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 7^th 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 AdvancedFictionWriting.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. 

The post Boosting Your Discoverability appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. Our topic today is a Public Service Announcement on how to spot the scammers who are currently trying to sell you bogus services . . .

Scammers, Scammers Everywhere

Every week, I get several emails from scammers. Most of them are written by AI but I suppose some might be human-written. It always feels good to hear from them, because they all love one of my novels and say wonderful things about both me and my fiction. We all like getting compliments. But these emails are all scams. 

Early on, I replied back to one of these scammers, just to see where his scam was going. After a couple of exchanges, he got to the point. He wanted to have me on some sort of a Zoom call with “thousands of historical fiction fans, hungry for thought-provoking” blah, blah, blah. And there was just a small $85 administrative fee to get things rolling.

I replied back pretending to misunderstand him—as if he were offering me $85 to be on his Zoom call. I said that my time was valuable and I couldn’t appear on his call for less than $250, my usual hourly fee. (I made this up. I am a much cheaper date than that, but I wanted to pull his chain.)

Then we had a number of back-and-forth emails where he kept asking how I would pay the $85, and I kept telling him I’d be fine with him sending the $250 by PayPal or Zelle. At a certain point, I told him I had raised my rates to $500. Eventually, he got tired of this and quit emailing me. 

Since then, I’ve got many more scam emails. The offers usually take one of several forms:

• The scammer wants to have me on a Zoom call with those “hungry” readers. 
• The scammer wants to help me promote my book by redoing my Amazon Author Central page, my Amazon keywords, and/or my Goodreads page. 
• The scammer doesn’t say what they want, but they use the typical language that other scammers use, so it’s clear they are going to want something eventually.

I now simply ignore these. I am on an email list with hundreds of professional novelists, and lately, part of the conversation has been the many scammers they’ve been dealing with. They have noted two other scams that I haven’t come across:

• The scammer says they are an editor at a very well-known publishing company. 
• The scammer says they are an agent at a big-shot literary agency. 

In both cases, the scam is that they’ll say your book isn’t quite ready, but they have this friend who does book doctoring and can get your book up to snuff. Or they have this friend who does book publicity and can help you promote your previously published books and earn much more money on them.

So how do you sniff out a scam? I’ll show you the red flags that instantly raise my hackles and make me suspect a scam. And I’ll show you the smoking guns that prove you’re dealing with a scammer. Neither the red flags nor the smoking guns will always be there, so you should always be cautious. When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 

Red Flags: Probable Scam Ahead

Scammers are lazy, and most of them seem to be using AI to generate their emails. And they all seem to be using the same AI tool, because there are certain phrases that I see over and over in scammy emails. Here are a few of them:

“What caught my attention about __________”. I see this phrase or phrases like it often in scam emails. The sentence goes on to say something very specific about my novel. This makes it sound like they must have read my novel, because the compliments can get very specific. 

“What I found especially interesting is __________”. Then they add in yet more detail about my novel. They really lay it on thick. You’d think my novel was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the way they go on about it. 

“… an interesting reader conversation…” This sentence fragment is designed to make me think that the scammer is part of lots of reader conversations, and knows people who are simply dying to have reader conversations about my book. 

“… curated Goodreads readers…” This makes it sound like the scammer has a Goodreads group that they’re connected to. 

“Amazon visibility strategy” The scammer offers to make the book more “visible” on Amazon by doing things that most professional authors already know how to do and have already done. If you don’t know how to do these things, you can use your favorite search engine to learn how to do them yourself at no cost. Or you could pay a “visibility expert” to do it for you, but they won’t do as good of a job as you will, because you know your book and they don’t. 

There are many other similar phrases. The common denominator is that they tell you how great your book is, and then they offer a service. They don’t tell you how much it costs. Not yet. That will come after you reply. And once you reply, they’ll probably sell your email address to other scammers. 

Smoking Guns: When You Can Prove It’s a Scam

You can know for sure that a scammer is fake when they impersonate a real editor at a real publisher, or a real agent at a real literary agency. 

The reason is that they have to give you an email address to reply to. But real editors and real agents have email addresses you can check on their websites. And the scammer can’t receive email at those real email addresses. So they have to find a way to look like the real thing while still receiving email from you at a phony address.

The scammers use a few tricks that you can easily spot.

The first trick is to use an email address that is very similar to a real address, but it has a small typo. If the real editor is named Joe Schmoe and works for a real publisher named (for example) BigPublisher, then the real editor’s real email address would typically be joe.schmoe@bigpublisher.com. The scammer changes the lower-case “l” in bigpublisher.com into a “1” and uses the scam address joe.schmoe@bigpub1isher.com. In some fonts, these look almost identical, and you’d be hard-pressed to notice. 

