P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

Yes, it’s the title of a David Gray album- and don’t knock him please, I still think his stuff up to White Ladder is great.

You’ll be glad to hear that this blog isn’t about music. Instead, I’m going to talk a bit about book marketing- a subject about which I consider myself to have zero authority, but I want to honour my promise to share here my publishing journey.

Before I get to that, thanks again to everyone that’s bought Troubleshot since it came out a week ago. It’s been quite fun looking at the daily reports on the sales and you can see from the featured image of this blog how much money I have earned (note the presence of coins, not notes). A particular highlight has been the Big Brother-esque way I can see how many pages have been read by people with Kindle Unlimited (because you get paid by page read). On one day, 423 pages were read, which means someone REALLY liked it and read it twice, two people quite liked it and read it all in one day (which is still pretty cool) or 42 people didn’t get on with it and gave up after 10 pages. I’ll let you guess which possibility I prefer.

Anyway, onto marketing. It has been – and continues to be – a steep learning curve. Self-promotion really isn’t my forte, so I’ll just share here some of the things I’ve discovered.

Amazon has some interesting options. You can do all sorts of things like price promotions, paid advertising (which makes your book pop up at the top of the list if you search for something similar), and Kindle Select (which grants Amazon exclusivity to sell the ebook for a period in exchange for a higher profile on the site and availability to Kindle Unlimited subscribers). For now, I’ve just published Troubleshot normally and enrolled for Kindle select as it’s not like I have a distribution empire elsewhere.

There are all sorts of book websites and mailing lists but most of them seem to be US-centric. Besides, marketing your book as ‘humorous’ seems to be the kiss of death, as different people will find very different things funny. I’ll save this sort of promotion for Dead Letters next year, which should have a wider appeal.

Facebook offers some terrifying possibilities. Okay, maybe this isn’t news: we’ve all seen the headlines. But as I’ve found out more about some of the options it offers, and the precise way you can target an audience based on interests, associations and all sorts of personal information, it’s really sunk home. I’m not planning to do any Facebook advertising, but it really has been an eye-opener.

Word of mouth. This seems to be the holy grail of marketing, and something you can try to influence in a variety of ways, but it’s really out of your hands. One important factor is the nature of ‘verified’ reviews (i.e. from someone that’s actually bought the product) on Amazon. This also impacts on the the fabled ‘Amazon algorithm’ that dictates how visible your book is to browsers. So I end this blog with an urge to anyone that’s read Troubleshot to PLEASE LEAVE A REVIEW!

Actually, if you didn’t like it, don’t – or don’t do it just because I’m asking you, anyway.

I’m now off to think about the launch party that someone from work has been kind enough to suggest (having not read the book, so it was rather brave of them). I’ll need to find an excerpt I can read and that will make sense out of context. I’m thinking about the Bus Counsellors bit – but would be happy to hear suggestions, if anything stood out to you.

Until next time!