Learnings Re: Marketing

I haven’t had much time to write (or edit—please excuse this one, I just wanted to get it out there!) these days, but I’ve been learning so much from marketing my book "As beautiful as it seems” and want to talk to others about my findings. I’ve also had a bunch of people ask me about what I did, and it seemed easier to write it out rather than answer the same question repeatedly.

So, let’s dive in—I find marketing fun. And it can be challenging and take some courage, especially when it’s for your own creation. But it’s also been another way to let my creativity flow, and not to mention getting feedback like this has made me feel great:

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There are three sections below: where I think I did well, where I think I could improve, and findings & learnings. I hope you can take something away from this!

Where I think I do/did well:

• Building in public—I didn’t fully realize I was doing this, but I guess I started about a year back with this fun post (lol this actually took me about two weeks to find the courage to post. I’d never put something so revealing on social media before, but saw two women I admired do something similar and decided to go for it.) I then posted every once in a while talking about the book over the next year until I released it.

  • I also did things like asked everyone in my stories to help me name one of the characters (Weston won the competition) and help me make decisions on the book cover. Lastly, I promoted a short series I wrote called NY Stories and leaked the first six chapters of the book on my substack so everyone could get a taste of my writing for free before I started selling my book. I personally think this is why it shot up to number 1 in the Teen & YA category on Amazon in its first week, but it could also be from the power of having a community who knows what it feels like to birth a creation into the world and was down to support (or both)!

• Coming up with & executing marketing stunts—I’m mischievous at heart. I think it makes life more fun to poke at the universe a bit and see if it pokes back. I like the idea of putting your thing out there in a way that others aren’t so that you gain more attention. I want people coming to me, not the other way around (although I admittedly am also cold emailing a bunch of people as I do my own PR at this point 😂). This attitude led me to get my book noticed by a producer from a well-known entertainment company who is now helping me to pitch my book as a TV show, which was hands down one of the coolest moments of my life.

• Guerrilla Marketing—taking to the streets of NY to post stickers with QR codes, hide books, sell books, get it noticed by Subway Creatures…

• Doing my own PR/reach out to tell my story and the story of the book and get it into bookstores. A huge rewarding moment was getting an email back from Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson saying she found my story inspiring and would carry it. I think hustle recognizes hustle.

• Putting myself out there— I started speaking on podcasts, at live events and panels, and did an hour-long Instagram Live with one of my close friends Lindsey who voiced my audiobook (I still haven’t edited and posted videos from any of the above—which is something I have not done so well).

• Learning about Tiktok! It feels empowering to know how to create and edit videos on the app, as well as have knowledge of various strategies.

• Journalist & publication reach out. Although nothing has come from my efforts here yet, I’ve gotten past my resistance to doing PR for myself/my creation. A friend of mine told me that she spent hours daily for months doing this type of reach out and that 99% of it resulted in nothing, but the 2 or 3 responses she got landed her a publishing deal. “Just keep swimming” and “It only takes 1” is what I keep telling myself.

  • Edit: A week after I wrote this my book was highlighted by Bustle as one of the Top 10 YA Books Perfect for Summer 2023!

Where I could improve:

• Consistency of posting social media. I get overwhelmed when I think about posting on Insta, Twitter, AND Tiktok. Especially when I love to take week-long breaks at times for my mental health. I can also feel like I’m shouting into a void on Twitter and Tiktok which can stop me from posting at all (more on this below in findings).

• Repurposing content from the live events I’ve done—it’s hard for me to rewatch some of these—don’t get me wrong, I’m super proud of myself, I just still have an aversion to it. Also editing clips and videos can be incredibly time-consuming.

• Beating myself up when I feel like I haven’t been doing enough to market the book (I’m great at this).

• Having a more fixed and measurable schedule outside of my job for how much time I’d like to spend on marketing so I can feel like I’ve done “enough” each week. For some reason, this is hard for me to do.

• I’ve been stalling on starting a Tik Tok series about the book on my personal account. It’s like I’m digging my heels into the ground on this one and I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps it’s the fear of having to be super consistent with posting “or else the algorithm won’t pick it up”, or perhaps it’s just having to be consistent with creating and posting something with my face in it in general. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve never done anything like this before, and I’m scared (more on Tik Tok below).

