Confessions of a marketing skeptic.

So here we are, in week two of my test run for sharing my blog posts as Facebook Notes. It seems to be as good a time as any to make a confession: This is basically the only marketing-type thing I've done for my books in months. Why? Because I have an innate suspicion, bordering on irrational fear, of anything that has to do with marketing.

There, I said it. And I apologize in advance to my friends who work in marketing, because the rest of this post is going to be about why this is so.

For starters, I came up through journalism. It's hard to believe now, but in those days journalists thought themselves above any involvement with filthy lucre. Yes, we did our jobs and got paid for them -- but we were supposed to be discerning about the topics we covered. If we were asked to write about a new store or a new product, it had better have something more interesting going on than just being new. It had to be unique, or very nearly so. The redevelopment of a decrepit retail block? We're in. A mac-and-cheese box whose perforated, thumb-sized "open here" button actually worked? We'd like to talk to the inventor. A product that would keep one's shoes from coming untied during the course of a day? We'd be all over that. (Am I the only grownup who has trouble with her shoes? Even if I double-knot my Keens, they untie themselves in a matter of hours.)

Anyway, the point is that we had standards against running stories that amounted to unpaid infomercials. (That's one big reason why so many news releases end up in the trash: the hook is too weak. If there's no real news in your news release, it's going in the circular file.)

Sometimes it was someone from the sales department who would try to sell us on doing a story on his/her client's new something-or-other. Unfortunately for the client, the same rules applied: No hook, no story. And "cool new store in town that's going to buy a lot of advertising from us if you put it on the news" was, unfortunately, not a hook. Sorry/not sorry.

From news, I jumped into the simple living movement. And among that movement's tenets -- besides downsizing your life and reducing your footprint on the earth -- is keeping an eagle eye on your discretionary spending. Don't buy something just because your neighbor bought one; analyze your spending habits and stop buying stuff you don't need; buy the store brand if the quality's the same; kill your television; and so on. These things were pretty much second-nature to me, as my parents grew up in the Great Depression. And I never made a fabulous salary in radio, so I was doing a lot of them anyway, out of necessity.

Fast-forward to today: I've let up on simple living and I no longer work as a journalist. But I still have the sort of inquiring (all right, maybe cynical is a better word) mind that asks what's so new about this thing and do I really need to spend money on it.

And yet here I am, writing novels, which are pretty close to the top of the "stuff no one needs" pile, and asking complete strangers to take a flyer on them. Karma sucks.

Plus, to get my name out there so that people will know about my books, marketing is a necessary evil. But now I'm doing business with people whose messages I've spent decades resisting, and I am skeptical of all of them. Will Marketer X give me the return on my investment he/she claims? (Doubtful, in most cases.) How much is Marketer Y relying on me to get the word out about the promotion I'm paying him money for? (Crowdfunding sites, I'm looking at you.) Why does Marketer Z insist that I must use a particular blogging platform/book distributor/etc., even though other marketers argue for a different one? Whose pockets are being lined by all this advice, and how?

Last fall and winter, I put a fair amount of time and money into marketing, and didn't get much in return. There are a number of reasons why I've pulled back since then, the Denver saga being one of them. But I'm not planning a big push for any of my books this fall -- despite the fact that A Billion Gods and Goddesses will be out in the next week or so, and I expect to release a Pipe Woman's Legacy set for Kindle just before Thanksgiving.

Which is why I'm counting this blogging experiment as marketing. It's another avenue to get my name out there -- and a fairly unique one right now. And it's free.

Anybody else feel the same push-pull about marketing that I do, or am I the only one?

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These moments of skeptical blogginess have been brought to you (on multiple platforms!) , as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Fun with trailers, and social media follies.

We're heading into the home stretch, prior to the release of Fissured.  I created a trailer for the new book yesterday -- the link is over to the left, if you want to take a look at it -- and taught myself how to use Power Director 10 in the process.  It's not the most intuitive program in the world (more than once, I wished I were back in the analog world, with a razor blade and a roll of splicing tape), but it's got a lot more bells and whistles than Windows Live Movie Maker.  And all in all, it was fun.

Earlier in the week, the Indies Unlimited staff took a crack at producing book trailers on animoto.com.  I tried it out by throwing together a trailer for SwanSong, which is just below the Fissured trailer on the left.  Making a 30-second video is free, and the process is quite user friendly.  Of course, you can make any sort of movie, not just a book trailer.  So if you've ever had a desire to play around with making videos, you might want to check it out.

One other housekeeping thing:  Further down on the left is a blue bunny icon.  If you click on it, it will take you to a page where you can enter the "Books for Bunnies" contest.  A number of indie authors have contributed their books as prizes, and all proceeds go to The House Rabbit Society, a nonprofit organization devoted to finding homes for pet rabbits that are no longer wanted.  Book blogger Suzie Welker at The Bunny's Review is sponsoring it.

So okay, on to the main subject this week.  On Monday, a blogger at the Guardian's website posted an article about how indie authors are being led astray by advice about social media.  He says:

I'm convinced that epublishing is another tech bubble, and that it will burst within the next 18 months. The reason is this: epublishing is inextricably tied to the structures of social media marketing and the myth that social media functions as a way of selling products.

In a nutshell, he says social media advertising doesn't work, and it requires authors to spend too much time online, talking about meaningless stuff, instead of writing.  He goes on to talk about the 80/20 rule, which, he claims, says we should be spending 20 percent of our time writing and 80 percent marketing through social media.  Furthermore, 80 percent of our "marketing" time should be spent talking about anything but our books -- because the point of social media is to make connections with people, not just hammer them with ads.

There's been a bit of a backlash, as you might expect.  One blogger posted a cogent deconstruction of the Guardian post on Tuesday.  For starters, this post says the Guardian blogger misquoted the 80/20 rule, which simply says 80 percent of your profits come from 20 percent of your customers.  In terms of social media marketing, applying the 80/20 rule would mean that 80 percent of your posts should go toward establishing you as a credible expert in your field.

(This, by the way, and not incidentally, is a good way to beef up your online credentials in any field, not just in writing e-books.  I've heard stories of people receiving job offers after establishing themselves as a helpful and knowledgeable voice on sites like LinkedIn.)

It's true enough that nobody really knows how effective Facebook ads are.  That's part of the reason for Facebook's dismal stock performance since going public a few months ago.  But Facebook isn't the only social media platform -- Twitter and G+ immediately come to mind, and there are numerous others.

But the biggest thing the Guardian blogger misunderstood is that not every indie author is in it to make a fast buck.  Some folks are impatient for their work to show a profit, it's true, and some writers publish before their work is ready (either through ignorance or arrogance).  But most of the indie authors I've met are more level-headed than that.  They know they need a deep catalog, which will likely take them years to build -- and even then, they realize, they may never make much money from their writing.  But they figure that if they're going to be writing anyway, why not e-publish the finished product and make a few bucks from their work?

Indie publishing has been a learning experience for me.  It seems like I'm always acquiring a new skill set, digital video production being the most recent. But I'm having a ball -- and really, isn't that the point?
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I'm Lynne Cantwell, and I approve this blog post.