In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Orna Ross and Joanna Penn discuss how book marketing is changing—and what still works. Drawing on their experiences updating their own marketing guides, they explore the growing role of AI, alternatives to social media, the renewed importance of print and in-person marketing, and why email lists remain essential. They also discuss how authors can develop marketing strategies that fit their goals, personalities, and resources, rather than trying to do everything.
Listen to the Podcast: Book Marketing in a Changing World
About the Hosts
Joanna Penn writes nonfiction for authors and is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F.Penn. She’s also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker.
Orna Ross launched the Alliance of Independent Authors at the London Book Fair in 2012. Her work for ALLi has seen her named as one of The Bookseller’s “100 top people in publishing”. She also publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is greatly excited by the democratizing, empowering potential of author-publishing. For more information about Orna, visit her website.
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Read the Transcript
Joanna Penn: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast with me, Joanna Penn, and Orna Ross. Hi, Orna.
Orna Ross: Hi, Jo, and hello, everyone.
Joanna Penn: Hi, everyone. We're back on video, which is very exciting. We are real people. And so today we're talking about marketing. Both of us are working on updating some marketing books, and also, as ever, marketing our own work.
Orna Plans a Print-Heavy Launch
Joanna Penn: But before that, we are writers running creative businesses just like you, so we'll talk a bit about what we've been up to. So Orna, what about you as Orna Ross? And then we'll get on to ALLi.
Orna Ross: Yeah. So working away, writing away as ever, but publishing focused on a big launch next April, and more of a traditional-style launch with some PR and various other things happening, unusual things that I haven't done before.
We may talk a little bit about that later. I am serializing my novel on Substack, which Substack isn't built for serialization, but it does work quite well over there, and I'm really kind of interested in that. I have been working with some beta readers as we go along, who are giving feedback on it, which is fantastic.
So the shape of it is even changing just by doing the serialization. And putting Gardners distribution in place as well for the launch next year. And I have two poetry books, special editions, coming up. I am putting two together, a bereavement book and a Christmas book, as Comfort and Joy, a gift pack.
Joanna Penn: Aw.
Holiday Deadlines Squeeze Print Books
Joanna Penn: That's lovely. So gift books, well, there's a few marketing tips there. So doing gift books, I mean, it is October. Actually, you probably should've started earlier for the Christmas gift market, but still, good timing, I think.
Orna Ross: Yeah, I think so. We're at the end of the process, so it's really just getting the final bits together and packing the boxes.
You can't really market it yet.
Joanna Penn: Well, I think the main thing, 'cause I've come across this, 'cause I was thinking of maybe launching my How to Market a Book, my next edition, in December, and then I realized one of the biggest issues in December is all the printing for books going out in December.
So just a tip for everyone listening, launching in December is actually really hard, because if people try and print books with print-on-demand at that point, all the shipping dates are very early, so IngramSpark and BookVault and Lulu, whatever, probably early December or even November if you want to get a book in time for Christmas, right?
Orna Ross: Absolutely, yeah, especially on the POD side. And if you're getting a consignment, you need even longer.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, and just shipping in general in the holiday season. Of course, America has Thanksgiving. So it's one of those that you get towards October, you start thinking, “Oh, I really need to get my act together.”
Gardners Opens Doors to UK Bookstores
Joanna Penn: And then you also mentioned, just in case people don't know, what is Gardners?
Orna Ross: So Gardners is a distributor here in the UK. It also distributes in other places around the world, but it's particularly a UK thing. And the reason I'm doing this is because this is going to be a print-heavy launch. The type of reader who's going to be interested in this particular fiction title that I'm doing, they read in print still, largely.
Because it's a print-heavy launch and because I'm also exploring a bookstore placement at scale, not just my local bookstore, Gardners is a better option for the UK than anybody else really. They have a better in. So you can get your book into bookstores through IngramSpark, no problem.
That can actually happen. But in terms of actually selling books to bookstores and keeping the pricing in the right place and so on, a Gardners distribution is generally better. So they say. I mean, a lot of the reason I do these things is to find out. You hear one person's experience, and it can work for them.
But you have to do it yourself to see all the ins and outs of it, so I'm just interested in that as well. And obviously the information feeds back into ALLi as well. So it's always worth doing. Even if it doesn't work for me, I learn so much.
