Tami posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I’m not on Facebook, I don’t tweet, and other than email, I don’t follow any of the other social media available. (I do follow your blog and two other authors) Do you think a first-time author can successfully promote a novel in today’s market without using these formats?

If not, what do you think is the most effective use of my time using social media and/or a website? There are so many available and each one seems to require a large time commitment.

Randy sez: You’re asking the right questions, Tami. One should never jump into some marketing scheme without having some reason to believe that it actually works. An author is in business, and business people ask hard questions about anything they do. There needs to be a reasonable Return on Investment (ROI) for any marketing action you take.

First let me say that there are two kinds of marketing:

• Active Marketing
• Passive Marketing

By “Active Marketing” I mean anything that you do that needs to pay off right away because it has a limited time that it has an influence. This is like working a day job, where you do some work and then you get paid, and that’s the end of it.

By “Passive Marketing” I mean anything that you can do once that will continue to pay off for weeks, months, or years. This is like investing in real estate or stocks (in a rising market), where you do your homework once to decide on the investment and then it earns you money for the rest of your life.

It should be obvious that Passive Marketing is inherently more efficient than Active Marketing. When you are doing Active Marketing, you’d better make sure it has a decent immediate Return on Investment, because it won’t be earning you money very long. When you’re doing Passive Marketing, your immediate ROI doesn’t need to be as high, because you expect it to earn money for a long time. What you care about with Passive Marketing is your long-term ROI.

A recent study showed that the average length of time that a Tweet or a Facebook post hangs around is a few hours. After that, they no longer do any work for you. This means that a marketing plan based on you Twittering or posting on Facebook needs to have a high ROI, because it’s Active Marketing. It also means that you need to keep at it continuously. If you go on vacation, your marketing campaign swiftly dies and you stop earning.

Blog posts and articles on the web, however, are indexed by Google and can bring you visitors forever. A marketing campaign built around writing interesting blog posts or articles on your web site (or anything that is indexed by Google) is by definition Passive Marketing. If you go on vacation, your web site continues working for you around the clock, while you lie on the beach or relax.

Note that you can effectively use Twitter and Facebook as part of your blog or web site. Just include a Tweet button or a Facebook Like button on your blog or web site. You do this job once (or your webmaster does it) and then anyone who visits your site or blog can Tweet about you or Like you and this can bring more traffic to your site without you doing the work. The people doing the work of marketing you are the people who like what you have. These are the best people to be marketing on your behalf. Far better for others to toot your horn than for you to toot it yourself.

I have much more to say about marketing, but I’ll save it for another day. Please note that there’s a monthly column in my Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine on marketing that deals with issues like this in more detail.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Author branding is one of the scariest and yet most necessary things an author can do. But how tight should that brand be? Can you have a “broad brand?”

Teddi posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Randy, in the second half of your interview on StoryFix.com you mentioned branding and reader expectations. You said,

“New writers often fail to understand the importance of branding. When you attach your name to a novel and publish it, that’s an implicit contract you’re making with your reader: ‘I promise to produce more fiction like this in the future.'”

I have a dozen stories in various stages of notes-and-development, and they are spread across several genres. I intend to pursue a certain amount of self-publishing, so the choice of branding is going to be in my hands for many of these projects.

Is author name really the key factor in reader expectations?

For example, one of my favorite authors is Lois McMaster Bujold. She writes fantasy, science fiction and things in between. Although I like some of her books more than others, it didn’t really bother me to discover “the hard way” that I like her sci-fi better than most of her fantasy. I’d read anything she wrote, even in other genres outside SFF, because I like her writing.

Just wondering if that’s atypical. Maybe we need new ways of categorizing things.

Lois Bujold: Science Fiction
Lois Bujold: Medieval Fantasy
Lois Bujold: Fantasy Romance

I’d prefer something like the above rather than having her identity obscured behind a totally different author name. Especially if her aliases weren’t easily and publicly available.

Any thoughts on this? Do you think the publishing world is changing enough that this sort of thing will also change? Or should I simply make up a pen name for each genre and then put them somewhere on a website for folks who want to know “what all Teddi’s written”?

Thanks!
Teddi

Randy sez: Imagine this scenario: You’re in Cairo for the first time and feeling way out of your depth. Egypt is a very different world for you, and you’re starting to feel just a wee bit homesick. Then you see the golden arches of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. Desperate for a taste of home, you walk in … and find that the only thing on the menu is crocodile pancakes.

Question for you: How do you feel about that?

I suspect you’d feel a bit put out. Nothing against eating crocodile. Nothing against eating pancakes. But you don’t go into a McDonald’s looking for either one of those. You go there because you expect exactly the same menu in Cairo as in California.

When somebody violates your expectations, you don’t blame yourself. You blame them.

In the case of Lois McMaster Bujold, I don’t see a problem. Fantasy and science fiction have long been joined at the hip. Whether she’s writing in one sub-category or another really makes little difference.

I think you’d be a bit upset, however, if you bought one of her books and found it to be cowboy erotica. Or an Amish detective story. Or an Ayn Rand-like economic manifesto on the virtues of capitalism.

Any of those could be a fine, fine book. Or not. The quality of the writing is not the issue. The issue is that when you see Lois McMaster Bujold’s name on the cover of a book, you expect a certain kind of story. If you don’t get anything like what you were expecting, you don’t like it.

Treat your readers the way you want to be treated. (This brilliant piece of advice works in many areas of life. I regret that I didn’t invent it.)

This reminds me that my friend James Scott Bell just published a zombie legal thriller. No kidding, a zombie legal thriller. Jim has been writing legal thrillers for quite a while, but this one is out of his normal zone. So he wrote it under a pseudonym, K. Bennett. This is not a secret, so I’m not spilling any confidences here.

The novel, PAY ME IN FLESH, is hysterically funny. I’m tempted to say the novel is “brilliant,” but that term gets thrown around so much that it’s pretty useless. Let’s just say that I haven’t had so much pure fun reading a novel in a long time.

Any time you start a novel with a female lawyer being sexually harrassed by a lecherous judge, and the lawyer’s immediate reaction is to wonder what the judge’s brains would taste like, you’ve got a weird, wacky start to a hilarious book. I loved it.

I’m not a big fan of horror fiction, by the way, so I’d never have guessed that I’d enjoy a zombie legal thriller. But my friend, Susan Meissner, (whom I interviewed on this blog a few years ago), gave such a glowing review that I had to get the book. Susan is a gentle soul who writes literary women’s fiction, and I figured if she could stomach the zombie stuff, then it wouldn’t bother me either. I figured right.

In my view, Jim did the right thing by using a pseudonym here, even though a “zombie legal thriller” doesn’t seem all that different from a “legal thriller.” The fact is that the zombie element plus the humor element make this quite a bit different from Jim’s usual writing. (Jim can be funny, but he doesn’t usually do slapstick comedy, as he does in this book.)

The fact is that Jim’s new pseudonym, K. Bennett, now effectively owns the entire subcategory of “zombie legal thrillers.” So Jim can go on to break new ground in this wacky genre under this name, and if the category eventually fades out, he can walk away from it. Good move, Jim!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.