This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 84: Marketing Is Not A Dirty Word.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today we are talking about something that is the scourge of so many writers out there, and that is marketing. This is going to be a bit of a two parter. This week we are talking about marketing in general, what it is and why we need to do it, and the basics on how to get started with it. And then in next week’s episode, we’ll talk a little bit more in depth about marketing tactics and what’s available to you as a writer.

I’m really excited about this. And part of the reason I’m excited about it is because I get to talk about a transformation that I went through. I get to talk about a change in mindset that I made, and I think that it’s one that a lot of other writers have made or are on their way toward making. It really makes a huge difference in how you build an audience for your work and in how you make money with your work. So let’s jump right in.

The story starts with me back in high school, and then sort of repeats itself again in college, and then again after I graduated from college. This is a story of me being determined to never sell out. I was really into indie poetry. I was really into sort of the more esoteric, non-commercial works. I was listening to a lot of punk music. I was listening to, gosh, I don’t even remember. But what I do remember is that I had a great disdain for bands that sold out. So bands that sold out essentially lost their authentic sound. So they lost what made people love them in the first place, and they sort of left their roots and they moved on to a more commercially appealing sound, because ostensibly, they wanted to make more money. They wanted to sign with a big record label. They wanted to blend in and create more of a mass appeal with their sound, and doing this meant that the band was sort of over and no longer cool to listen to.

Now whether this was about the band itself, the music that the band produced, or my own ego, I will leave that up to you to decide. Now, in my mind, I made a connection. Just as a band would sell out to sell more albums, I noticed that some writers were gaining immense commercial success. I remember especially, this was around the time that Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code came out. And I remember checking it out from the library and reading it with great disdain, and I’m ashamed to admit now, even a little bit of mockery. And I remember comparing it to the “literary writers” that I was reading at the time, and just shaking my head and saying, “Oh, this author is a sellout. This author is creating mass appeal books that are not very well written in order to make money.”

Now today, as a full time creator who makes their money by creating things, I do not blame Dan Brown for writing bestsellers that made him a ton of money. Like, go Dan Brown. If you can do what you love and make money doing it, that’s amazing. But back then, however many decades ago, I was feeling a righteous anger that someone like Dan Brown could outsell and even get published commercially, when some of the writers that I admired, some of the really, really talented and edgy and innovative writers, were struggling to get published. It wasn’t fair. And I remember this sentiment got echoed again and again years later, with the success of the Twilight books, with the success of the 50 Shades of Grey books, which again, while not stunning works of literary genius, sold very well. And I’ve seen a lot of writers on social media who echo these same sentiments, like, oh, the publishing industry is willing to publish this, describe the books here, use your own words, whatever, however you describe those books, but they’re not willing to publish me.

And I think that there’s sort of this idea floating around that publishers only want garbage. But here’s my question. What’s the difference between a book that sells and a book that doesn’t sell? I didn’t know it at the time, but that difference was marketing. So here I am, a new high school graduate or a new college graduate. I was sort of in a very similar mindset for both of those events. And I was determined not to sell out. I was going to be a starving artist to prove a point. I was going to write weird, innovative, esoteric novels that did not sell. And at the time, could I precisely define what it meant to sell out? No. It was just sort of this vague sense of, oh, you dampen or quiet your message in exchange for corporate money. And I was not going to do that.

Hilariously, I graduated college in 2006. Yep, right as we were heading into a recession. And if you remember anything about that time, jobs were kind of scarce. And so after a year as a software license agreement auditor, which I think I’ve talked about before on this show, it was not the best year of my life, but I moved on from that. And I, of course, got a job in marketing, because if you were a recent college graduate with an English and creative writing degree, ironically, you are a great fit for the world of marketing. And I didn’t want that to be true, but I spent a decade getting paid to do the thing that I hated.

I started my career in marketing in house, doing traditional marketing for a bank. And I was all ready to rage against the machine. I was like, “You know what, I’m going to do this work and I’m going to do it well, and I’m going to get paid, and I’m going to save up that money so that I can one day quit my job and write the kind of novels that I want to write. And I’m going to do this marketing, but I’m not going to like it.” But it was weird, because during my first couple of months, and then my first couple years, I realized something. I learned this by doing it. And I learned that marketing was not inherently evil or even vaguely bad. Marketing, at its core, was communication. And I was good at communication. I learned through writing flyers and pamphlets and, yes, even creating advertisements, that marketing at its core was communicating that, hey, this thing exists and making sure that that message found the right people. At its core, that’s all that marketing was.