Joanna Penn: Yeah. And of course, again, on marketing, since this is the topic, marketing to bookstores and getting bookstores to stock books is, again, completely different to marketing direct to readers, which is what we often do.
Although you can obviously say to people, “You can get my book in a bookstore. Just go ask them to order it.”
Orna Ross: Absolutely. But people don't necessarily do that. And if you're looking for the kind of person who likes to browse a bookstore, if you're aiming at that… I mean, selling through bookstores is not for 90% of indie books.
Joanna Penn: It's not for me, to be honest, 'cause of the discounting. Goodness me.
Orna Ross: Discounting. And 90% of books won't sell in a bookstore. You need to be appealing to the type of person who goes into a bookstore to browse, and not every book is fit for that, and is better sold online, and it's much easier to reach a reader online.
So that has always been the situation for me. It's just this particular book, and also because I've been working on this series for 100 years or more. And I just want to have a party with physical books and just do things differently.
Joanna Penn: And we should say this is your Yeats book and trilogy, right?
Orna Ross: Yeah. This is my magnum opus. That's been going on forever. But yeah, that's right.
Joanna Penn: I'll believe it's over when it is over, I literally will.
Orna Ross: Yeah, me too.
Joanna Wraps Up Her Master's
Joanna Penn: Okay, so what about ALLi? What's been going on with ALLi?
Orna Ross: Well, do you want to tell us about you first?
Joanna Penn: Oh, okay. Me.
Orna Ross: Good for author.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, okay, so I finished my master's in death, religion, and culture, which has been the last year's work, which included a dissertation on AI digital resurrection for authors, which you are reading.
Orna Ross: I'm fascinated, but I'm not going to say anything now, because it's an absolute imperative that we do a session on this whole thing.
So much to think about.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, so much to think about, but of course, it's also about our digital footprint, what that means for our estate management. So it's not even just the faraway possibilities of it. It is every single one of us who are doing anything online, which is pretty much all authors. You are leaving these digital traces.
And you need to at least do some updates on your various settings on stores in order to figure that out. So we're going to do a special session on that sometime in the next six months, I guess. Then also, because I was so desperately over academic writing, and I feel like I never really got into flow.
There's no flow state for me in academic writing. You have to stop all the time and cite things, and read papers, and this. Anyway, so I very quickly wrote this, How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories, which just came out, and this is based on a webinar I did when I launched my short story collection, The Buried and the Drowned, last year.
So for nonfiction authors doing books off the back of webinar transcripts, obviously you don't just publish the transcript. You have to change it into a book in some form. There's a lot of editing and redoing and stuff like that. But I'm really happy that I got something out this year for that.
And now I am, as I said, starting on the fourth edition of How to Market a Book. Can't believe it's the fourth edition. It's crazy. The first one I think was 2012. And I did a survey with my audience with nearly 700 responses, so we'll be talking a bit about some of that today. And I've also been in LA for a conference around sort of technology-first stuff, so I'm fired up with agentic AI and using a lot more technology in the back end of my business so I can do the fun stuff.
Which is kind of my vision of my business, is that I just do all the stuff I love and I have agentic AI do the rest. That's my plan. So that's what I've been up to.
Orna Ross: Yeah, just a little few things there, Jo.
Joanna Penn: And we haven't talked for ages, like officially.
Orna Ross: It's been a while. It's been a while. I'm so glad that MA is over and we can get back…
Joanna Penn: Me too.
ALLi Readies SelfPubCon and Genre Groups
Orna Ross: …to a normal catch-up every two months, because any more than that and it becomes too much to even talk about or you forget what you've done. Over at ALLi we have SelfPubCon coming up next weekend, and Jane Friedman is our keynote speaker this year, and our topic is new trends in publishing.
We seem to be doing a variation on that theme each year now because each year there's just more to upgrade and talk about. But also new takes on timeless trends, and I think that's also in common with the marketing upgrades that we're going to be talking about. We too have been upgrading the Sell More Books book. We split our marketing and promotion into two different titles, and we had done Reach More Readers not long ago.
We then did Sell More Books, and almost as soon as Sell More Books came out, we needed to do it again. Things had just shifted from us commissioning. It takes us a while, commissioning a book and it goes through the pipeline kind of thing, and it's just a measure of how quickly things are moving at the moment.