The second trick is to “spoof” a real email address by putting it in the header of the email as the “sender” email. But then the “reply-to” email address is something different. (The “sender” email address is the one that the email claims to be sent from. This is easy to fake. The “reply-to” email address is the one that you will actually send to when you click Reply. These are usually the same address, but not always.) You might not notice after you click the Reply button that the email you’re sending is now going to joe.schmoe.bigpublisher@gmail.com. Which is owned by the scammer. 

The third trick is for the scammer to simply to use a Gmail or AOL email address and hope nobody notices. But real editors always work with an official email address provided by their publisher. And so do real agents. 

So here’s the smoking gun test to catch these kind of scammers. If you receive an email claiming to be from a real editor or real agent, click the Reply button and look to see what email address your reply would go to if you were to actually send it. (You won’t send it. If this is a scammer, you’ll delete this reply after you see the address of the alleged editor or agent.) Now use your favorite search engine to find out what real email addresses look like for the publisher or agency in question.

As an example, a friend of mine was recently contacted by someone claiming to be an agent at the very well-known literary agency, Curtis Brown. I looked at the Curtis Brown website and saw a Security Notice at the bottom saying that its agents were being impersonated via email. The notice said that all real Curtis Brown agents use email addresses ending in @cbltd.com. This was the smoking gun, because the emails my friend was receiving didn’t match this ending. My friend then used the Curtis Brown website to contact the real agent, who confirmed that she had never tried to contact him.

Note that this kind of smoking gun will not work when the scammer is merely claiming to have a Zoom community of “engaged readers” or is offering an “Amazon visibility” service. Lots of legitimate people use Gmail accounts. In that case, you’ll need some other way to detect their scamminess. People who run real reader communities should not be charging authors a fee. People who offer to help you with promoting your book or making it more visible are probably offering you services you can do better yourself. 

Case History of a Scam, With Receipts

My friend Stan Williams is the author of The Moral Premise, a well-known book used by authors and screenwriters. I reviewed it in my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine in November of 2011, after meeting Stan at a conference. 

Stan emailed me recently about an “agent” he’d been talking to. Something seemed scammy, and he wanted my thoughts. I told him my opinion, and pretty quickly he found the smoking gun and proved that the person he’d been talking to was impersonating a real agent. 

You can read Stan’s whole account of it on his blog: https://moralpremise.blogspot.com in the post dated October 7, 2026. He identifies 12 red flags along the way. 

One bright side of this episode was that I learned Stan had a recent novel, Sabriya’s Hope, that looks interesting. I’m pretty sure I’m in the target audience for this book, so I’m going to read it. 

Homework:

• Watch out for red flags.
• Be on the alert for smoking guns.

The post Stop and Smell the Scammers appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Our topic today is how to inject conflict into your scenes using “adversarial dialogue.” I’ll define what I mean by that a bit further down. But first let’s talk about conflict…

Conflict is the Heart of Fiction

I’ve been in critique groups for more than 35 years. I remember one meeting when a new guy came to the group, bringing a scene to be critiqued. There was nothing grammatically wrong with his scene. No spelling errors, grammar problems, or failed punctuation. But nothing was happening in the story. This is my best recollection of our discussion of his scene:

I started out by saying, “You write pretty well. But there’s a problem with this scene. You don’t have any conflict.”

He gave me a blank look and said, “A novel has to have conflict?”

I said, “That’s practically the definition of a novel. Fiction is characters in conflict.”

He said, “Oh.”

Notice what happened here. He thought fiction was one thing. I thought it was something else. That meant our goals in the meeting were at cross-purposes. I didn’t come there to grade a piece of writing for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. And he didn’t come to be graded on conflict.

So we had a dialogue that’s stuck with me. There’s a lesson here. The key to interesting dialogue is that it needs to be “adversarial”…

What is Adversarial Dialogue?

When I talk about “adversarial dialogue,” I mean dialogue in which two or more characters are at cross-purposes. They each come into the scene with a different goal. And that automatically creates conflict.

You don’t need violence to create conflict. You don’t need shouting. You only need multiple characters who each want a different thing, with neither willing to budge. If the stakes in the scene are high, your scene will be interesting, and your reader will be hooked. 

If the stakes are low, or if there’s no conflict at all, your scene will be boring. 

So how do you fix dialogue that’s not adversarial? That’s easy. Let’s look at an example, and I’ll pull this from my recent experience buying a car. (Our family car died unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago, so we spent last week shopping for a replacement. It’s a story with a happy ending, but there was conflict along the way, because I watched a few billion TikTok videos first on how to shop for a car.) 

Example 1: Nonadversarial Dialogue

In this example, I’ll show you how not to buy a car. The dialogue will be nonadversarial, and the scene will be extremely boring. 

Salesman: Hi, how are you today?

Buyer: I’m great, how are you? 

Salesman: Fantastic. Are you looking to buy a car?

Buyer: Yes, but I don’t know what model I want. 

