinged hard and pinged often with activity and interactions. No matter how you cut it, a publisher has made a gamble on your latest work and on your series. They are expecting this gamble to deliver. This is what it means to be a professional writer in today’s publishing industry.

. . . .

You can’t kick back and enjoy a few years between titles. You’re measured by your last book, and even if it’s been a day like it has been for Pip and myself, that last book now includes that one-day-old title currently sitting on the bookshelves.

It’s your job to get it off the bookshelves and into readers’ hands. What do you do?

Keep the Blogging Pace You’ve Set. The best thing about recent blog tours I’ve participated in has been the habit of blogging I’ve developed. I’m figuring if I can keep up the pace of two blogposts a week at TeeMorris.com and the Ministry blog, this will keep people tuned in to what’s going on with me and Dawn’s Early Light.

. . . .

Continue Podcasting Appearances. Something I’ve seen often with podcast tours is once the book is out, the promotion stops cold. Truth is the key time for promotion is a month before and a month after a book’s release. Make sure that when you schedule interviews on podcasts, you have some appearances reaching into the weeks following the book’s birthday.

. . . .

Continue to Post in Social Networks within Reason. This is a hard avenue to traverse because you don’t want to turn your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Google+ accounts into noise as enough writers tend to make this mistake. However, promotions on these channels are key.

Link to the rest at Agent Savant and thanks to Toby for the tip.

From Patheos:

Yesterday, World Magazine published an article by Warren Cole Smith which described a contract between Mars Hill Church (MHC) and ResultSource, Inc. (RSI) for the purpose of elevating Mark Driscoll’s book Real Marriage to various best seller lists.  The arrangement was successful, leading to a week atop the New York Time’s best seller list for advice books. Mars Hill Church does not deny this but spun the arrangement as a means to spread the gospel.

. . . .

. . . .

Apparently, the publisher must be on board with this arrangement as well since the contract requires the publisher to supply the proper number of books. I have asked Harper Collins Christian for comment but they have not replied as yet.

Link to the rest at Patheos and thanks to Eric for the tip.

PG blogged about this practice last year.

From Forbes blogs:

When comparing authors, publishers tend to focus on book sales.  But sales figures tell only part of the story.  Expensive advertising and a strong push for distribution and display at bookstores might yield strong initial sales but create lots of returns and low profitability.  An early and fortuitous movie deal might overexpose a book that doesn’t meet the promise of the movie.

A thousand other externalities make sales data inadequate to measure the strength of an author’s franchise.  To understand which authors are worth investing in, publishers need a better measure of an author’s value.

. . . .

[A]ccording to Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group, which polls thousands of readers to determine their preferences and purchase behavior, platform is a misleading metric.

We’ve seen celebrities with extremely high name recognition and very large platforms fail miserably in book sales.  Being famous or having millions of Twitter followers alone is not enough to build a strong franchise as an author.

Hildick-Smith points out that only about half of adults read books and just a fifth are regular book buyers.  So a celebrity with a large and dedicated following will not automatically become a bestselling author.

. . . .

Brand loyalty is important because it has a direct impact on profitability.  In fact, Codex data shows that consumers are willing to pay a 66% premium for a book by a favorite author over an unknown author.

. . . .

One view in the publishing industry is that bestseller lists are the product of a skill-based meritocracy.  But the reality is that the popular perception of a book itself is colored by the strength of the author’s brand.   When we view bestseller list, part of what we’re seeing is a brand ranking.

. . . .

The question is – what makes for a strong author brand?  To answer this question, let’s look at the strongest brand in the most recent Codex survey.

. . . .

Jack Reacher is the creation of British author Lee Child, and has sold more than 70 million books, making Reacher more than a billion-dollar brand.  But what’s most interesting about Lee Child’s creation is not the size of the brand but its strength. Child doesn’t have the largest following among bestselling authors: just over a third of book shoppers are aware of him versus the more than 95% who know John Grisham and the 99% aware of Stephen King, both of whom have sold more books.

. . . .

But while just under a quarter of Grisham and King’s readers count either man as their favorite author nearly a third of Reacher readers mark Child as their favorite.   (King and Grisham still rate on the higher end of reader loyalty, by the way.  Most bestselling authors have less than 20% fan loyalty.)

This loyalty is not just theoretical: Child carries a higher percentage of his readers with him to each successive book than any other bestselling author.

Link to the rest at Forbes blogs and thanks to Ann and several others for the tip.

From author Shantnu Tiwari:

 In this article, I try to look if using Google AdWords is a good strategy to drive customers to your website, and hence mailing list. I will explain what AdWords is, how it works, and whether it is useful for writers.

Like many people, I have an email list for people to hear about my new books (I  no longer call it a newsletter, as it’s such a boring term, and no, I have no intention of sending people crap very week just so they can read my “newsletter”).