At ALLi as well we launched what we're calling genre bonding, so dividing our members into genre groups at the moment, not particularly on the bookstore. We break down, I think it's into 27 or 30 genres, but I think it's five or six genre groups for now. And that's a bit of an experiment, and we're seeing how that unfolds, but it's linking into the developments on the bookstore and getting people to…
It's one way in which we're bringing books out to readers, if you like, also bringing them out to influencers. We're on the bookstore up past 7,000 titles now, with a big influencer and reader push this month, and a focus particularly on Black authors. And yeah, lots of other things going on.
The watchdog desk is busy. We're working with one of the trade publishers that's big in the indie space at the moment on their publishing contract to try and improve it, and ACX and the new value model thing, also talking to them about that, and we have the Barnes & Noble issue also.
So there's just a lot going on in the community at the moment. But remember, the blog posts will be on selfpublishingadvice.org if you want to catch up on any of those issues over the next couple of weeks.
Joanna Penn: Yeah. So the conference, you said next weekend. I don't know when this is going out, so which weekend, dates-wise?
Orna Ross: Oh, sorry, it's this weekend as we actually air. We're airing on Wednesday, and so it's on Saturday the 18th, I say vaguely.
Joanna Penn: Okay. And if you've missed it, you'll be able to get the replays?
Orna Ross: Yeah. Well, it's member only, and then you can attend for two days, but you need to register.
So on selfpublishingadvice.org/conference, if you want to take part. And yeah, any more questions?
Authors Stand Stronger Together
Joanna Penn: Well, the other thing is just you mentioned there some issues with ACX, and contracts and Barnes & Noble, and I think this is one of the things. I get emails almost every week like, “Oh, my account's been shut down,” or, “Oh, this hasn't happened.”
And I'm like, “Don't tell me, tell ALLi.” This is one of the benefits of being a member. We are stronger together as a community, and one of the things ALLi does is advocate for author rights, indie author rights and author rights in general. These big organizations that really don't care about individual authors do care about bigger groups of authors who can change things.
But individually, independent authors can't do much, which is why you started ALLi, and so that's so important.
Orna Ross: Absolutely. Thanks for mentioning that. And the Barnes & Noble thing, we haven't seen it mentioned even outside the community, so we will always try and work with the service to try and make the thing happen, but then if it doesn't happen, then we take it out to the community, and then suddenly it does work.
Joanna Penn: Yeah.
Orna Ross: So the power of the community is something we witness every single week. It really does make a difference.
Joanna and Orna Revise Their Marketing Books
Joanna Penn: Yeah, it really does. Okay, so let's get into marketing. I guess we've talked a little bit about some things already. But we're working on new editions, so this is not just from scratch.
We have old editions. We're doing new editions. So what are we adding? What are we cutting? What are we keeping? And we thought maybe you, the listener, could think about this with your own marketing plan. If you don't have a marketing plan at all, this will also help you, but if you have one, there may be time to revise it.
So one of the reasons I'm revising mine is my last big edition was 2017, so by the time this comes out in 2027, it's like 10 years. Now, I did an update in 2021, like a minor update. Wasn't a new edition. But of course, lots of things have changed, and the biggest one really being AI, but a lot of other things have changed, including me.
So my thoughts have changed on marketing. My approach has changed. And also, it's still one of my top-selling books. So this is another tip. Again, the 80/20 rule: 20% of our books make 80% of the money, and How to Market a Book is one of my top sellers. And every day I'm like, “Oh,” just cringe a bit.
There's things I would change. Now, 75% of it is still relevant because it's principles, but I was like, “Right, I have to do it.” And once I make a decision, I'm like, “Right, it's happening.” So that's me. Why are you updating, Orna?
Orna Ross: Yeah, well, ours was a little bit more… I'm not sure exactly when we planned and worked out Sell More Books, but we put it together and then found two things. There was a real need for grounding different experiences in the…
So it was general information. And that's one of the problems, I think, and one of the challenges, I should say, with marketing and promotion books, is services change, platforms change. What's working one year suddenly inexplicably doesn't anymore. A new platform comes along, and indie authors jump on there.
