Beyond the Book Podcast: Book Marketing So Good It Feels Illegal

Gonna share with you book marketing so good it feels illegal. Now, I promise we're not gonna break any laws, but I'm going to share with you 10 incredible marketing tactics that will help you stand out, help you sell more books, and really grow your readership faster than ever. Now, before I get there, I wanna share just a little bit about me. My name's Michael Evans. I've written, published 12 science fiction novels. I used to work on Mr. Beast's team helping him grow. And, and now I'm here trying to help all of you as authors grow your readership and revenue by utilizing your superpower. Now, before we dive into the 10 specific tactics, I want to share a framework, really three simple steps that I always think about when I'm coaching an author. When I'm even writing an article. I'm trying to think, where is someone at in terms of this advice? Where is it going to be most useful in their journey? And I really think there's three stages of you marketing your book as an author, and the first stage is first figuring out who's going to be interested in your book. So oftentimes we're tempted to create Personas. We're tempted to create audience demographics, thinking about what age of our reader, what's going to be their gender, where are they going to live? And I don't think that's very useful. In fact, I want you to throw out that old marketing advice because my goal is together, to make marketing fun again, I think. So oftentimes lose sight of what really matters, which is us having a fun time and most importantly, giving our readers a fun time. And our marketing can be dull. Our marketing oftentimes just fits in with everyone else because we're too scared to be ourselves, because we're too scared to take risks. And our first risk we're going to take is to shoot the marketing paradigm in its head. All of that Persona stuff, throw it out, we don't need it. Instead, I want you to focus on one thing. What passions, what interests do your readers have? Are they obsessed with cryptids? Are they obsessed with baseball? Maybe they love cold cases. Right? There's unlimited things that your readers can be interested in. In fact, there could be multiple interests that they have. Maybe they love basketball and they happen to love cold cases. This sounds like an interesting story. Regardless, that's what you want to focus on, because in reality, there's two really fun things about this. One is that when you think about just serving folks who share interests similar to yours, or at least that are similar to the stories you're writing. All of a sudden you can be so much more creative in terms of how you reach people and where you even go to find them. And the second thing is that there's likely so much more people interested in what you're creating than you can even imagine. The ceiling for your story is probably 10x bigger than you think. And by looking at other stories or the existing market, you can sometimes limit yourself. Because at the end of the day, all of these words, genres, all that stuff is just what we try and bucket readers into. It's what marketers have used, it's what bookshelves use. It's what capitalism does to try and bucket people in and take away their unique individual experiences and their individual passions. So what are those individual experiences? What are those individual interests you want to serve? That's stage one. Once you start to feel like you're nailing down on that and who you want to serve, the next thing is thinking about your story market fit. That is stage two of the marketing process. And story market fit is really simple. It's understanding that your story has a high enough conversion to purchasing or downloading the book, and from that conversion has high enough readers reading through the book and purchasing more of your stories to be economically viable. There's not like a specific number here. In essence, you don't have to necessarily go, oh, hey, I need 50% of my readers to read through my whole book and buy the next book to reach story market fit. Likewise, you don't need to necessarily have a 10% conversion rate in the landing page or a 2% conversion rate. It's not the number that matters here. It's actually making your business viable. For instance, if I'm able to market regularly, acquire your readers through Facebook ads for $5, but I only make $6 back by the time a reader actually breathes through my series. I do not have a viable business. I'm barely profiting. Whereas if I'm making $50 back, that's really great. Or if you'd only cost $1 to acquire a reader, then that's really great. Your story market fit is going to vary based on how expensive your marketing is and how much it costs to reach readers. And one important thing to remember is that boring marketing is expensive. So by following a lot of the tactics I'm about to share and really just making your marketing fun and trying to stand out, you can actually short circuit this and be able to reach story market fit faster. Now, the third thing is once you reach story market Fit. The third stage is actually scaling your audience through one of the three reader growth engines which are going to be collaborations. It's going to be paid ads or it's going to be content. Now, paid ads are typically when you are paying to reach someone else's audience. Could be a newsletter, could be a Facebook ad, could be an Amazon ad. Collaborations are when you're working