SFA 069 – Selling Hard-to-Categorize Books That Aren’t Written to Market/Trope

Very few authors think of writing “to market” or “to trope” with their first book/series. They’re just writing what they love! Sometimes, that ends up being popular with readers, but sometimes you end up with some cross-genre mashup that doesn’t fit tidily into any of the categories on Amazon or the other online bookstores. You don’t realize that’s a problem (or at least a challenge) until you try to market it!

On this week’s show, we talk a bit about the Theory of Diffusion of Innovation (and how it might apply to books and advertising/marketing) and then jump into tips for selling hard-to-categorize books.

To start things off, we talk about why books that aren’t written to market and/or don’t fit well into existing categories are hard to sell. There’s both the visibility problem and the conversion problem — readers are more likely to try things that are like other things they already know they like.

Also, a large chunk of the reading population isn’t going to click ads and may only try books that others they trust have already vetted and said are good. This can make it very hard to gain mass market appeal and ever sell niche books to more than niche audiences.

We also talked about how important time is in the adoption cycle (“The passage of time is necessary for innovations to be adopted; they are rarely adopted instantaneously”), so if you’re giving up on your marketing and moving on to other projects too soon, you may be doing your book/series a disservice.

Here are some of the tips we offered for selling your niche books:

• Embrace the free loss leader — it’s easier to get people to try something when there’s no potential for financial loss.
• Go out and find your tribe, the people who are looking for niche books like yours.
• Test covers/blurbs to see what works best. Sometimes, it may work best to stand out from others in your genre; sometimes, it may work best to make your book look like the stuff that’s selling.
• Highlight the character aspects that tend to be more universal and less obscure than creative settings/premises.
• Work on something more to-market to make some money and then come back later to the passion project.
• Learn how to market well and spend time figuring out what’s really working. For a niche book, Amazon and Facebook ads may not convert well.
• Focus on building your newsletter and gathering together what may be an eclectic group of fans.

Listener questions we answered:

• Alisha: Do you try to use comp titles for these types of books? Like blah blah meets yackity yack or whatever? Or do you think comps only work well for books that fit perfectly?
• Jeff: I’d love to hear ideas on how to cultivate a niche subgenre into something larger.
• Sean: Does it help to write short stories to be included in Pizza-Dragon Anthologies?
• Renee: I’ve been thinking about changing my category to New Adult Historical Fiction but when I search the New Adult genre (that has apparently been around since 2009) most of it is bare chested men and Y/A. Nothing against bare chested men but I’m not having much luck in finding New Adult anything.
• Darrell: I have my book, Jane Austen vs Dracula, that a lot of people assume is romance (it’s more horror/action adventure). How do you market a book that isn’t easy to classify? Who do you market to when it’s not easy to define your target audience? And if you write a book that isn’t to market, and doesn’t hit the tropes, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. It just doesn’t fit the categories. Should indie authors turn to trad publishers in those instances because they’ve got bigger pockets and may be able to more effectively promote the novel?

Thank you for listening, and thank you to Joshua Pearson for producing the show.

Six Figure Authors

SFA 069 - Selling Hard-to-Categorize Books That Aren't Written to Market/Trope

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