Things start to happen in new ways and all of that. But AI was the big game changer, and that was because the sister title had been done more recently, which was Reach More Readers, even though it's an earlier title in the series. It had got the sort of dual treatment, which was if you're doing this particular thing, organizing your email list, setting up your whatever it might be, here's how to use AI to help you with that.
Again, at a very high level, but broadly the principles of it, and here's how to simultaneously be more human and be more you. And you can fall along the spectrum of that anywhere you want to, because in between those two editions as well, we had done our AI survey of our membership and broken down the membership into three, which is AI minimal, AI assisted, or AI integrated.
And the practical advice is very different across those three groups really, when it comes to publishing. So that was the need for the upgrade. It's not actually out yet, but we're in the middle of pulling it together.
Joanna Penn: That's interesting, 'cause of course I have my AI-assisted artisan author, my A4 approach.
So we actually now don't define AI assisted as the same thing.
Orna Ross: Yeah, that's true. Well, kind of, but maybe we do. It'd be interesting to tease that one out. They're very broad categories, AI minimal, AI assisted, AI…
Joanna Penn: Super, super broad.
Orna Ross: It's a spectrum, as they say.
Joanna Penn: It is for sure, yeah.
Authors Look Beyond Social Media
Joanna Penn: Okay, so you were talking about a survey there, and just very high level, the survey I did of my audience. So what do authors want to know? Current effective strategies and what works. So specifically what drives sales, because this is such an important point. Why are you marketing in the first place?
Because for some people it is not necessarily to drive revenue or brand building. It is literally just to get their stuff into people's hands. So definition of success, but what are the effective things? AI and future marketing, how things like AI search are changing things. Agentic AI is going to be very interesting.
Budget and time management. This age-old question of how much time do you spend writing, how much time do you spend marketing? Gosh, we've been answering that one for years. Then something for beginners and starting from scratch, and then something for the later authors rebooting, perhaps. And also a lot of people asking about alternatives to social media, which we also know about.
Sustainable, low-energy, and introvert-friendly strategies without social media, without that kind of thing. And I think that is really common, but that is a shift too, right? A decade ago, even five years ago, people were like, “Social media, yay, yay, yay.”
Orna Ross: Yeah, definitely. I think there's a big disillusion with social media.
And now on Meta you can only do, what is it, two links a month or something. You can only link out… there's just so many restrictions. The idea that they were grateful to creators for bringing people onto the platform, that's gone. So I think it's also quite cynical, when you see what's going on with the big companies and kids and everything else.
So I think people are really looking for alternatives. And also that whole movement that we're witnessing as we get more technologized, for want of a better word, some people are leaning more into analog and wanting to make everything smaller and more human and more personal.
There's a lot of shifts going on in the marketplace, yeah.
Joanna Penn: So for me, I'm redoing the whole thing. It is not just updating the existing chapters. It's being restructured. So very different. But in terms of what we're adding, what are you adding?
Orna Ross: So our update is more… because, again, it's not 10 years since you did yours. It's a much shorter period of time since we did ours. So fundamentally it's not changing hugely. The fundamental difference is what I described there. We're giving the alternative of how you actually use AI to do some of these very practical things.
And that is the biggest shift in the book. The structure is pretty much what it was all along, because it's very much built around what are the most popular ways in which people set up. So we define promotion in the Sell More Books book. We're not looking at any of the ongoing marketing things, your promise to the reader, any of that sort of stuff.
The reader journey, all of that is in the Reach More Readers book. Sell More Books is specifically about time-bound promotional activity. So the things that have always been tried and true in the indie market actually haven't changed. I think, as well as saying things have changed hugely, it's interesting to see how much stays the same and how much is consistent.
Boring Marketing Still Sells Books
Joanna Penn: Well, let's just go into that a bit more before we come back to the other stuff, then. So what hasn't changed, then? In all the times that we've known each other as indies, since 2011 I think we met, what hasn't changed?
Orna Ross: Well, specifically around promotion rather than the marketing side of things, I mean, advertising still sells books.
Email lists still sell books, and your own email list more than anything. They are the three things, I think, in terms of promotion that never change and are still there. They're being done in different ways, and AI is making a big difference in how you might approach particularly advertising.