directly with another author or someone else who has an audience, can be a creator, can be a podcaster, and you're accessing their audience because you did a swap, because you're offering something for free, because you're giving something of value to their audience and maybe also in turn you're sharing their work and their stories with your audience. And the third way is content. That's the third reader growth engine. And content I find particularly powerful because content, as we'll talk about very soon, actually is the hidden trick to succeeding at paid ads and can give you a lot of leverage in collaborations. Oftentimes I always think content first and thinking about social platforms and how to succeed on places like TikTok or Instagram or YouTube and Pinterest, because I feel like those spaces are are a lot of your gateways to your future reader growth engines. Now this is how I like to think about marketing. We get going with stage one. We have to really identify our reader passions and interests. Stage two, which is when we're trying to find story market fit and ensure that our story actually meets the expectations of folks who have those passions and interests so that we know our story and therefore our publishing business is economically vibed. And then the third stage is now scaling and only do we scale at this stage when we start maybe dumping money into ads, really going hard on content. That's this third stage. Now I promise to share with you. Book marketing so good it feels illegal. I don't think we've done that yet. Instead, I've just shared a framework, hopefully that helps you dive into everything about to share and parse through this information based on where you're at in your own author journey. Because some things I'm about to share are going to be really useful for someone who's scaling and it also could be useful for someone who's still trying to figure out their audience or still trying to find story market fit. However, you're going to have to approach it differently and this is where something really exciting comes in. I'm releasing on Kickstarter 50 author marketing superpowers. It's the first launch from Author Decks. It's a brand new company that actually me and David For Goods are starting to try and make author education fun and accessible. Here's the deal. The virtual Author Marketing Superpowers deck will be available completely for free in the coming weeks. The physical version is going to be available on Kickstarter, and I'm super excited to launch that. And I'm also having a ton of other exclusive benefits and really fun things to help further immerse you into these 50 marketing superpowers. They are crazy powerful, probably too powerful. And once you get into learning all about it, you're going to see so much of really what top authors are doing to succeed, what top brands are doing succeed in other industries, and be able to apply it to your own business in a way that meets your superpowers. I'd love for you to support the campaign. You can follow it on Kickstarter in the link below. And I'm just so excited to share this the world. It's going to have such beautiful illustrations. It's literally going to be 50 cards, they're 4 by 6 inches that you're going to be able to flip through. And at any time, think about it as your desk side sidekick that you can open up and get some new marketing inspiration, get some new fundamentals that you can take action and keep growing. And like we said, the digital version is going to be available completely for free. We want to make this accessible to everyone. And today I'm actually gonna be sharing with you 10 superpowers that are inside of the Author Marketing Superpowers deck. And the first one's really important, which is the story suit. You must awe people to go viral if you want your book to really grow. If you want your readership to grow, you need to surprise people. But you need to surprise people in the right way because you don't want to necessarily surprise people with something that's unrelated to your books. Likewise, you don't want to create something totally from left field that people don't want. We see crazy things all the time that we don't desire. So how do you create something that people both desire and are surprised by? And the answer is to stick to a lot of the core things you see your readers are interested in along many different dimensions of your book. But you want to stand out in at least one of the following dimensions. The first is your packaging. You can have a really unique cover or really unique description that brings readers in and orients them completely differently in your experience. You can do this through how you describe your book. You could be actually Inventing a new genre for yourself. If you're combining subgenres and tropes in a unique way, if you're serving a specific interest group, maybe you have a romance book for people who love going out in nature, or a romance book for people who've always wanted to travel to Thailand. That immediately becomes an interest within an interest that helps you stand out. And you can position that in your cover description, in your packaging of your story to try and convert the right readers in. Because some people are going to look at that and be like, I've never seen a story like this before. I need that. So don't be afraid to be loud about who your story is for. And it's okay if a lot of people go, I don't want that story. That's not for me. Because