Salesman: What kind of monthly payments were you thinking of?

Buyer: I was hoping not more than $900 a month. That’s the most I can afford. 

Salesman: You’re in luck. Take a look at this car right over here. 

Buyer: (Looks at sticker and gasps.) Wow, that’s a lot of money! 

Salesman: Not to worry. We can get you a great deal on financing, if you need it. 

Buyer: That would be wonderful. Can I take it for a test drive?

Salesman: Hop right in and let’s give it a whirl. 

15 minutes later…

Buyer: Wow, I love this car! But I don’t see how I can afford it. 

Salesman: Leave that to me. Let’s just go in my office and I’ll work some numbers for you. 

Buyer: OK. 

30 minutes later…

Salesman: You’re in luck. I fought with my manager and got you a $3000 discount that includes a $2500 rebate from the manufacturer. Then I argued the bank down and got you an amazing rate on financing. I added in a really incredible maintenance package to extend your warranty out to 10 years, and our own special Invincible Finish paint protection package. The bank let me stretch out the loan a tiny little bit, and we got your monthly payments down to only $897.67 per month. That’s within your budget, right?

Buyer: Yes.

Salesman: Then you just bought yourself a new car. Sign right here.

* * *

Let’s mercifully draw the curtain on this exceptionally boring scene. There’s no conflict here, because this salesman and this buyer have almost exactly the same goal. The buyer wants to buy the best car he can at a price he can afford, and the salesman wants to sell a car at the maximum amount the buyer can afford. These goals are so well aligned, there’s only one possible outcome. 

And it’s a yawner of a scene. If you have a scene like this in your novel, you need to fix it. Here’s how…

Example 2: Adversarial Dialogue

In this example, I’ll show you a better way to buy a car, and coincidentally, a better way to write the scene. The dialogue will be adversarial, because now the two characters have misaligned goals. The salesman still wants to sell a car at the maximum amount the buyer can afford, but now the buyer wants to buy a car at the minimum amount the dealer can afford. This does not mean that either the salesman or the buyer is a bad person. They are simply players in the game called capitalism, each playing the role that the game requires them to play. 

Salesman: Hi, how are you today?

Buyer: I’m really interested in your model Z. I saw it on your website and it looks like a solid car. Here’s the stock number for the exact vehicle I want to look at.

Salesman: (Looking at stock number.) That’s a terrific car, but it’s in the cheapest trim line. The Limited edition is way better, and I bet you can afford it. What kind of monthly payments were you thinking of?

Buyer: I don’t know if I’ll be making payments. I might pay cash and I might finance it. We’ll talk about money later. All I care about right now is that I want to drive this exact car. 

Salesman: Help me help you. Can you afford $1100 per month? 

Buyer: I’m not going to talk about money until I decide if I even like this car. Have you got the keys?

Salesman: Hop right in and let’s give it a whirl. 

15 minutes later…

Buyer: This car is perfectly acceptable. 

Salesman: Great! Let’s just go in my office and I’ll work some numbers for you. 

Buyer: Thanks, but I’m not ready to talk numbers yet. I haven’t even decided if I’m going to be buying from you. I’m planning to also test drive a Toyota Model X and a Chevy Model Y today, so I need to be going now.

Salesman: Those cars are OK, but that model of Toyota has had some problems with the…

Buyer: Thanks for your time. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to talk money.

Salesman: I can get you a $3000 discount. Also, we’ve got really great financing. Just come into my office and we can talk. 

Buyer: (Walking away). I’ll be in touch.

Salesman: Let’s go talk to my manager. I think I can get you $3500 off, but this deal is only good for today. 

Buyer: Have a nice day.

* * *

There’s no punching or shouting in this scene, but the conflict is real, because the buyer and salesman have wildly different goals. The salesman’s goal is to get the buyer into an office where he can create a deal favorable to himself. The buyer’s goal is ONLY to test drive one particular model and then walk away. 

The buyer does not intend to buy any car today. After he test drives a few different brands and models, he’ll make a decision on one of them. That may take a few days. Then he’ll take another day or two to research prices online for his chosen make and model and trim line, looking at sellers within 500 miles of his home. He’ll identify a few specific cars with specific stock numbers at specific dealers. 

In a later scene, the buyer will negotiate with the dealers who have the cars he wants. He does not intend to negotiate in person. Nor will he negotiate over the phone. He plans to negotiate the deal ONLY by text messages. The buyer knows he’s an amateur going up against a pro. Negotiating by text will help to level the playing field. A little. If he can, he’ll pit the dealers against each other to get the best selling price. But he might not have this option. 

In a yet later scene, the buyer will negotiate financing, again using only text messages. Now he’ll pit the dealer against his credit union (or against a cash deal, if he’s lucky enough to have cash). 