But to me, they're still core, and you may not do them all, but you need to do some aspect. You definitely need your own email list. That's number one. And you need to know ways in which you promote that list, and that's what Sell More Books does, as opposed to Reach More Readers, which is about how to set up your list, how to make sure it's doing what you want it to do for your particular books, and so on.
A lot of authors don't realize, they kind of do that much and leave it, but just keeping that list refreshed and updated is a job, a promotion job, as opposed to a marketing job.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, I obviously just put everything in one book. So what was interesting, I actually got Claude, I uploaded all my previous editions, and then in terms of what hasn't changed since I started self-publishing is the basics.
So the title and the subtitle, the metadata, your cover, an excellent book, and an email list. Like you said, this is boring marketing. Boring marketing still underpins everything, and people always want the sexy, what's going to make me shoot my book up to the top of the charts, or this, that, and the other, but the basics are still so important.
And I remember when I started online in, like, 2006, and I heard people going on about building an email list back then, and I was like, “Oh, no, how am I ever going to do that?” And then, of course, you put your sign-up somewhere on your website, in the back of your books, and the years pass, and it grows and it grows.
So I wanted to encourage people listening, because if you are new, it can really feel like, how do I do that? And for us, it's time, it's consistency. Boring marketing works.
Orna Ross: Yes, and I think it is really important for new people to hear that, because the question we hear a lot is, “I've missed the boat.”
Joanna Penn: No, not at all.
Orna Ross: Marketing doesn't work now because the market is saturated. There are too many books now, as if that's a new phenomenon. So a lot of the questions that new authors have today, they don't realize, new authors had those questions 15 years ago, and they still will 15 years hence.
Those core things are still really, really valid. So if you do feel you've missed the boat, you haven't. There's, yes, a lot more books around, but that actually, weirdly maybe, but definitely isn't a reason to be not doing an email list.
Strategy Starts With Who You Are
Joanna Penn: Yeah, exactly. So a couple of other things. One thing I've also done in my thinking about this, and I'm high Strategic in CliftonStrengths, so I've got a whole section on designing your marketing strategy based on who you are and where you are in your author journey, and what your definition of success is.
Now, for a while, I was definitely… for example, I wanted everyone to be wide. I wanted everyone to do all the things, and now I'm like, do you know what? My mom, for example, is almost 80, and she has some sweet romance books as Penny Appleton, and she has those e-books in KU. We put them free for five days every 90 days.
That is all we do. She doesn't have an email list. She has no website. She doesn't do any social. She does nothing. We do nothing except KU free days, and that's it. Now, compare that to me at my stage, doing the podcast and the books and series and ads and all the things that I do. So that's just an example at two different stages of life. What do you actually want?
And so some people email me, they're like, “Oh, well, I should be doing all this.” I'm like, “Seriously? Do you need to? Do you want to?” And so your marketing strategy has to be based on who you are, what your life is like. I know another woman, a mom of four young children, who is like, “Why can't I do more stuff in book marketing?”
I'm like, “You're so busy.”
Orna Ross: Different, honey. Yeah. And the other thing, I think, is the type of publisher that you are. As writers, we're very good at identifying what we like to write, what genre we're in. We're very good at that, but we're not so good at realizing that not all publishers are the same.
We generally divide our members up into three different kinds of publishers, and they will market very, very differently. So a volume publisher who's all about the words, getting the words out and getting as many books out as possible in a high-turnover genre, is going to market in a very different way to a publisher who's all about the engagement, and the reader, and bringing the reader close, and personalizing stuff for readers, and really engaging with the reader in a big way.
And that's different again to the person who's all about the craft and may take 100 years to write a book. And they're going to market differently, so that's something to take into the mix as well, I think.
Audio and Print Change the Format Mix
Joanna Penn: And then the other thing that's different is how much on audio I've been adding in.
So a decade ago, I think we had ACX. That was 2014, I think ACX started, and that was the only thing we had for years. And of course I had my podcast, but podcasting wasn't that big until, like, 2015, when it started taking off. And so I've now got a much bigger section on audio in terms of how to market your audiobooks on the various platforms and things.
And then also using audio for marketing, so things like podcasting and short-form audio and that kind of stuff. So I feel like, in terms of how the various formats have changed, we've probably had more change in audio and, in fact, print with special editions. E-books have pretty much not been that different.