  • Edit: Last week I started posting! I just did a few videos without my face in them where I pulled quotes from the book and did simple transitions. This took some pressure off of it for me as I work my way up to posting ones of me talking about it.

Some Findings & Learnings:

• Reviews—for some strange psychological reason, it is astoundingly hard to get humans to write reviews. The number of people who have told me how much they loved my book compared to the amount who have actually written a review is vast. And yet, I GET IT. I’ve procrastinated on writing reviews for friends’ books or products for weeks, and even months at times. And yet, this is one of the main things that can help your book or product sell. The more reviews something has, the more likely we are to buy it. Ps if you’ve gotten anything from reading this and would like to return the favor, please take 30 seconds and review the book here! You can just put stars, doesn’t even need to have commentary!

• AMS (Amazon Marketing Services)—I spent hours doing an entire “reputable” course on how to pick 300+ keywords to target for my book and then days coming up with said 300 keywords and similar titles, all to learn that it’s apparently diminishing returns to start with that many keywords, and to instead start with 15-20 or so. I spoke with someone who worked high up at Amazon for 20+ years who gave me the latter information, as well as the insight that getting a ton of reviews for the book should be one of my primary focuses. All this to say, popular online courses can sometimes be full of s***.

• Tiktok Talk—I started a Tiktok account for ABAIS (As beautiful as it seems) with my friend Haley and it took so much time for such little results that I decided to hit pause and focus on my personal account only. Haley made these amazing clips about the characters and almost mini trailers for the book, but they got little to no views. Neither of us had enough free time to keep it going. I’ve heard you have to post around 3x’s a day for months for your videos to actually go viral (a friend’s account has proved this), but I’ve also heard you can gain traction by posting only about 3x’s a week spread out, as long as you’re consistent.
  My plan is to continue to post on my personal account and do things like read from my book and talk about my favorite parts, why I wrote about certain topics, the inspiration behind the lines, etc. I’m trying to figure out if I should just read the entire book and make a (very long) series like that or just do my favorite parts. (Fun fact: I actually recorded a 20 minute video of myself reading the book and giving commentary when this inspiration struck me, which I really loved, only to realize after that I hadn’t looked in the mirror beforehand and had something in my teeth 😂).

• I’ve started testing some random marketing ideas I have—still don’t have enough data on if they work or not—but it’s fun to get an idea and just be able to try it out for your own thing. Esp when they’re low to no cost.

• I’ve realized that I love public speaking, and I’m pretty good at it too. The feedback I’ve gotten has ranged from being called inspiring to being told I should be a stand-up comedian to being asked if I do this as a profession. This was all amazing to hear, and has also made me wonder… could I do this more often, and help people through it by sharing my experience? (And potentially get paid to do it at some point?)

• Posting about my book and putting myself out there in various slack and WhatsApp communities and groups was actually harder for me than performing or speaking at IRL events. It takes a lot of courage for me to post and ask for people’s time and attention in these groups and therefore I have some resistance toward it.

• It’s been really cool to bring what I’ve learned into my work life at Huddle. I started pitching our two co-founders for podcasts and doing some PR & marketing type work for us. The clarity and knowledge around how we can get more exposure that came from me trying stuff on my own feels great.

• Just try stuff! So many people are out there online telling us how to market and how many times to post and what to post… but at the end of the day, experimenting with what’s fun and figuring this out will help you keep it up for the long haul. Also, making content that’s easy to repeat and post consistently can be a lifesaver.

• You’re probably not going to hear back from a lot of people, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you or your creation are not good enough.

• Ask others for help. You never know who has advice or a resource or can even just give you a pep talk when you’re losing steam. On that note, I’d like to take this moment to thank everyone who has freely given me advice or resources or left reviews. Thank you so much. I’ve thought about you and what you’ve done for me after the fact and have brought these deeds up in my mind when I’m feeling low and reminded myself how lucky I am to have humans in my life such as yourself.

• There have been so many ups and downs in this, but nothing beats the moments when stuff works. Also, hearing this feedback on my marketing from a CMO friend of mine: “Do you know what you’re doing? I was like damn, she’s good at this,” made me realize that if you just have fun with it, and lean into it in your own way, you can stand out.

I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve forgotten; I’ll probably post more when I’ve learned more or remembered whatever I’ve left out.

Would love to hear anyone’s comments, views, tips or tricks, thoughts, etc. Much love✌️