In each of these scenes, the buyer will be at cross-purposes with the salesmen. They will try their best to get him to come in to the dealership and “talk.” The buyer will try his best to get a written term sheet in a text message. The buyer wants to have a hard offer before he goes to the dealer in person, at which point he will sign papers and take his car. There is no guarantee on who will win this tussle. A lot depends on what the market is like for the particular model the buyer wants. Uncertainty is part of life. And uncertainty is what keeps fiction interesting. 

Homework:

• Take a look at the dialogue in the most recent scene you wrote. For each of the speakers, write down what their specific goal is in this scene.
• Are there conflicting goals in this scene? 
• Can you put those goals more at cross-purposes to each other? (Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. It’s always worth asking.)

The post The Art of Adversarial Dialogue appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Our topic today is author branding. There is no need to spend a lot of angst on this. Branding yourself as an author is simple, once you know the answers to two questions… 

Who Is Your Target Audience?

The first question to ask yourself is: Who is your Target Audience? 

Let’s define our terms first. Your Target Audience is the set of all people in the world who would love your book, if only they knew it existed. This is usually much less than 1% of the world population. It’s often much less than the population of the country you live in. And that’s OK. I live in the US, which has a population of almost 350 million. 1% of that is 3.5 million. 

And that’s plenty. My Target Audience for this blog is the set of people who want to write a novel. These are very special people. I’ve always estimated that only about one person in a thousand is really serious about learning to write a novel. That is more than a third of a million people in the US. And many more outside the US.

If you work with a traditional publisher, they’ll often send you a questionnaire about your Target Audience, asking “demographic” questions like “What is the age of your ideal reader? What is their sex? What is their annual income?” I take a jaundiced eye toward these questions. They’re relevant for a few kinds of fiction and useless for most. 

I prefer “psychographic” questions such as “What does your ideal reader secretly dream of doing, if they had the time, energy, and money? Who would your ideal reader want to have dinner with, if they could choose 5 guests from any period of time?” These questions tell you how your ideal reader’s brain works. 

Once you know who your Target Audience is, there’s only one other question to ask…

What Would Delight Your Target Audience?

You have only one job as a writer—to delight people in your Target Audience. If you do that, you’ve won the game of fiction writing. If you don’t do that, you need to rethink and retry. There’s no shame in missing the mark. Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We all have to keep improving. But once you start hitting close to the mark, your life changes. Amazingly. 

So what experience can you give your ideal reader that would delight them? Only you can answer that question. And you’ll probably be getting better and better answers to that question for your whole writing life. Finding good answers to that question is the secret to branding. It’s the whole secret. There isn’t anything else.

Constructing Your Branding Promise

When you’ve figured out what your Target Audience wants and you’ve settled on an experience you can give them, it’s time to make a Branding Promise. Let me give you a couple of examples. 

I’ll use my own work as an example, so I don’t have to guess. I respect and admire many authors, but I don’t know exactly what thought processes they went through to figure out their Target Audience or their Branding Promise. Whereas I do know mine. 

For my Advanced Fiction Writing website and (forthcoming) Substack, my Target Audience is “Everyone who dreams of writing a novel someday and successfully publishing it.” There are hundreds of thousands of people in the US who are in this Target Audience. But there are hundreds of millions of people in the US are aren’t. 

My Branding Promise for Advanced Fiction Writing is this: “I will teach you to write an excellent novel.” This appeals to people in my Target Audience, and it drives away people who aren’t. If people who aren’t in my Target Audience accidentally come to my website, I want to let them know right away that this is not the place for them. But if they are in my Target Audience, I want them to stay. 

For my fiction, my Target Audience is “Everyone who would take a vacation in ancient Jerusalem.” This is not a huge Target Audience, but I’m in it. I’d go on that vacation. I’d love every minute of it. The closest I’ve come to this impossible vacation is the four times I’ve worked on archaeological digs in Jerusalem.

My Branding Promise for readers of my fiction is this: “I will take you on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” I’m well aware that not everyone wants to go on my adventure. That’s fine. Other authors can take them on other adventures. But for those who want to go to ancient Jerusalem, my aspiration is to be the best person on the planet who could take them there. (A high bar, yes, and I hope someday to reach it. You jump higher when you try for something difficult.) 

Constructing Your Branding Promise

Once you know your Branding Promise, it tells you how to market yourself, forever. Everything you do marketing-wise—your website, your email newsletter, your blog, your Substack, your TikTok, your Instagram, your FaceBook, your whatever—should make your Branding Promise crystal clear. 

You can make your Branding Promise explicit or implicit. Neither way is always right or always wrong. The only important thing is that you must know what it is. That will guide your art, your layout, your presentation, your message, your everything. 

Your Branding Promise gives you a clear yardstick to measure your work. Look at the results of your fiction every year or so. Are you keeping your Branding Promise? If not, what went wrong? Did you lose focus? That happens to everyone occasionally. The solution is to get your eye back on the ball. 