I suppose selling direct for e-books, but there's been a real shift in what we can do with print and audio.
Orna Ross: Definitely, yeah. An e-book is sort of the plainest animal in the mix, in a very clear and defined way. E-books are great. They're so easy, and they're such a great place for a new author, a new publisher, to start.
But yeah, that's what I was talking about, I suppose, when I was saying the fundamentals of promoting a book haven't changed. It was e-books that was in my mind. We've new platforms in audio, and we have new marketing people coming up all the time, and more and more authors now willing to consider an audiobook as a publisher because the costs are falling.
And AI has a big part to play there, too. And as that happens, then you've got more marketing services coming in to help people to do it.
Pricing Shifts From Bargains to Deluxe
Joanna Penn: Yeah. The other thing I was thinking, just as we were talking there about print and special editions, I feel like we used to talk about pricing.
We've always talked about pricing as marketing, but we have really talked about free or discount deals…
Orna Ross: 99 cents, yeah.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, that kind of thing. And now with the ability to sell direct, doing a lot of bundles, so bundling, where there is a discount, but the actual price that people are paying… some people are selling bundles for, like, $100, $200.
So it's so interesting how that's shifted away from chasing the bottom for discounting to kind of discounting big bundles, or just pricing really high to do beautiful print editions. So that has changed. But again, for authors to think, do you know, price is a form of marketing. You do things with pricing to affect when people buy, how they buy, that kind of thing.
AI Handles the Business Back End
Joanna Penn: So I think that's interesting. But then, we've mentioned AI, but in terms of AI as a marketing assistant, what about you? What are you doing to plan for your launch, for example?
Orna Ross: Well, the thing is, the launch is not a good example of how I'm using AI at the moment, and it will be in different ways when it comes closer to the time and advertising and more online-related stuff.
Right now, a lot of the stuff I'm setting up is physical. And there might be ways in which AI could help with that. It definitely has helped in terms of scheduling, budgeting, because with print you've got to be so careful, postage, all of that kind of thing. That's really hard to figure out alone, but I find Claude is absolutely brilliant for things like that.
And it's a weakness of mine, so I had to hire people to do that in the past and nag my accountant brother and people like that, and now I don't. So at that level, which isn't quite marketing, but it is a very important thing to get right in order to do your marketing.
But at the actual marketing level at the moment, it's a physical launch. Do you want to talk about some of the things that you are using it for?
Joanna Penn: Oh, well, I use it for a ton of stuff. And so in my book I will have stuff on it in every chapter. But just as you were saying there, using AI to help us with our weaknesses is so important.
And so for me, I have endless ideas, especially doing this book. Every time I'm like, “Go research this. What's happening here in this?” And then how do I bring that into the book? And then I'm like, “How do I use that myself?” So, for example, one of the tips I learned about YouTube was that under the how-to category, you can now put in specific timestamps in a different area, not in the description, but in a different area where you answer questions.
Well, Claude is now putting those timestamps with useful things on all of my audiobooks automatically. It's doing that work. It pulls up the transcript, it finds the timestamp, it's adding it to YouTube. And what that means is that will help my SEO in Google, or my GEO as the AI looks for it, and will bring those snippets into Google search.
So again, it's one of those things where, like much of marketing, you don't necessarily know how somebody ends up finding your book, but all these are like little things that you scatter around and you try these things. And now, instead of me going, “Well, I'm not going to do that 'cause it would take too long, so I just won't even bother,” I can say…
I'm using Opus 5.5 in Claude, but ChatGPT, or Grok, or whatever can do it too. Go do that work, and it just does it while I'm doing something else. And it costs very little now, the 5.5 model. And in terms of the launch, the organizing, another thing Claude has done for me is build my Notion.
I tried Notion, I just couldn't get with it, and other people use Asana, some people use Monday. But I said to Claude, “Can you build something that we can both use as a list where we give each other tasks?” And so it built my Notion, and that has really helped. And we all need that project management as authors for marketing, for launching, for publishing, for all this stuff.
So asking an AI tool to help you with stuff like that can be super useful.
Orna Ross: Yeah, absolutely. Couldn't agree more.
Social Selling and High Volume Lose Emphasis
Joanna Penn: Okay. So what about cutting? Anything we particularly cut that you thought, we definitely need to remove that?
