Art by Will Terry
How do you market a book? After you’ve done all the fun stuff — writing, illustrating, inventing, creating — you need to figure out a way to sell your book to get it into the hands of your readers. Marketing is just as important a job as illustrating, and perhaps even more important when it comes to courting an audience. Most artists struggle to put themselves out there and market their work, but have no fear: Jake Parker, Lee White and Will Terry discuss the best ways to make your book stand out with unconventional thinking and compelling case studies, and offer some ideas on how to stop your work from languishing on a bookshelf.
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Introductions:
Recapping New Year’s health goals from last episode: Lee discusses a hot yoga incident. If security camera footage exists, Lee will post it.
Exercise, but don’t go 0 to 60.
How to Launch a Book:
Illustrators spend so much time mastering one skill that taking on another — marketing — can be difficult.
The book launch should start a few years before the book is done. Don’t leave it until after you finish your product. This could apply to any creative endeavor, especially crowdfunded projects.
Making the product is easy, selling it is hard. Plan your outlet and your audience ahead of time.
PERENNIAL SELLER by Ryan Holiday
Selling your book is a part of your job. Making it is the fun part, but selling it afterwards is a huge part of your job too.
If you have a publisher, they don’t always tell you how to market your book.
What can we do to actively market our book instead of hoping it becomes successful? Book signings don’t always work — random shoppers aren’t necessarily interested in buying a signed copy of your book when you’re sitting at your table.
Being creative about your book signing event and making it feel special can help a great deal. Brian Lies’s guerrilla marketing events caught the attention of a passing NPR host, who decided to interview him for his show. This led to Brian’s NYT bestseller placement.
There are no written rules for this stuff, you should make your own luck.
We want to be told what to buy, even if we don’t think about it in those terms. People want top tens, critic’s reviews, and famous endorsements. Those are a more sure-fire way to sell your book than hoping a passerby in the store likes the cover.
Without a lot of preparation and marketing, book signings at Barnes & Noble can be underwhelming.
The wrench in the works: how do you do these marketing events when you need to make more money on new projects? Your publisher does not pay for your book signings or send you to events. New illustrators might only sell one or two books at their signings.
Most beginning illustrators get an advance around $8k-$10k. That could take you a month to six months to illustrate, so it isn’t a lot of money. 4 books a year, at the highest end, is still only around $40k a year gross. It’s a gamble marketing your book — if you manage to sell 100,000 copies of your book through your marketing efforts, that’s an extra $100k from that one book. But there’s no guarantee, you could sell a lot of books or sell very little and your earnings will reflect that. There are also expenses that you have to take care of, so you really need to realize it is a risk and a gamble. The numbers are not on your side.
Going to physical places to sell a product isn’t going to work, unless you’re going to a specialty event like an art show or a comic convention. Book signings are not the most profitable use of your time unless you have the ability to do a big event or stunt.
Indie bookstores can work because they have communities built-in. They have a platform, they are not necessarily famous, but they have an engaged audience. Barnes and Noble does not have this.
Your time might be better spent building a platform for yourself and cultivating a fanbase. That starts a few years before you launch your book.
Making IS Marketing. Don’t be secretive, share as much as you can share online because that’s marketing in and of itself. People want ease, so make it accessible. Build an email list and a website.
Bookstore visits can be scheduled in conjunction with school visits, if you’re traveling. School visits make you money and bookstores can be a freebie that you do on the side.
Wealth is made in your spare time. Working 8 hours a day isn’t enough to get you ahead, people who are successful often spend every waking minute on their dream.
Will’s Youtube Interview with David Biedrzyscki
David does school visits almost all the time and offers order forms at each event, which leads to lots of sales on top of the money made from the event itself. His publishers can publish his books with almost no risk because of the consistent sales he generates from these events.
Jerry Pallotta does the same thing and Scholastic loves to publish his work because it is low risk.
The Hazards of Publishing
Scholastic Book Fairs: You make a smaller royalty from the book fairs, 1%-3% as opposed to the standard 6%-8%.
When your book gets remaindered, the publisher and the market are more or less done with the book and it gets sold on deep discount. The remaindering period is happening faster and faster these days.
It might be possible to get your rights back after your book gets remaindered.
You need a publisher to sell more copies but you lose control over the property.
Tangent: according to celebritynetworth.com, Jake Parker’s net worth is $64 million. (Editor’s note: That’s pretty standard for illustrators, right?)
School Visits and Unconventional Marketing
School visits pay anywhere from $500-$2000 depending on how famous you are and the location of the school. It’s not easy to get paid school visits, but doing free visits with a preorder form for the kids can be more profitable for self-published authors. Some authors and illustrators who do paid visits recommend against doing free visits because it can puncture the market.
Brandon scheduled 4-5 school visits per day, for free. His 30 minute presentations were aimed at getting kids and their families to his weekend book signings at Barnes and Noble. They sold so many books that they had to bring their own copies because Barnes and Noble always ran out of stock, and he had lines around the block. He became a New York Times bestseller almost overnight. His small local publisher Shadow Mountain then sold the rights to Simon and Schuster, who were impressed with his method.
As an artist, you can be creative in marketing your book and your book launch. Your work is original, your marketing ideas can be original too.
3 Steps to Marketing Your Book
Create a following
Get the word out
Make physical appearances to meet your readers.
Do note this is a gamble, though it has worked for several authors. It might work but it also might not. More conventional methods, like building an online following, are safer.
Jake: Get the email addresses of people who have bought your book, including teachers and parents, and you can market to them directly when your next book comes out. Do the hard work to build a platform and a network of people who support you. A solid email list of people who want to hear from you is one of the strongest marketing assets today. Email always appears in their inbox, whereas social media posts might not reach them.
Don’t just think about marketing your book, think about marketing your books. Don’t put everything onto one idea, think of it in terms of your next ten books, you will develop traction over time.
Start building that email list.
Lee: You can use book signings and readings as tax deductible vacations.
Self-publishing doesn’t ever get remaindered which is a huge bonus. His book from two and a half years ago is still his bestseller: https://www.leewhiteillustration.com/work/illumination-the-art-of-lee-white
That book will never go away and get remaindered by a publisher.
Will: There are tons of things you can do to market your book but we don’t have time to talk about:
Media/Press Kit
Press Releases
Book Trailer
You can find out how to do these things online, but the bigger thing is building a platform and thinking about the wider picture.
The final answer for your book launch: build a fanbase.
Summary:
If you want to do book signings or events, think outside the box and be creative about making it a larger than life event.
Spending time on marketing events can be a gamble, the safer method is to build an online following by sharing your work in progress and engaging with readers.
School visits can be profitable and helpful but are sometimes hard to book.
Building an email list and your own fanbase is one of the best ways to generate interest in new products. That’s long term thinking.
LINKS
Jake Parker: mrjakeparker.com. Instagram: @jakeparker, Youtube: JakeParker44
Will Terry: willterry.com. Instagram: @willterryart, Youtube: WillTerryArt
Lee White: leewhiteillustration.com. Instagram: @leewhiteillo
Alex Sugg: alexsugg.com
Tanner Garlick: tannergarlickart.com. Instagram: @tannergarlick
Aaron Painter: painterdraws.com. Instagram: @painterdraws
Daniel Tu: danieltu.co.
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