In the terms of you as a writer, marketing for you is simply telling the world that, hey, my book exists, or my memoir exists, or my website or my blog exists, et cetera, whatever it is you’re creating, this exists, and then making sure that that message meets the right audience. Now, that’s not to say that marketing can’t be used in bad ways. We have all seen bad, gross, manipulative, spammy marketing, using women in bikinis to sell beer and soda, or the infamous used car salesman who lies about the condition of a car to get you to buy it. We’ve seen untrustworthy, evil, gross marketing, and I’m still very against that. Don’t lie to people, don’t manipulate people.

But overall, the idea of marketing is a pretty good one. It makes sense. In order for people to know about your book, you have to tell them about it. Now, I know that a lot of writers operate under the whole if you build it, they will come mentality. I saw the movie Field of Dreams, decades ago, I think it was after I was recovering from my spinal surgery. And so I don’t remember it very clearly, because I was on a lot of painkillers and I was relearning how to walk at the time. But I do remember that infamous line, “If you build it, they will come.” And in the context of the movie, it’s talking about, hey, if you build this baseball field, all of these famous baseball players will show up miraculously and everything will be amazing forever.

Unfortunately, the line, “If you build it, they will come,” has sort of seeped into our cultural consciousness. And I think people interpret it as advice or wisdom that they should follow. But I have talked to so many writers who have finished writing a book and looked around and said, “Okay, I fulfilled my part of the bargain. I wrote this thing. Where’s my audience?” And then they get really frustrated, and angry, and even a little bit jaded that they did something, but it’s not having an impact. It’s not finding an audience. The world is denying them an audience. They built the field, but the people didn’t come. There’s this perception that if you create something, the world will automatically find out about it or know about it, when really, I have no way of knowing that something exists, unless somebody tells me about it.

Now, there’s things that we see in our daily life. I don’t need somebody to tell me that cars exist, because there’s a million of them going up and down my street right now, and they’re very loud and annoying. I don’t need someone to say, “Hey, Sarah, fun fact. Cars exist.” Similarly, I don’t need somebody to tell me, “Hey, Sarah, books exist.” I am very well aware that books exist. I am surrounded by them right now. I have stacks of them overflowing from my shelf. I am extremely aware that books exist. But what I might not know is that you wrote a book and that your book is awesome, and that I need to pay you money to buy your book. I don’t want you to be an angry, frustrated, and jaded writer. I don’t want you to make a false assumption that nobody’s buying my book; therefore, my book isn’t good, or therefore, I’m a bad writer, or therefore, I’m not meant to be doing this. That is a false conclusion. Don’t do that. You are a writer and you have a story to tell, and that story is important and you need it to reach people. And that is why we are talking about marketing today.

Marketing is communication. Marketing is building a bridge from point A to point B, where point A is your book or your blog or your novel, whatever it is, your work, your creative work, and point B is your ideal audience. Marketing your book is building a bridge between point A and point B. Now, marketing has changed very radically over the past 10, 20 years, because the internet exists. And so you no longer have to have the money and the connections that you would need to rent billboard space in downtown New York. You no longer need $60,000 to buy a TV spot. You don’t need to be the VP of Marketing in order to market. That barrier is gone, and that’s awesome. That’s such good news for us. You can build that bridge for free, but so many writers are never told that this is something they need to do, or worse, like in my case, they are told that doing that is bad.

We’re going to talk today. Well, I mean, we’ve already been talking, but we’re going to talk more about what that bridge is made of. What goes into building that bridge between your work and your audience? And I’ll tell you, and again, this is radically different from the marketing of even 10 years ago, today that bridge needs to be made out of permission, trust, and likeability, because what has changed is how people pay attention to things in the age of the internet. Old marketing might have asked you to use people, to use shame, to lie, to spam people, to manipulate people emotionally, and to be just really untrustworthy. And you had to do that to compete with all of the other people who are using shame and lies and manipulation and spammy tactics.

