A flowchart has been making the rounds in author groups on Facebook. It asks whether you have money. Say no, and it moves on to whether you have a job, then possessions, then a kidney. Every box leads to the same place: buy my books.
Another novelist made it, and the kidney is the best part.
Then I made my own.
Mine is a highway sign. Green signs ask the questions, blue signs give the answers, and a dashed yellow express lane carries every yes to the same exit. The no answers don’t escape either. They drop straight down the page until they hit the big green sign at the bottom.
It’s a joke, and it’s also a small marketing experiment. I want to talk about both, because the reasons it works say a lot about why most book promotion doesn’t.
Why does a Buy My Books flowchart work?
It tells the truth. Every author who posts about a book wants you to buy it. Readers know that before they finish the first sentence, and most promotional posts spend a paragraph pretending otherwise. They talk about the long road to publication, the passion project and how humbled the author feels, and then they slip the link in at the bottom like a waiter sliding over the check.
The flowchart skips the pretending. The first box makes the ask, and the joke is how shameless it is. Once the reader sees that every arrow goes to the same exit, they’re in on it.
You can’t resent a sales pitch that’s laughing at itself.
Compare that with the post every writing group sees ten times a day: “Please, please buy my book, it would mean the world to me.” That’s begging, and begging makes people look away. The flowchart asks for exactly the same thing, but it asks with a grin, and a grin gets shared. Social media runs on sharing. Who forwards an ad to a friend? Nobody does. People forward jokes all the time, and a joke that happens to have five book covers on it travels a lot further than the covers would alone.
Every author wants you to buy the book. The flowchart just says it out loud, and you can’t resent a sales pitch that’s laughing at itself. – Richard LoweShare on X
What has sold my books, and what hasn’t?
I’ve written 113+ books, so I’ve had plenty of chances to find out what moves copies and what doesn’t. Nothing works every time.
Focus on LinkedIn is my best result. I promoted it hard on LinkedIn, priced it at 99 cents, and 15,000 copies went out in three days. My book on selling on eBay sold about 5,000 copies over its life. Those two had something in common: an audience that already wanted exactly what the book offered, and a way to reach that audience directly.
Then there’s the one that sold nothing. I promoted a cybersecurity book heavily under its original title, Safe Computing Is Like Safe Sex, and it went nowhere. The title was memorable. The promotion was real.
It didn’t matter, because the market was flooded with cybersecurity books and mine was one more voice in a very loud room.
My most reliable sales have come from plain direct marketing to people who already know me: LinkedIn Live sessions, reaching out one person at a time and talking about the book, and live events where I sold from a table. None of it ever sold mountains of copies. It still beats everything else I’ve tried.
I’m an introvert, and marketing and sales don’t come naturally to me. A joke helps with that. It’s a lot easier to post a goofy highway sign than to stand up and say, “My book is good, you should buy it.”
Is humor good for book marketing?
Humor is good for attention. It doesn’t close the sale.
Attention is the first problem every author has, and a funny post stops the scroll. It makes people read the next line, look at the picture and maybe tag a friend who reads too much. Then the cover and the description take over. When I’m shopping for a book, I read the description and decide, and maybe I glance at a review or two. Most buyers work the same way, so a flowchart that drags people to a weak cover or a limp description has just sent them somewhere to say no.
Real covers belong on the flowchart for that reason. Mine carries Peacekeeper, The Ghostwriting Advantage, Grim, Family on Ice and Show Don’t Tell, and each one links to its page in the library. If a cover catches somebody’s eye, they’re one tap from the description. If your covers need work, fix them before you spend any effort being funny. Why book covers matter so much goes into it, and so does what to do when a book description isn’t converting.
The humor also has to fit the author. Writing funny is its own skill, and humor in writing covers how it works on the page. A horror novelist can make a flowchart, but the punchlines should probably end somewhere dark. A memoir about grief should skip the format entirely.
How do you make your own Buy My Books flowchart?
Start with the excuses. Every question on the chart should be a reason somebody gives for not buying a book, said out loud and then knocked over. I don’t read. I don’t have shelf space. I’ll wait for the movie. Mine answers that last one with “Your imagination has a bigger budget,” which happens to be true.
Keep it to five or six questions. More than that and nobody reads to the bottom on a phone. Each answer gets one line, short enough to read in a glance. Make the no answers go somewhere too. The funniest part of the original is that refusing doesn’t get you out of it. If every no leads to another question and the last no still lands at the exit, the reader feels the trap close, and that’s the payoff.
Put your real covers at the exit, one link to where people can buy them, and nothing else. Leave out the price lists, the review stars and the series reading order. All of that belongs on the book pages. Post it as an image with a short line of text, and end with a question people can answer in the comments. “Which question got you?” works. Comments push a post further than likes do on most platforms, and promoting your book on social media covers the rest of that.
Marketing is experimentation
I haven’t run a real promotion for my own books in years. Ghostwriting takes most of my time, and my books mostly prove I can write. Writing and publishing them is something I enjoy for its own sake.
So this flowchart is half joke and half test, and I’ll find out what it does when people see it.
Testing like that is how marketing works for any author. You try something, it doesn’t work, and you keep trying until something does. What does a flowchart cost? An afternoon. If it gets a few people to look at your covers who never would have, it’s paid for itself. If it flops, you laughed while you made it, and the next idea is already waiting.
Selling books is hard for almost everybody, and why selling self-published books is so hard lays out the reasons. My book Sell Your Books covers marketing without the hype, and more is in the Publishing and Marketing Hub. For help building the book and the plan to sell it, look at my self-published author service.
And if you’ve read this far, you already know where the arrows go. Every one of them ends at the library.