But no one had signed on to my list. Which wasn’t surprising- I get 4 visitors a day, out of which 2 is my mother in law (Hi mom!).

. . . .

I decided to give Google Adwords a try. For those who are not aware, Google makes most of its money from ads. Anytime you search for anything, Google displays an ad at the top and bottom, as well as the sides.

. . . .

So I decided to get some people in via Google Adwords.

Google adwords is a real beast. It is not easy to get started with, and if you don’t know what you are doing, you can lose some money. If you want me to write a blog on how to use Google adwords, let me know.

. . . .

AdWords aren’t for everyone. To get the most of it:

1. Your target market must be online, and use Google for their problems (only Google counts here, as it has the biggest market share).
2. Your keyword must have thousands, if not hundreds of hits a month.
3. Ideally, you should have a product that can sell itself, so you can track how many people clicked on the ad, vs how many bought. Software is a good example of this, as are books (especially eBooks).

. . . .

I wanted to find people who were looking for books online. So I searched for keywords like “free books” “Free kindle books”, “download books”.

These keywords get thousands of searches. The keyword “free books” alone gets 5000+ searches a month. You can setup AdWords, so Google will either only look for the exact term, or a variation of it, like “free books online”. I chose 10-12 keywords which were getting the most hits.

The next thing is to create an ad. This is a bit of a trial process. The best way is to create at least two ads with different words. You then see which ad was more successful, and use that. Then you create another two ads, based on the winning ad, with slight modifications. This is called A/B testing. The theory is that you run this for a fairly long time (a few months, and thousands of conversions- people clicking on your ads, not just viewing them). I only went through a few iterations, as the process can be very expensive, but I did increase my click through rate very slightly.

. . . .

Google wants you to bid as much as possible, as that’s how they make money. But like I mentioned before, this can very quickly bankrupt you. I set a of bid of £0.10 (Around $0.15). Google moaned that this was too low, my ad wouldn’t show on the first page, etc etc. But the keywords I was using was getting thousands of hits, I didn’t care. I set a daily budget of £1 ($1.5 at the time), and let the ads run for a few weeks. The 1st week I didn’t get any clicks, as my ads were bad, but I slow improved them, till in the second week, I had around 6 clicks. Of these, 4 people signed up to my list. This was from almost a 960 impressions. The most popular term was, of course, “free books”.

. . . .

I got 6 clicks, which meant almost £0.60. Not bad, but not great either. I decided to really push it. I increased my click cost ten times to £1 ($1.50). This would blow my budget in one click, but hopefully, my ad would now be placed higher, instead of the 2nd or third page.

And it worked. Within one week, I went from 3-4 clicks a week to 50 clicks.

But here’s the kicker. The people subscribing to my newsletter went down. I only got 2 subscribers from those 50 clicks, while previously I had gotten 4 from 6. The only reason I can think of is: When I was on the 2-3rd page, only the very serious people were there, and they really wanted a book.

On the front page, people were more likely to click on impulse, and immediately click back.

. . . .

In retrospect, the experiment was doomed to fail. But in retrospect, we are all geniuses. The problem with the experiment was, the people searching for “free books” were doing just that. They didn’t care about me or my books, they would have been happy with books about zombies, Fifty shades of Gray, or my Lord of the Rings parody.

Link to the rest at Shantnu Tiwari

From Digital Book World:

When it comes to book publicity and promotion, the predominant strategy has always been, for better or worse, “big splash out of the gate.” The resulting typical PR time frame for most books hovers in the two- to three-month range for titles that show signs of catching on with readers; even less for books that don’t show immediate signs of life.

That culture of immediacy in book PR is a holdover from a previous era when front-of-store displays at physical book retailers included a time stamp, similar to screens in movie theaters, where it’s imperative to maximize the short period of sunshine, before being pushed out of the theater by newer and shinier movies in the queue. But in a book discovery world where less physical browsing occurs, the shorter publicity time frame is becoming an actual impediment to success for many books, books that often take much longer to find their way into readers hands or devices–sometimes months or years after publicity efforts were put to bed.

. . . .

Of course, most publishers simply aren’t structured to provide the time and support necessary to fully grow an author’s profile over the duration of the lengthy process of book discovery.

. . . .

But the reality is that the long-tail marketing needs of writers remains an unsolved publishing issue, and one that confounds writers as much as anyone. Sam Missingham, current head of events at HarperCollins Publishers in the UK and a co-founder of Futurebook explained the author paradox in a post last year. According to the Futurebook Digital Census study, almost half of the traditional authors surveyed considered switching to self-publishing, expressing concerns with the marketing and pricing strategies for their book. Conversely, 43% of self-published authors expressed a desire for a traditional publishing deal, citing a desire for the marketing support that a traditional publisher can provide. In other words, the very same issue authors were most dissatisfied with in their traditional publishing relationship.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World and thanks to Jeff for the tip.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Here’s how writers decide to market their books:

They read blogs and articles, which tell them the best thing to do. Or, they mimic what they’ve seen other authors do. Or, they try to act like big traditional publishers, by funding their own book tours and doing signings.