But with the advent of the internet, people now have the option to look away. People now have the option to simply ignore your marketing. Think about the old days of television. You’d have to sit through the ads or turn down the volume on the TV, if you didn’t want to watch the ads, or change the channel. We don’t have to sit through ads anymore. We have DVR, we can fast forward through the commercials. We can watch our shows on a platform like Netflix, where there are no commercials. Many of us have ad blockers installed on our internet browsers. We don’t have to look at ads if we don’t want to. We’re instead paying money directly to the content creators, directly to the platforms. I pay for Netflix, and they get their money from me and not from advertisers. And I like that model. I can support what I like directly. That’s amazing.

There’s also something called ad blindness, and you may have heard this term before, but our culture is so used to advertising and so inundated by advertising that we’ve become blind to it in a way, but we’ve sort of, as a society, become numb to ads. When was the last time you bought something because you saw it advertised on a billboard on the highway? Do you even notice the billboards on the highway anymore? There are ads everywhere, but we’re seeing less and less of them. So attention has become currency. If you can get people to willingly pay attention to you, that’s the key to new marketing.

The question becomes, how do we get people to willingly pay attention to us? How do we get them to willingly spend their precious free time on our work? This is why advertisements have become so quirky and fun and delightful over the past several years. You’re not a captive audience anymore. You have to want to watch the ads. What makes people pay attention to your work? Well, I can tell you, we’re done with the days of sleaze and trickery. When we say I don’t want to be sold to, which I’ve said myself, and maybe several of you have said before, too, what we’re saying is we don’t want to be lied to or manipulated, because honestly, if you have a really cool book that I want to read, I want to be sold your book. I want you to tell me about your book. Sell me on it, yes. I am looking for awesome books to read, and I want to know about them. I’m really grateful when somebody recommends a book to me, when they sell me on a book. I want to find and be connected to certain things, certain people, certain works of literature, certain aspects of culture that I don’t otherwise know about. And marketing does that connecting. Good marketing, new marketing, does that connecting.

We’ve talked about what you shouldn’t do. Don’t lie, don’t emotionally manipulate people. I feel like that’s pretty common sense, but I’m going to say it anyway. Don’t do bad stuff. Instead, new marketing is going to ask you to be authentic, to ask permission, to interact with empathy, and to serve others. This is so important. This is how you connect yourself to a larger community. This is how you build that bridge. Because when we’re talking about building that bridge, what we’re really talking about is building a relationship between you and your ideal audience. And in order to do that, you need to build trust and you need to learn to be okay with who you are as a person. Now, which version of yourself you present to the world is up to you. But when we’re talking about interacting with other people with empathy and with a mind for service, we’re talking about interacting with other people.

And if you’re an introvert, that’s okay. You can still do this. I’m an introvert, even after all these years. We don’t change who we are. We don’t need to change who we are. And that’s really what’s at the core of marketing. And that’s a beautiful thing. The more yourself you are, the more authentic you’re willing to be, the more people will connect with you. So for the remainder of this episode, and then in part two of this episode, we’re going to be talking about building that bridge. And there’s a lot of different ways to talk about marketing. You have broad terms, like paid and unpaid, or paid and organic, which simply means are you paying money to get your message out there, or are you relying on the connections and relationships that you’re building and not spending any money? And both are equally as effective and both are equally as important. So you don’t need to worry about having a huge marketing budget in order to do effective marketing. I want to make that very clear. We’ll talk a little bit about paid marketing next time, in the next episode.

But in this episode, I want to talk just very briefly about building that bridge for free, building that bridge of permission, trust, and likability through empathy and service. And so the four segments of just a very basic marketing plan might be number one, building up your personal brand, and I actually have an episode of this that I recorded several years ago. It’s episode 52 of the Write Now podcast. And I think it’s still really relevant. And through your personal branding, you’re going to show your work. There’s a wonderful, wonderful book by Austin Kleon called Show Your Work, and it’s a great marketing primer. It doesn’t bill itself as a marketing primer, but you can take away so much from that book of how to brand and market yourself effectively using social media. And it’s just by being yourself on social media.

