Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

Lead generation is basically marketing speak for “how will you initiate interest in your product or service.”

It’s not something many writers are encouraged to think about — there is a mindset, more prevalent in other genres than here in the romance community — that once the book is done, it generates interest simply because it exists, and there’s a sense of frustration when the newly released book (or books) aren’t generating the kind of visibitiliy and sales they’d like.

Truth is, all writers need to generate leads. We call it different things — running a newsletter, building a platform on social media, blogging, generating adds on Facebook or Amazon, newsletters swaps, and putting calls to action in the back of a book — but they’re all predicated on the same idea: get someone interested in you and your writing so you can further that relationship and build a sale.

It may be horrible marketing speak, but I actually like the phrase lead generation because it keeps me focused on high level strategy rather than immediate tactics and tools, which have a tendency to be less effective as more people use them.

In just the last year we’ve seen Facebook adds and Newsletters become a tougher method to use effectively because of changes Apple’s made to the way it handles privacy, while the cost of Amazon ads has increased as more and more authors flock to them. Meanwhile, Booktok and Instagram have become the hot new means of reaching out to authors… but they will grow less effective as more authors flock to those methods.

One thing I will stress — less effective doesn’t mean ineffective. It just means they’re no longer going to have the outsized impact, and you’ll need to invest time and money in learning to use those tools effectively.

Making effective use of your backlist will often come down to three questions:

• What kind of leads are leading people into your backlist?
• How are you using your backlist to generate leads for your other books?
• What resources can you leverage to generate new leads?

One of the most useful parts of Thompson’s Merchants of Culture is the breakdown of the five modes of capital used in the publishing industry and its adjacent fields. I’ve used these to build a publishing company, guide my writing career, and solve all manner of problems.

But I also see a gap, born of Thompson’s focus. He specifically calls out Financial Capital as a key form of leverage, encapsulating all the cash-on-hand resources as well as the ability to generate credit, financing, and investment. It’s a key part of any artistic organisation, as very little happens without it. 

The missing element — based on my experience — is probably time, which doesn’t appear anywhere else on his list. Traditional publishers default to the velocity models, focusing on a short, hot burn with sales — they generate interest, release the bulk of their stock into the world, and expect to sell the most copies in the first month. Failure to do so means using financial resources to warehouse books, using connections and marketing to keep books alive after the rest of the industry has set them aside, and tying up human capital managing the unsold books. That’s only viable for the evergreen titles, which generate so much interest there is constant demand.

Indie publishers can work slow, because the books are always there. The financial cost of storing an ebook or print-on-demand title is negligible, so it doesn’t matter if they sell tomorrow, next week, next month, or in five years.

If you wait long enough—and keep your costs low—every book is profitable.

And you can overcome a lot of financial resources by thinking long term and embracing the time to DIY and build your skills. 

When you’re an indie publisher, every book is evergreen. And that means you can take chances, step away from the status quo, and do something surprising with utter confidence that one day—maybe months, maybe years—it will pay off.

You can write the book of your heart and eventually it will find its people. Maybe slowly, a reader gained here and there, but they will come.

The yellow smiley face was first designed in 1963. State Mutual Life Insurance hired the designer, Harvey Ball, to create the logo attached to a company-wide “make friends” campaign after a merger decimated morale. They paid him $45 for the creation of two eyes, a smile, and a yellow circle.

Nobody trademarked the smiley face, although plenty of found ways to copyright specific expressions of it. In 1970 the Spain brothers, Murray and Bernard, appended the words “Have a Happy Day” underneath and made a killing selling merchandise with the ubiquitous symbol. Contemporary operating systems all agree that the smiley face is a useful icon or emoji, now represented by the ascii digits of a colon and a closing bracket – 🙂 – but each system has its own expression of those emojis when the OS interprets the characters and translates them into graphics.

As you might expect, the smiley face is a copyright nightmare once you dig into its origins. The Spain brothers took credit for the creation on national TV when appearing on Whats My Line in the seventies, despite knowing good and well that the originator was Ball. A second group attempted to take ownership of the design in 1971, when a French journalist launched The Smiley Company (and they seem to have been successful, with the Smiley Company fending off a copyright claim by Walmart in over 100 countries back in 2005). In 2001, Harvey Ball’s son Charlie started a non-profit dedicated to reclaiming the rights to his father’s work.

I love the history of the smiley face because it touches upon so many of my favourite mantras for writers:

• Take care of your copyrights
• Never think you can predict which work will take off
• Never doubt that a simple idea can be great
• And, sometimes, even Capitalism can’t contain the right idea hitting at the right time