that's not the readers you're going for. And sometimes we try and fit our story into the mold of all the existing stories when actually the interests our readers have are slightly different and we want to speak to that we want to honor. Rather, you could be innovating based on your format of your story, the actual medium of your story. This could look like doing something like David Vergutt's. I had him on our last podcast and talked all about how he makes $2.4 million a year from a story letter business. You can find that video linked in the description. It's a really great one. He's basically turning a book into. Now that same core story is told through letters and that's so cool. That's a way to stand out. You could be going into podcasting and serial podcasts or very just and could be different ways for you to tell your story. You might be going into YouTube or TikTok and creating short form videos there that share your story with the world. Maybe it's thinking more about immersive stories or different formats entirely that haven't been invented yet, but that readers still desire. These are different ways to get your story to stand out. Oh, I've experienced something like that, but I haven't experienced it in that way. So yeah, I want that. It's like getting chocolate milk versus chocolate fudge versus a chocolate bar. It's all got chocolate, we all love chocolate, but it's in a slightly different format and therefore it becomes novel and unique and can attract people to make you stand out. Because remember, if you're just the same old thing. Oh, there it is. Here's option number 10 of this book. It's so hard to stand out. You're going to have to spend so much more to get the attention of people to stand out. You want to get away from dull marketing and make your marketing fun. Now, the third way to stand out is your marketing channel. You might be utilizing a marketing channel that not many other people are utilizing. You're in a space and putting your book in a space that orients you differently. I'll give an example based today. I was working a little bit from the beach and when I was at the beach, I was noticing these boats going by that had ads on it. This is probably not gonna work for most authors, but you can imagine your actual boat book as one of the things on the ad. And people will be like, oh my God. Summer beach read. I don't see beach reads on the beach coming to me like this. Yes, I'll take it. What a unique way to advertise a book to me. So you could be thinking a lot about your marketing channel. And these are really the ways to stand out. And what I call your story suit, which is dress up your story in a way in which it's going to reach more readers. Now the next thing, and this second tactic is one time marketing events. And one time marketing events are essentially things you do that try and grab attention that are not really repeatable. But the whole idea is that you're using these things to build deep relationship with readers and to get sometimes your initial fan base or supercharge your fan base at a later stage. Let me give some examples. So I'm actually running this thing called the Big Pencil Party and I'm giving away a massive pencil. I'm going to share with y' all a picture soon. It's a big pencil. I'll bring it onto the YouTube channel as well and show it in a podcast. It's being delivered now. And you get to win this massive pencil at this costume party I'm hosting. And now this costume party's a 10 minute costume party. You can dress up as anything. You can dress up your dog, whatever you want your entry to be. But then we're going to talk about the superpowers for the rest of the chat for the next 45 or 50 minutes. So instead of it being like another author webinar, it's a costume party. But we all get to learn and grow together. And someone gets a big pencil. That's a one time marketing event. I'm not going to give away a big pencil every day. That's. It's not really the idea. Right. I might do something fun again. I'LL always try and do fun things, but I'm not going to do that one thing again. But what it's going to let me do is create an event that drives buzz, that hopefully teaches me what's working with the author marketing superpowers and can validate that something that is a great product and it's very useful for y'. All. You can think the same way about your books, launch parties, different activations. The best at this is actually Hollywood for marketing movies. They're very innovative. Recently Apple had the latest season of the Severance and they were like literally inside a massive train station in New York City with people there. You have Squid games that does so many different activations. Their guards for the latest season two, season three's upcoming, they spent tens of millions of dollars on crazy activations around the world. Having guards in big cities, having guards on boats going through Bangkok and Thailand. Wild stuff. What's really cool about these one time marketing events isn't just the reach you get through the event itself. It's two important things. One, if you're just getting started, it frees you from having all the pressure to get everything right at once or have a marketing plan. Nope. You're trying to get story market fit. What you're focused on is just bringing some readers in and these one time marketing events could be unique things that bring in the right readers and it could give you an indication of whether you have story