Number three, building your community or communities. Community is a huge part of marketing that no one talks about. And you can either build your own community or communities, or you can join existing communities and be a vibrant member there and get the benefits of connecting with other people. Because, again, that is the core of marketing. And number four, building up a tribe of evangelists who will go out into the world and tell people about your work.

These are the four aspects to a really solid, zero budget marketing plan that every writer can implement. Again, that’s building up your personal brand. Go back and listen to episode 52 of the Write Now podcast. Number two, showing your work, so being visible and interacting and engaging with people, which ties into number three, building or joining a community. And then number four, eventually building up that tribe of evangelists, who will tell other people about your work without you even asking them to. Most people come to the Write Now podcast from the recommendation of someone else they trust. I don’t pay for advertising. I don’t have billboards on the highway. You won’t see ads for the Write Now podcast on Instagram or anything. I don’t pay for advertising for the Write Now podcast. I get most of my new listeners through word of mouth, because that is the most trustworthy kind of marketing.

I’m curious, how did you find the Write Now podcast? Did you hear me speak somewhere? Did you stumble across it in Apple podcasts, or did someone recommend it to you? Or maybe I randomly followed you on Twitter. I don’t know. I do that a lot, too. I would actually be really curious to know. Before we wrap up today’s episode, and again, there will be a continuation of this topic in the next episode, episode number 85, before we wrap up this episode, I want to talk about one more really important key to marketing. And that is, in order to build that bridge from point A to point B, using permission, trust, likability, empathy, and service, in order to build that bridge between point A and point B, you have to understand very fully and very deeply what point A and point B are. That means knowing yourself, knowing your work, and knowing your audience, whether or not that audience exists or not. Maybe it’s an existing audience. Maybe it’s an ideal audience. But knowing yourself and knowing your audience, you need to be very clear on point A and point B so that you can build that bridge between them.

Because if you’re going to tell someone about yourself, you have to know what to say. If you’re going to be likable, you have to know what people like about you. So who are you? What do you love? What do you create? What matters to you? A really great place to start when you’re asking this question is by building your mission statement as a writer. And I just happen to have an episode on this. So in addition to listening to episode 52, which is about personal branding, I encourage you to listen to episode number 46, which is called Crafting your Mission Statement. It’s a really great place to start with your marketing, because it will help you enunciate. It will help you really clarify who you are as a creator, why you’re creating, why are you doing this? And what sort of change can you offer people? What sort of transformation? What sort of value does your work, do you, offer to people? Or in the words that we’ve been using so many times in this podcast, how you serve them, which is why it’s so important to know who it is you’re serving.

So point B, who is your audience? Who is your ideal reader? Who is your book for? We’ve talked before that, you know what, your book is not for everyone. And that’s okay. Your book is not going to be for everyone. There’s people out there who give one star reviews to Jane Austen. There’s people out there who give one star reviews to your favorite author. There’s no accounting for taste. There will always be people who don’t like your work. That’s not who we’re focusing on.

What we’re focusing on is who is your ideal reader? Who did you write your book for? Who did you write your memoir for? And if your first answer is yourself, that’s amazing, but who are people who are like yourself? Who else can get value? Whether it’s education, transformation, entertainment, who is going to fall in love with your book? Who is going to fall in love with your work? That’s your ideal audience, and it’s a great idea to just sketch out what does this person like? Where does this person hang out online and offline? What types of communities is this person a member of? Because in order to serve people and in order to empathize with them, you have to know who it is you’re serving and empathizing with.

It’s also a really good idea to segment out your audience and to understand that you may have two or three different groups of people who you want to build a bridge with. I’ve seen a lot of writers build that bridge between themselves and other writers, when in fact other writers are maybe not the ideal audience for their book or their work. Now, it’s valuable to build that bridge with other writers. It’s valuable to build that relationship with other people who are doing the same thing that you’re doing. That’s amazing. Some of my most amazing and valuable friendships are with other writers that I’ve reached out to, or who have reached out to me, but they may not be the same people who you need to market to. They may not be the same people who are going to purchase your work.