Talking to Agents and Editors

Once you understand your Branding Promise, it becomes super easy to talk to agents and editors. When they ask, “What do you write?”, you just tell them your Branding Promise. “I teach people how to write excellent fiction.” “I write novels that take people on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” 

99 times out of 100, when an agent or editor hears your Branding Promise, they’ll say, “Sorry, that’s not for me.” That’s fine. You’re trying to separate the sheep from the goats, and you just found another goat. If they don’t like your Branding Promise, they’ll never like your book, so don’t bore them by talking about it. Talk about the weather or sports or food or something else equally unbook.

But 1 time in 100, the agent or editor will stare at you with thunderstruck eyes. After ten seconds of golden silence, they’ll say, “Where have you been all my life?” And now you have a potential business partner for whatever you’re writing. And not just a business partner. A true believer. Wouldn’t that be incredible, if your agent or your editor was a true believer in your work?

Homework:

• Who is your Target Audience? 
• What delightful experience could you give your Target Audience?
• What is your Branding Promise? 
• What actions could you take to make your Branding Promise clear on all your marketing platforms? 

The post Your Branding Promise appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Organizing. This will be a very short blog post, but it shows you how to master one small aspect of one of the most powerful skills any writer can have—the art of getting stuff done. Most writers have far too many things on their plate. A lot of stuff doesn’t get done, and it keeps us from writing as much as we want. But there’s a way to change that…. 

Nothing Happens Unless You Take Action

Years ago, I came across a marketing guru who often used the phrase, “Nothing happens unless you take action.” This guy got an incredible amount of stuff done. 

Getting stuff done is hard when you’re neurodivergent. I’ve struggled with this all my life. My neurodivergence is my superpower, but it’s also my anchor—both at the same time. 

So I watched how this guru worked for a while, and I got better at taking action. I started getting more stuff done. 

Getting stuff done requires you to break every project down into Tasks. I capitalize the word Task because I’m using it as a technical term. What is a Task?

A Task is some action you can take in a single sitting. Like editing a scene. Writing a blog post. Fixing a broken page on your website. Calling your agent. Reading a contract. And on and on. Tasks are small chunks of a large project. 

Most of the things on your To-Do List are Tasks. If they’re not a Task, then they should probably be broken up into Tasks, because each Task is a step on the road towards getting stuff done. “Stuff” is amorphous. A Task is a discrete chunk of work. 

But there’s a problem, and it’s the reason some Tasks sit on your To-Do List for ten years without getting done…

The Two Kinds of Tasks

There are really two kinds of Tasks we take on. One kind gets done in an afternoon. The other kind may never get done.

An Actionable Task is a Task that you have the skills and the know-how to do. This is the kind you do quickly. You would like for all your Tasks to be Actionable Tasks. 

A Hard Task is a Task that you don’t have the skills or the know-how to do. This kind will sit festering on your To-Do List for years. Because you literally can’t do it. 

If all your Tasks were Actionable Tasks, you would get all kinds of stuff done. But if your project has even one Hard Task on it, your project is going to stall. Possibly forever. 

The only solution is to somehow convert a Hard Task into an Actionable Task. And how do you do that?

Let’s say you’ve got a Hard Task on your plate and you desperately need to get it done. Now. What are your options? You only have a few:

Converting Hard Tasks to Actionable Tasks

• Do some research to learn how to do the Task. Google is your friend here. Also YouTube. Sometimes Wikipedia has the answer. 
• Ask a few friends if they know how to do the Task and can teach you. 
• Find somebody who does this kind of Task for a living and hire them to do it. There is no shame in hiring out Hard Tasks that you just don’t have the time to learn how to do. We all have things we’ll never be able to do, even if we had infinite time to learn. 

Please note that all of these are Actionable Tasks. You know how to do research online, so “researching a Hard Task” is an Actionable Task. You know how to talk to friends, so “asking friends for help on a Hard Task” is an Actionable Task. You know how to hire somebody to do a task, so “hiring somebody to do a Hard Task” is an Actionable Task. (It may be beyond your budget to hire them, and if that’s the case, this option is off the table.)

The key point is that you can convert any Hard Task into an Actionable Task—one that you have the skill and the know-how to do. It may be an Actionable Task that you can’t afford. If you can’t afford it, then you can’t afford it, and that may mean it’s the end of the line. There is freedom in knowing that something just can’t be done. When you know that, you can delete it from your To-Do List. 

This Doesn’t Fully Solve the Procrastination Problem

Converting Hard Tasks into Actionable Tasks is a powerful skill that will change your life, once you master it. But it won’t completely eliminate procrastination from your life, because there are many reasons we procrastinate. 

Having a Hard Task is only one of those reasons. It’s the one I’m focusing on today, because it’s been a big thing in my own life and it’s a big thing in a lot of writers’ lives. 