market fit. Now if you already have story market fit and you're looking to scale your audience, this is also where it gets interesting because you can use a one time marketing event and amplify it through social media and through social amplification. This is when you're creating TikToks and you encourage fans to create videos and oh my God, it's just so powerful when you can do that. Netflix got over 50,000 times more people to view their in person activations online compared to who actually participated it in the real world. Literally 50,000 time amplification. If you design one time marketing events in ways that are going to be great for content or encourage readers to create content around it, that's where it gets exciting. Now this is where we get to our third book marketing tactic that is just wild and you'll start to see all these things play together and it's just. Oh, it's beautiful. And what's even crazier is that this is only 10 of the 50 superpowers. I'm only giving you 10 right now. And the third one that I'm giving you is double dips, which. Oh, I love double dips. Double dips are gross when it's salsa at a party. Double dips is when you put the chip in once and then you put it in again after you've already aiden a little bit and you don't tell anyone. This is a little different. Double dips in the context of marketing, when you get to repurpose something and use it twice, three times, four times, one time. Marketing events through social amplification are a really good example of double dip. Not only are you marketing to those people during an event, but you're able to amplify it through social. I am searching for double dips everywhere. Willow Winters is so great at this. Every time she makes her book box, she has to make the book box anyways. She has to pack them. But she's sharing videos of it, of her doing that on social media. Beautiful. Double dip. She's already spending her time doing that. She just takes out her phone records. Content marketing, beautiful. Another great example is taking a cover model photo shoot. You could be having some exclusive photos that you upsell to subscribers. You could also be using that cover model photo shoot for ads. These are double dips that can be really, really useful. Now the fourth tactic I want to give you is social listening. Social listening is when you're really in tune with what your readers are saying about your books, how you're being betrayed on social media and actually participating in the conversation. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean commenting on negative things, but it does mean thanking readers who are commenting positively. It does mean encouraging them to share more because people love when you reward them. And it does mean being in tune with if there's something going wrong. If a lot of people are saying something specific about your books, that could be a sign to lean into it. If it's something that's working in your marketing or something to maybe change or adjust. An author who's great at this has built an amazing community is Matt Deniman. He's the author of Dungeon Carla Crawl, an insanely well selling series. He's an incredible person. He's just so good at being in touch with his readers. The different reviews they're sharing, different things they're saying online and just being a part of the conversation. Now the fifth tactic is called the book liquidator. Not enough people do this and it's so powerful. This one's definitely dangerous. And it's when you are able to pay for advertising on something. Capture emails, right? So you're capturing emails growing Your list. But then at the end, after that email, there's an upsell on the next page that either is a book bundle. It could be related products, your books. It can be buying a whole series upfront. And on that page, your goal is to make back the money you spent on ads. That's why it's called Book Liquidator. You're liquidating your ad costs. And with this, you're able to scale really quickly and grow your audience really fast. An example of this would be saying, I'm gonna give you book one of the series away for free. Okay, great. I run a Facebook ad, go to this landing page, enter in my email. Maybe you get that email for 50 cents. Maybe it costs you 50 cents on average. Maybe you're getting clicks for 20 cents. About two and a half clicks convert because it is free. Then on the next page you go, hey, enjoy the free book. If you want this full series, normally it's 50 bucks. There's seven books in a series. They each go over 67, but I'll give it to you right now for 19.99. I'm just throwing out numbers here, but you can see what I'm doing now. You spent 50 cents getting that initial email. If you're able to get one in this, using this math, one out of every roughly 40 readers to convert to the full series on the next page, you've now immediately made your money back. So if you can do that, there's pretty much nothing stopping you from scaling at that point. And you could scale spend hundreds of dollars a day even like many authors do, a thousand plus dollars a day. Growing your list where now all of a sudden you can grow your list by tens of thousands of readers a month. And you might be thinking, but I'm, I'm giving away a whole series. I'm not making any money on it. You're gonna have more books that you're coming out in the future. You're gonna have more series to sell. And an offer like this that allows you to grow your audience so fast is going