I’d say that’s no way to run a business, but honestly, that’s how traditional publishers have run their businesses for a long time.

A lot of traditional publishing is based on “we always do it that way.” That was one reason why, in 1993, a relatively unknown Edgar-award winning author spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money producing a television ad for his book. He did so because he had the money, and his publisher refused to do the kind of support the author believed would make the book sell.

This author wasn’t a guy who simply believed in himself: he was one of the top ad executives in the nation. And he had worked his way into that position from the ground up. In other words: he knew his stuff.

That man? Not unknown any longer, and certainly not known only as an Edgar-winner. You know him as one of the bestselling authors in the world, James Patterson.

Am I recommending that you buy your own TV ads? No. I’m telling you to start thinking outside the box.  Patterson did, back in the days before indie publishing was easy or cheap. He started using Little, Brown, his traditional publishing company, as if it were his own personal publishing company. Now, Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown, says, “Jim is at the very least co-publisher of his own books.”

And it all started with that book, the one he advertised on his own.

. . . .

Traditional publishing often balks at bringing in new readers, claiming it doesn’t want readers of that sort or that readers don’t buy books that way. All the while, the publishers refuse to commission studies on how readers actually buy books, leaving that to government agencies or booksellers, most of whom don’t have the money to commission studies either.

Remember now, traditional publishing’s business model is based on velocity, and no long-term thinking at all. All of its marketing is geared toward that fierce urgency of now which I mentioned last week, because to traditional publishers, books spoil. They leave the shelf within a few weeks or a few months and then become (smelly) backlist titles that are taking up warehouse space. It’s tough for traditional publishers to realize that e-books never spoil; it’s hard for publishers to change their thinking.

. . . .

Let’s now move to TV. It worked for Patterson—who spent his career as an ad executive, who wrote and produced television advertising for other companies.

In other words, he knew what he was doing, and it sold his book. The key here, though, is that he knew what he was doing.

There’s no way to stress that enough. He knew what worked in the advertising market of 1993. He didn’t take his publisher’s suggestions. You know why? Because then, as now, traditional publishers did none of the sensible things that other big businesses do.

Traditional publishers don’t measure the results of their ad buys. They don’t look at the effectiveness of a sales campaign.

For God’s sake, they don’t vary the type of ad campaign to reflect an individual product. Instead, they only vary their campaigns by a vague sense of whether or not a book will sell. Then they slot that book into a pre-established set of behaviors, which “worked for other books of the same type.”

Um…no self-respecting ad agency would ever make a Nike shoe campaign look exactly like an Adidas shoe campaign, even though they’re both advertising high-end athletic shoes. Of course, Nike and Adidas have different ad agencies. But assume they had the same agency. That agency would work very hard to make Nike’s shoes look different from Adidas’s shoes.

But one publisher of thriller bestsellers treats those novels exactly like the competition treats its thriller bestsellers. Apparently, Clive Cussler writes the exact same book as Lee Child who writes the exact same book as Dan Brown. So that’s why they get the exact same advertising treatment—even though all three of them have different publishers.

. . . .

Because traditional publishers believe that marketing is something that is beneath them. When they do reach out and try to market something differently, they don’t hire an ad agency to do it. They don’t bring in outside experts. They don’t market test. They guess.

. . . .

Yes, your local bookseller(s) may hold a charity signing for you. Yes, you might even have a mutually beneficial local event. But it won’t make any real difference to your book sales, and it certainly won’t be worth your time.

Long-term booksellers know that. They know that only certain authors draw readers to a store. These booksellers are also respectful of the author’s time, realizing that well-known authors generally don’t have an afternoon to give to sitting in a bookstore. And I do mean “give.” Writers don’t get paid for those appearances, and the sales don’t make up for the lost hours of work.

Most traditionally published writers get paid a percentage of each book sold, earning as little as $2 per hardcover sale, and sometimes as little as 50 cents on each paperback sale. That money might not reach an author’s pocket for six months or more (if ever). So, sitting in a bookstore for two hours and selling even 20 hardcovers is only worth $40 to the author—six months from now. And if the writer had to drive to the signing, and had to get a hotel room (on her dime) and had to buy her own meals, well, she lost money.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

PG worked in a very large ad agency back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. In fact, it was the same agency that James Patterson ended up running. (Yes, it was slightly like Mad Men and, no, he didn’t know Patterson.) He has also been a marketing vice-president a couple of times.

PG will confirm Kris’ conclusion that big publishers are rinky-dink advertisers and marketers of their books. He’s not at all surprised that Patterson created his own advertising after seeing what his publisher had in mind.