So now let’s make this practical…

Homework:

• If you keep a To-Do List, take a look at it right now. Are there any Hard Tasks on it?
• Rewrite each Hard Task to be an Actionable Task—either a research Task or an “ask a friend” Task or a “hire somebody” Task. 
• Never again put a Hard Task on your To-Do List. If you have a Hard Task that needs doing, always reframe it as an Actionable Task. 

The post Yes, But Is That Task Actionable? appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Creating. Specifically, we’ll be talking about the theme of your novel. How do you find your theme? Do you even need a theme? This is not a huge topic, so this blog post will be shorter than usual. 

Three Strategies for Dealing With Theme

First, let’s define what we mean by “theme.” When I talk about theme, I mean the deep meaning of your story. It’s the message behind all the shooting and kissing and car-chasing and wand-waving and shouting and whatever else is happening in your story. So when I use the word “theme,” I don’t mean merely some controversial subject. I mean the actual stance that you take on that controversial subject. 

I can think of three strategies that authors use with their themes. There might be more, but these are the ones that jump out at me:

• You come up with the theme first, and then you create a story that sends that message. 
• You come up with a story first, and then a deep theme emerges from the story. 
• Your story doesn’t have a theme. There’s no message. 

Authors have used all three of these strategies effectively. There’s nothing intrinsically right or wrong with using any of these strategies. You get to decide what kind of novel you’re writing. But it’s a good idea to know what your decision is, and why you came to that decision. 

So let’s talk about each strategy and give some examples. 

Strategy 1: The Theme Drives the Story

Some authors have a theme in mind, and they create a story to illustrate that theme. The hazard here is that your theme can come across as heavy-handed. The upside is that reader who already agree with the theme of your story will love your novel and may help promote it, and that may turn out to be very good for sales. 

A classic example of a theme-driven book is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This was the best-selling novel in the US in the entire 19^th century. The theme was that slavery is evil. This is not controversial today, but it was in the 1850s. Some people loved this theme. Others hated it. The story was created solely as a vehicle for the theme. The book had a lot of flaws that make it much less popular today. It had a sentimental style that is long out of date. And it glorified the servility of the main character, Uncle Tom. It’s now an insult to call someone an Uncle Tom. And yet, for all its problems, the book had a huge impact. 

A modern example of a theme-driven story is The Shack, by William Paul Young. The theme was that God is good, even though he allows evil in our world. This is highly controversial. The question of the goodness of God is hotly debated, and the problem of evil is one of the two strongest arguments used by those who don’t believe in the existence of God. Some people loved the book. Others called it stupid or heretical. The book sat at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and has more than 10 million copies in print.

If this is your strategy, then own it. You have a theme. Send your message. Make it clear. Be ready to take some heat for it. Be hopeful that bad publicity will lead to good sales. Sometimes it does. 

Strategy 2: The Story Drives the Theme

Some authors just set out to write an interesting story, and a theme emerges. The upside here is that the theme naturally fits the story, because it grows out of it. But you may find that once you’ve found the theme of your story, you may need to rewrite it extensively so that the theme is fully woven into your novel. 

So far as I can tell, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fits this model. The book follows on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a light-hearted book about a boy growing up in the South. It took Mark Twain about seven years to write the Huck Finn book, and things evolved as he worked on it. A strong anti-racist theme eventually emerged organically from the story. But the theme is not perfectly developed. The book is a 19^th century novel, and it contains 19^th century stereotypes and racial slurs that don’t sit well in the 21^st century. 

In my own novels, I’ve never started with a theme in mind. I usually just try to write a story and see what comes out of it. In my City of God series, a theme has emerged organically from the hard questions one of my characters, Ari, asks about the problem of evil. Ari rather reluctantly believes in God, but he’s not at all happy with the common explanations for why God should allow evil in the world. I am three books into the series, and the theme as it now stands is that the problem of evil is not solved. 

If this is your strategy, then own it. Watch what your characters find disturbing—that’s your clue for the theme that may emerge. Once you identify the theme, take care to keep it consistent through the story. This may take a lot of rework. Do the work. If you don’t feel the need to hammer the theme hard, then don’t hammer it. A message can be subtle, if that’s more your style. Or it can be bold, if that’s what you want. 

Strategy 3: There is no Theme

Some authors set out to write an interesting story, and no theme ever emerges. There is nothing wrong with this. A novel isn’t required to have a message. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a story is just a story. 

I’ve read most of the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child, and I don’t think any of them had a theme. Reacher travels around with nothing but a wallet and a toothbrush and the clothes on his back. He gets in fights. He catches the bad guys. He moves on. There’s no “moral of the story.” Fans of Reacher don’t seem to mind, and it’s certainly never bothered me.

If this is your strategy, then own it. You don’t owe your reader a message. You owe your reader a story. Your novel doesn’t have to carry some deep meaning. 