to pay massive dividends. Now the math's gonna look different for everyone else. Before spending a thousand dollars in ads, you definitely wanna make sure this is working at a small scale. And more importantly, you need to make sure you're getting your cash flow back immediately. And that's where selling direct is really important. Using things like Shopify, where you're not waiting 60 days from Amazon to get your money back, that's just crazy. You're never gonna be able to really Liquidate your ad costs like that. And then the second thing, and this is sometimes for people a little risky. And I understand if you're like, I don't wanna do it. This is just one tactic. You don't have to use all the superpowers, but what you can do here is put your ad costs on a credit card. You're going to pay it off the end of the month. If you're able to make your money back immediately, that's great. Right now you have the money to pay off your ad costs and the credit card bill at the end of the month because you literally already made it back on day one and will be paid out two days later through stripe. But it gets even cooler because now you have 30 days to profit from that reader before you have any marketing expense go out, which is where you can start to see like a 2x return on your ads within your first three days. That's just like mind numbingly awesome. You really want to be thinking always about how you can build funnels that allow you to make money back immediately. And with that unlocks limitless scale. Now, the sixth superpower here I want to share with you is the power of reciprocity. This is so important. When you give to people, it comes back and you give with no ask for anything in return. You give with no expectation. Not everyone's going to give back to you. But one of the most universal things across all human culture, all generations, is reciprocity. When someone gives to you, they also feel a need to give back. And this is not something you're doing in some evil, secret plan way. It feels really good to give. Giving is true having. It's one of the mottos I learned at Mr. Beast, and it's a beautiful motto. And it's something that I want you to take to heart. So many authors that are big in this king are really giving. And those giving ones are the ones who end up being successful. Because other authors want to support them. They want to collab. Readers see this and readers want to support them. Be giving to your audience. Default to giving. Because what is the world about? Why take from people? Why? Why keep it? Keep all the joy and all your creativity to yourself when you could share it with the world and give away. And sometimes that means giving away things for free. Sometimes that means giving away discounts. Sometimes that means helping out a reader who needs it. Because it all comes back. You have to remember that. And even if it doesn't come back in money, because life's not about money in the day it's going to come back spiritually, it's going to come back in a really beautiful way. So give, give and give to those around you. That's what it's about. Giving to the people you love, the people you care for, including this great community we're all part of now. Superpower number seven is called the content canon. I'm not talking about a literal canon. I'm talking about creating a ton of content online. More than you think you should be. Because I want you using this content that you're posting on TikTok, that you're posting on Instagram to be tests. Test for what? Test for your ads. The content that performs best. I want you to be turning into ads because any content that performs well for free on social media is probably going to work really well as a paid ad. The other side of this is I don't want you paying a lot of money for paid ads and scaling your audience yet through advertising. If you don't get a signal that you can do it organically through content, go out there, get some sales to your content. It's why I always like when people start with that reader growth engine and then as you get those sales and as you do that, heck, now we have a cool opportunity for you to use that top performing content as paid ads. And being a follower of my own advice here, I want to give you something with absolutely no ask in return, which is a Google Doc link. I'm not going to require your email. Nothing. It's a Google Doc link that contains my marketing guide for authors on creating content. It's an excerpt. It's a 70 or 80 page excerpt. So it's a long excerpt on how to create content from authors from my book Creator Economy for Authors. You can get that free in the link below. Now we're on to superpower number eight. But just a quick note, for those watching the YouTube version, I had to move out of the library and I'm now in a new location. I've been traveling around. At least right now I'm living out of a hostel. It's pretty fun. Don't worry, it's great. I'm just doing a little bit of a nomad lifestyle for a little bit and enjoying it. Now that I'm in my new location, I want to share Superpower number eight, which is reader napping. Reader napping ties a lot into storysuit. I talked with storysuit how it's important to differentiate your marketing channel. That could be a great way to reach new readers and the Thing is, reader napping is all about understanding. If you could steal readers from someone, who would you steal them from? Now, necessarily, we're not going to actually steal them. First of