Orna Ross: Interesting one. Again, because it was a relatively recent update, there was nothing there that we cut out.
It was all about adding in how to do those specific tasks more easily, really. I don't think we cut out anything. Except I would say that probably the emphasis on social was reduced, so social media and social media advertising, and something that seemed a biggish thing maybe a year or two ago, social selling, where you would be directly selling on the social media platforms and stuff.
But less of that, with the possible exception of BookTok. That just doesn't seem to be going for people the way it has before. So not dropping it or cutting it out of the actual book, but reducing its emphasis.
Joanna Penn: Yeah, and I think that reducing the emphasis is the point.
I was thinking another example is permafree. And I don't know how official this is, but I've noticed it myself for a while. Obviously, permafree first in series used to be a super easy way to do more easy marketing, and I still have permafree books, but they are there for other reasons.
So Successful Self-Publishing, for me, is a free e-book and an audiobook, but it's also a list builder. It also has affiliate income, and I have some short stories and audiobooks on YouTube for free, for example. But for YouTube, the reason is to get into Google. There are ways to use free, but it's not like it used to be, and so I feel like that's the same with a lot of this stuff.
So you mentioned high-volume publishing. As much as I am very positive about technology, I know there are problems with any technology. But one of the things, obviously, that we've seen is high-production AI-assisted or generative books. Now, there are some people doing it very carefully, and that's no problem.
We all have a problem with the one-click output-publish approach. Now, Amazon seems to be trying to deal with that. They've now just changed it to two books per week, rather than, I think it was even, like, 10 books a day for a while there. So now they've changed it to two books a week. So to me, the high-volume publishing approach is perhaps less of a thing than it used to be, because the bar has fallen so low that you can generate a book like this now.
So I think, again, the emphasis that there was for a while on writing to market, high volume plus ads…
Orna Ross: Yeah.
Joanna Penn: …which did work and can still work for some people. I just think that the emphasis on that is less.
Orna Ross: Yeah. And the same as what you were saying about the pricing, the discounting as a promotional tool similarly still works.
Everybody still likes a bargain, but it's, again, an emphasis thing, whereby indies used price as almost their competitive advantage, and now indies are using deluxe as their competitive advantage, and it's interesting to see that shift.
Authors Go Back to In-Person and Local
Joanna Penn: Yeah. And I guess that's the other thing that I have expanded, 'cause in-person marketing has always been a thing, but it has actually become a lot bigger.
And in fact, I messaged you earlier and said, “We need to go back on video.” So this is not in physical person, but we are now putting our faces back on. Yeah, you can fake this with AI, but why would you?
Orna Ross: Yeah. And one of the sessions of the conference this weekend is Penny Sansevieri, who's been in book marketing forever.
Joanna Penn: Oh, forever.
Orna Ross: But her latest book is about local. Think global, but sell local. And again, I'm more interested in local than I ever was. I never really was before, and that's partly due to a change of town, possibly. But for the first few years I was here, I wasn't interested.
I'm much more interested in that now, and have a small circle that kind of radiates out into a bigger one. And I notice that is a trend. More and more people are interested in that. And there are even people hiring assistants who will go to the book fairs or the local market to sell books, and all of these in-physical-person things as well that wouldn't have seemed worthwhile.
There are ways to do it.
Joanna Penn: Yeah. And in fact, going to conferences to renew relationships with people. ‘Cause we can have Zoom meetings or whatever, but it's sometimes just the casual bumping into people and a coffee. Of course, again, that depends on your budget, on your personality, on your energy, and your situation.
Confidence Replaces Borrowed Authority
Joanna Penn: So as we come… I mean, we could talk about this stuff forever, and we'll probably do something more on this. But I also wanted to talk a bit about how you and I, as Orna and Jo, market our books differently. ‘Cause I was very struck by reviewing the 2017 edition, where I had worked really hard to get blurbs from other people who worked in book marketing.
And at the time, that was people like Joel Friedlander, who has died since. Jim Kukral, who did the Sell More Books Show for a while and has moved on. Even Ryan Holiday, who some people might know. He's in the bro-ism niche, which is the stoicism, and he's a dad and all this. But back then he was in book marketing.