Homework:

• Pick five of your favorite novels. What is the theme of each? For each one, do you think the theme was designed in from the start, or did it emerge organically? 

• Did you start out with a theme in mind for the novel you’re working on right now? If so, what’s the theme, and do you hope that it’s controversial enough to drive big sales?
• Has a theme emerged organically from the novel you’re working on? If so, are you willing to put in the extra work needed to make sure the theme is consistent within your novel?
• Does your current novel have no theme at all? Are you good with that, or do you feel that it needs one?

The post 3 Strategies for the Theme of Your Novel appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. The question for today is how do you launch your novel without having a panic attack? Even if you are years away from launching a book, there are things you can do now to prepare for that happy day. 

Why Most Authors Feel Massive Anxiety in a Book Launch

We authors put a lot of pressure on ourselves. It’s easy to think launching a novel is a huge, gigantic task that’s going to be expensive and risky and force us to act salesy. And it’s easy to believe that if we don’t run a good launch, then our book is going to die. That’s just not reality. 

You can massively lower your anxiety level in a book launch by remembering one thing. In a book launch, you are not trying to sell your book to the whole world. You are not even trying to sell your book to your entire Target Audience. The ONLY people you are trying to sell it to are the people who meet all three of these criteria:

1. They already know you exist. 
2. They already know they like your fiction. 
3. They already have given you permission to let them know when your book is available.

That may be a very small set of people. It might include only your family and your close friends. 

But your circle of influence is probably broader than that. If you have followers on social media who know you’re writing a novel, then some of those people may be in that set. If you have an email newsletter about your fiction, that’s ideal. 

If you remember my recent blog post  on The Three Pillars of Marketing, you are launching your book ONLY to people you have already Attracted and Engaged. Attraction and Engagement are the first two pillars of marketing. In your book launch, you’ll execute the third pillar—Conversion. This simply means that you’re going to give them a good reason to buy your book RIGHT NOW.

And this step is stress-free. If people already know you and know they like your fiction, then they’ll be happy to buy your book. So the task of launching your book is just a matter of contacting them with an incentive to buy it right away. And how do you do that? That depends on what road you chose for publishing your novel. So let’s review those roads…

The Two Roads to Publishing a Novel

There are two methods authors commonly use to publish their novel:

• Traditional publishing—you sell the rights to your book to a publishing company that manages the editing and production of the book and pays you an advance and then later pays you royalties.
• Self-publishing (also called indie authoring)—you manage the editing and production of the book yourself. You don’t get an advance, and you have to pay the up-front expenses, but then you get all the the money the book earns.

Both of these are valid routes to publishing a novel. Both of them can be extremely successful, and both can be extremely frustrating. Neither of these is “the right way” for all authors. Some authors like working with a publisher that handles all the production and editing hassle, so they can focus on writing. Some authors like doing it all themselves because they feel like they can do a better job. 

I’ve published both fiction and nonfiction books by both of these routes. I started out my writing career working with traditional publishers. I later transitioned to indie authoring, and that’s worked out better for me. (Translation—I have earned more money as an indie author than I did as a traditionally published author. And being indie has caused me a lot less stress.) 

Choose the method that works best for you. I can’t go into all the ins and outs of how you make that decision in this blog post. That’s a topic for another day. The reason I mention these two options is that your approach to launching your book will depend somewhat on which route you take. So let’s look at how you run a book launch for each case.  

Launching a Traditionally Published Novel

When you work with a traditional publisher, they will set the publication date far in advance. They’ll work with you on the editing. They’ll hire a cover designer and proofreaders. They’ll ask you to keep to a schedule that they set, and if you fail, they have legal recourse, because you signed a binding contract. 

Your publisher will expect you to help out a lot with the launch. They may give you a long list of tasks they think you should do. Most of these will be impossible to do in the window of time you have available. So don’t feel obligated to do everything they ask. But you should definitely do something. Let them know what you’re doing, because they may be able to help you a bit, and they’ll be grateful that you did anything at all. 

There are two main things you can do:

1. Send free copies of your book to “influencers”—people who read widely in your category and who have some sort of platform for promoting books.
2. Email all the people you have Attracted and Engaged and give them a reason to buy the book now. 

Let’s talk about those two tasks.

Free Copies For Influencers

Publishers will often give you free copies of the paper edition of your book to send to influencers. Maybe these influencers have a blog. Maybe they moderate a Facebook group or a Goodreads group. Maybe they have a large following on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. Publishers know that this can be very cost-effective, because paper copies probably cost them around a dollar apiece. 

When I launched my book Writing Fiction For Dummies, I was part of a large online group of novelists. I offered a free autographed copy of the book to anyone in the group who wanted it. 60 authors sent me their mailing addresses. Almost all of them were friends of mine, and I knew that most of them taught at writing conferences and would be good influencers for years to come. My publisher sent me three cases of books, and I did all the work—signing the books, packaging them, adding mailing labels, and taking them to the post office. The publisher offered to pay the postage, so my only cost was a few hours of boring labor. This worked out massively well. 