all, we're not going to actually kidnap readers. That would be illegal. That'd be book marketing. That's actually illegal. No, of that. Instead, you to do is think about if you could have someone's audience, whose audience would you want? Who would have the highest overlap with you? Now, what I want you to think about is not just authors and books, but instead podcasts, YouTube videos, blogs, TikTokers. Because a lot of those audiences are what I'll call underutilized attention. Everyone's shown a million products all the time. But how often are fiction books mentioned on podcasts or fiction books mentioned in YouTube videos? Less often. And those can be really good places to actually advertise your books. I saw on a actual history channel, I was watching a fiction author who writes historical fiction advertised their book there. They paid for a sponsorship kind of genius. And they paid for it multiple times. So I'm guessing the first time went well. So those are places to think about, Places where people who read would love what you're doing, but they don't normally hear about books there. That's what reader napping is all about. Spotting the places where there's underutilized attention that you can put your book in. Superpower number nine is social hacking. I love social hacking. This is when you either literally do something wild to meet or directly connect with someone who you admire and get them to mention your book. An example of this would be getting someone like Stephen King to tweet about your book. If you're writing horror or getting Rebecca Yarrows to tweet about your romantasy novel, that would be awesome. Now, how do you do that? That's social hacking, getting things like that to happen. But the thing is, social hacking doesn't have to be. Getting the person who is the leader of the industry or the leader of your space to actually mention your story can be as simple as tying your name to theirs and creating content that's inherently going to interest that audience so that these algorithms serve it to the audience that you want to reach. So. So an example is if you want to reach Brandon Sanderson, you could create a video of making special editions about his books. I featured that exact case study in a previous version of Author Sidekick, my newsletter, which you can subscribe to below. It's an awesome newsletter that helps authors grow their readership and revenue. It's Completely free, Although I do have a paid subscription where you get a workshop from me each month. And it's on a discount now. It's pretty cheap. It's about the price of a coffee each month. And it's on a lifetime discount right now that expires at the end of this month. But on that newsletter, I mentioned a creator who made a YouTube video that got over a million views. Making special editions for Brandon Sanderson's books. Imagine making a library for your favorite author's books, or going down the rabbit hole and sharing, you know, a history of a specific author. Any content that would be interesting to the readers you want to reach. That content may just get the author's attention. That content also might get their readers attention. And those readers will now follow you and find your books. Social hacking. It's beautiful. Now we're on to my last superpower, superpower number 10. And I just want to remind you that there's 40 other superpowers waiting for you. 40 other superpowers. And you could follow me and the Kickstarter, the link in the description. I'd love to see you there. I'd love to have your support. And you'll be able to get the digital version completely for free. And you can also hold the physical cards, the illustrations, they're coming out so beautiful. I haven't shared any yet, but I will in the coming weeks. They're just. They're so beautiful. It's amazing. And superpower number 10 is other people's resources. And this is when you tap into someone else's audience or someone else's resources. They could have maybe different financial resources or different intellectual knowledge about the industry that'd be able to help you with running ads, whatever it is. And usually to do that, you give them something in return. An example that I've seen of this really recently, which is super cool, is Grady Hendricks. He's an author who writes horror, and he writes just very cool books. He's been going around to different bookstores in his book tour, giving classes on witchcraft. Super cool. If I'm a bookstore, I want to have a cool event. Of course I want to bring an author in. Author signings are great, but a witchcraft event is super cool. So they're blasting that out to their list, bringing a ton of people in who want to learn about the history of witchcraft. And it just so happens that there's a bunch of witches in Grady's book. So you probably are going to want to read his book about an academy of witches after you first of all, if you show up to the class about witchcraft, you're probably interested in it. And then after you take the class on it, you're going to be super interested in the book. It's a genius way to market this book. Other people's resources, how can you tap into it? How can you provide value to their audience and in turn be able to access them? It's huge. And that's through prior number 10. I'll see you all next week. I'm going to be in Austin recording an amazing episode of the beyond the Book podcast. So I hope I see you all there. And in the meantime, don't forget, together we are boundless.