And now I'm not even trying, or needing, I guess, to get blurbs. It's just not something that I'm doing, because this is for my audience. I've got my audience. I've got my email list. And I guess I'm more confident as well, so I don't have to borrow the authority of other people in order to put a book out there.
Of course, your quote I will always be proud of. And you're still here.
Orna Ross: I'm still here. I don't remember what I said. What did I say?
Joanna Penn: You said nice things. You could probably just paste it in again.
Orna Ross: I never say anything I don't mean.
Joanna Penn: Oh, exactly. 100%. But I think it's interesting because we all change things up.
Again, if you're new or if you're still building up your audience, you think, “Oh, I have to do all this push, push, push at launch.” But of course, the launch isn't necessarily the big push. I know you're going to do one, but for me, this book is going to be launched in stages. The windowing strategy, as publishing calls it.
Direct and then wide and all of this. And I won't be doing a Kickstarter on this. But it's almost like the ongoing sales, the metadata, the ads next year are going to be the more important thing than now. So every book is different, but I wanted to again encourage people to say that when you start, this can seem so difficult.
And then once you've done it for a while, it can become a lot more relaxed.
Measured Risks Compound Over Time
Orna Ross: Definitely. And again, the type of book, the genre of book, and what it means to you personally. Because, as I said earlier, I wasn't kidding about the party. The book means a lot more than, obviously, when I'm doing up a nonfiction book for myself or ALLi.
It's not quite the same thing, and it would be silly, an absolute waste of time and money and everything else, to treat it in the same way. And also, I think an important thing to say is that one of the things about marketing is that it is a risk. You are going to have to risk either time or money or probably both, and really there's no way to be sure until you take it.
A measured risk. A risk from a place of safety where you just give something a go, because the results can be surprising, and you can assume certain things about your book, about you, about what will work and what won't work. Really there's only one way to know, and that's to test it.
And so setting aside a budget, it can be a tiny budget, it doesn't matter what it is, but also to do it properly, give yourself a quarter where you kind of sink into it, especially if it's your first time to do it. And to do that kind of research to say, well, this particular book, as you said earlier, what's the definition of success?
What's the most likely way to get there? How am I going to play with this? And to treat it as an experiment that you will learn from, so that even if you don't sell a lot of books, next quarter, your next experiment is going to be a bit more clever and a bit more informed. And as that goes on, it compounds, and we see it over and over and over again at ALLi.
The people who stay there, who learn the skill, who do the experiment, then suddenly they have the takeoff. You never know when it's going to be, but it does. It either compounds so that you've got more titles that are bringing in more, or sometimes it's just a viral thing and something takes off, and it's never the thing you expected.
So “we're still here,” you said earlier on in the show, and I think staying power is probably marketing power.
Book People Keep Writing
Joanna Penn: Yeah. And when I think about… I mean, obviously I do now make a certain amount of money from everything. But one of the reasons we keep doing this, I mean, obviously both of our books we're writing to also help the community.
That's one of the reasons, because we get these questions all the time. So it's actually nice to have a resource to send people to. But also, we write because we can't stop writing. We are writers. And I was at this technology conference, and I was feeling a bit like I need to be more ambitious.
I need to do more. Like, I don't know, cure some disease or whatever it is. People doing these amazing things. And I'm like, do you know what? I just love books. We're just book people.
Orna Ross: We like books.
Joanna Penn: We like reading books, we like buying books, we like just books. So what can you do about that?
I mean, that's just the life, isn't it? That's why we're still here, and we do this partly so we can keep doing this.
Orna Ross: No, exactly. Exactly. And that is the thing. And you don't ever know with a book… It's part of a certain kind of imposter syndrome that creatives have, a general, “The world's going to hell in a handcart and I'm here making up people or writing poems.”
What on earth is all that about? And yet books last, and books touch people, and books change lives, and books do make a difference. You might not ever know what difference your book has made. You just have to kind of have faith in it and trust that impulse that kind of tells you, “No, you can't stop.
You're a writer. Sorry, you have to write.”
Joanna Penn: Yes. And on that note, we should say happy writing.
Orna Ross: Yes, and happy publishing.
Joanna Penn: And happy book marketing.
Orna Ross: And promotion. Yes. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.
Joanna Penn: Bye.