Emailing Your Followers

In the launch week for your book, it’s way too late to try to put together an email list. Building an email list is one of your lifelong projects as a writer. You will never stop building your list and cultivating it. And the sooner you start, the better. List-building is a giant project, and I can’t cover it here. I’ve blogged about it in the past. If you want to know how it fits into your overall marketing strategy, I can recommend my post A Virtuous Cycle for Marketing Your Books. For the nuts and bolts of how to build a list, I can recommend the book Newsletter Ninja, by Tammi Labrecque. 

Assuming you have an email list, when you launch your book, you will probably send out a series of emails beginning a few weeks in advance to let your people know that your next book is coming. You can do a cover reveal when your cover is designed. You can send an email weekly in which you talk about your story. If you want to include any part of your novel in your emails, you’ll need to get permission from your publisher, because you sold them the publishing rights. Usually, they’re happy to give you permission, so ask. Then on Launch Day, send your fans an email announcing the book. Add links to the usual online retailers. Add any incentives you can think of to buy the book right now. 

What do I mean by “incentives?” There are a couple of types of incentives. You might be able to convince your publisher to lower the price during the first week of sales, especially for the e-book version. But don’t count on it. Few publishers will do this. I have seen it happen, and once it had absolutely spectacular results. But one cost of working with a publisher is that they set the price of your book, and you don’t. 

There’s a second kind of incentive, and you have complete control over this. You can offer your true fans in your email list some sort of free electronic download if they buy your book during Launch Week. I did this with my book Writing Fiction For Dummies. I asked my publisher to put me in contact with similar authors who might provide electronic freebies. We put together a list of 8 free goodies that I put on my website for anyone who bought my book during Launch Week. And I added a 50% coupon code for all the products that I had on my website. I didn’t ask for any proof that they bought my book. That would have been a nightmare to check. I trusted people to be honest. When you treat people as trustworthy, they live up to your trust. The launch went extremely well, and I had a nice sales bump on my website from the coupon code. 

But what if you’re self-published? In that case, you have more control…

Launching a Self-Published Novel

When you self-publish your novel, you control everything. You set the deadline, and if you miss it, nobody will take you to court. You will know your publication date at least a month in advance. Which means you can start actively promoting your book to your email list weeks before the book is available. And you have the same general methods of promoting your book. But there are some differences from the traditional-publishing case.

Free Copies to Influencers

You can still send copies to influencers, but now you have to pay for them yourself—you don’t have a publisher to give them to you for free. If you use Amazon’s Print-on-Demand for your paper copies, you can make individual orders for the book at a reduced cost and send them directly to each influencer. You won’t get any royalties on these copies, but it’s nice to let Amazon deal with the shipping. 

Emailing Your Followers

You can also promote your book in advance to your email list, and now you have a bit more latitude as a self-publisher. Here are some of the advantages you have that your traditionally published author lacks.

• You can email your followers for weeks in advance with any amount of excerpts from the forthcoming book, and you don’t have to ask your publisher for permission. Because you’re the publisher. 
• You can set up preorders on Amazon up to a year before publication and notify your followers so they can buy it in advance. 
• You have complete control of the price and you can change it at any time, and use this to create an incentive to “buy now”. As an example, suppose you want the regular price of your e-book to be $4.99. You can tell your followers that during Launch Week, the price will be set to $2.99. And you might even offer a low-ball price for preorders of $1.99 or even $0.99. At that price, any of your followers who cares about your book will order. It’s a no-brainer. Note that you can’t go that low with the print version of your book, because paper costs money. 

The Common Thread—Your Email List

A major part of your book launch is your email newsletter. If you don’t have an email list when you launch your book, you can still use social media, but don’t expect great results. Successful authors know that social media converts a lot worse than email. Please note that it can take years to build a good list, so it’s way too late to think about building your email list when your book is weeks away from launch. If your launch is coming up and you have no email list, then focus on the things you can do and keep your expectations low. 

Your book launch should not be stressful. Stress comes from trying to sell to people who never heard of you and don’t know anything about your fiction. There are ways to reach these people, but Launch Week is not the time to try. Launch Week is for your true fans. And there’s no anxiety when promoting your work to your true fans. They want you to let them know when your book is coming out. They’d be angry with you if you didn’t tell them.

Homework:

• When is the approximate date of your next book launch? This might be more than a year out, and if that’s the case, you don’t really have a date, you have a range of dates. This might be years away, and that’s OK, because it gives you time to build an email list. 
• Do you have influencers in mind for your book? It’s OK if you don’t, but it’s nice if you do.
• Do you have an email list for your true fans? If not, then now is a good time to start thinking about building one. It’s never too soon.  

The post How to Launch Your Novel Without Stressing Out appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.