It’s a really good idea to say, okay, my audience is going to have two segments. The first audience, the first chunk of people who I want to connect with, are going to be my fellow creators. And I’m going to connect with them on Twitter, and I’m going to build friendships and relationships. And maybe we’ll even get to the point where we are recommending each other’s work. That’s fantastic. The second bucket is going to be your readers and your fans. Who is going to fall in love with your work? And just understand that there might be a difference between those two buckets. Okay, know your audience, know yourself, and know what you are offering to your audience. Is it transformation? Is it escapism? Is it entertainment? How are you serving other people? What kind of value are you providing? It’s a really good place to start, is understanding that about yourself, your audience, and your work.

All right, in the next marketing related episode of the show, we are going to be talking a little bit more about tactics. We’re going to be talking about a marketing plan. We’re going to be talking about how marketing can help you achieve your goals as a writer. So it’s going to be really great. Look for that episode. It will be coming next week. Part two, get ready. I hope that this episode was either interesting or valuable to you in some way. I would love to hear your thoughts about marketing. I would love to hear if this episode spoke to you or clarified anything for you about marketing your work. If that is true, then I would love to hear your comments, and you can go out to sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R.com.

Navigate to the show notes for this episode, episode number 84. And there’s a comment section beneath the show notes. Go ahead, let me know your thoughts. I respond to all the comments that I get there. And I would love to interact with you in the show notes for today’s episode. Also out on the show notes for today’s episode, there is a link that says help support this podcast. If you would like to support the work here that I’m doing, if you would like to financially support the content here that I am making, and help me pay for hosting costs and production costs and all of the stuff that’s associated with creating this show for free for people, then I would love to have you as a patron. Patreon is a secure third party donation platform, and there on Patreon, you can give a dollar per episode of the show. You can give two dollars per episode, three dollars, 10 hundred billion dollars. That’s not even a thing, but whatever value you feel like you get out of this show, if you want to support me financially, that’s fantastic.

Again, if you are not able to support the show financially, just tell someone about it. Tell another writer, tell an aspiring writer, anyone who you think would connect with the show or anyone who you think could benefit from the value that I share here, because, again, word of mouth is gold. So if you’re able to tell someone else about the Write Now podcast, I thank you and I appreciate you and everything that you do.

Special thanks today go out to several of my Patreon supporters. Again, they’re out at Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com. And you can find my page out there. It’s S-A-R-A-H R-H-E-A W-E-R-N-E-R. And the patrons that I’d like to shout out today include Amanda King, Amanda L. Dickson, Julian Vincent Thornburgh, Laurie, Leslie Madsen, Michael Beckwith, Regina Calabrese, Sean Locke, Susan Geiger, Tiffany Joyner, Leslie Duncan, Maria Alejandro, Rebecca Werner, and Sarah Lauzon. Thank you all so, so much for financially supporting the work that I do here at the Write Now podcast. I could not do this without you.

Quick announcement. For the last several weeks, I’ve been doing create-alongs every Wednesday evening at 7:00 PM central time out on my I Am a Writer Facebook group, and I’ve had probably about 14 or 15 people show up pretty regularly for the last several create-alongs. What I’ll do is I’ll start a livestream out in my I Am a Writer Facebook group, and we’ll talk for a few minutes about creation, about what people are working on. We will write together for a solid 45 minutes to an hour, and then we’ll regroup and we’ll talk about how the writing session was, any pitfalls we fell into, any triumphs that we experienced together. And it’s really just a place for us to create as a community. And it’s completely free. It’s every Wednesday evening. If you want, I also do keep the live stream replays. And so if you want to, if you’re not available Wednesday evenings at 7:00 PM central, if you want to watch the replay the next day or over the weekend, they’re available to you, and you can pretend that they’re live, and you can pretend that you’re there with me and we can write together.

It’s been really fun. I kind of just started doing them on a whim, and it’s really cool to sit there and know that you are creating with other amazing creators. So if that’s something you’re interested in, again, that’s all available for free out at my I Am a Writer Facebook group. And so if you’re not a member of the group already, come join us. I think there’s over 2,000 or over 2,500 members. It’s just a great community. Come hang out with us. We are out there waiting for you, not in a creepy way, to join us.

And with that, this has been episode 84 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I love marketing.