A Snowflake in the Blizzard: Marketing Yourself When 10,000 Books Publish Every Day | The Brian “The Hammer” Jackson Show

This is the complete interview from Richard Lowe’s guest appearance on the Brian “The Hammer” Jackson morning show on Hammer 96.7 BT Radio, with co-host Ellen J and callers Linda and Melissa, broadcast February 8, 2019, lightly edited for readability. The show’s opening segments and breaks are omitted; some passages in the source recording repeat due to broadcast delay and are rendered once.

The introduction and the Focus on LinkedIn story

Brian Jackson: Good morning, everybody, and happy Friday. Our guest is here, and we’ve been bragging about him for two days: authors and publishers, standing up for Richard G. Lowe. Good morning, sir, and welcome to the show. Now Richard, we’ve got a lot of authors listening who went to Amazon, self-published, got their book up, and nothing. What did we do wrong?

Richard Lowe: Well, I did exactly the same thing. I published my first book, and it sold two copies. That was kind of disappointing. Then I published another, and it sold a dozen. So I sat down and thought: what am I doing wrong? And it turned out I wasn’t marketing myself and I wasn’t promoting. Notice I said marketing myself, not my book. The book was about LinkedIn, so I started building myself up as the expert on LinkedIn: writing articles all over LinkedIn and Facebook about what I do. And the book started selling much better. Then I decided I needed people really engaged, so I gave away 1,500 copies and asked for reviews, and got 50, 60, 70 reviews. And then I bought an advertisement on BookBub and got five or six thousand sales in a single day.

What I learned: over 10,000 books are published every single day on Amazon. Over ten thousand. Your book is a snowflake in a blizzard, and you have to make the snowflake sparkle. Since I write nonfiction, I market myself as credible in the subject. If I wrote fiction, I’d market the characters, the world, the trilogy; everybody knows Game of Thrones. That gives people a reason to buy your book: they know they’re going to like it, know it’s going to be factual or a good story. Without a reason, they simply won’t.

And you have to keep doing it, because it stops selling the moment you stop. Five days a week, you write articles about whatever your book’s about, post them, comment, do interviews, and stay top of mind, so that when the next book comes out, people want to see what the expert says. When the next Game of Thrones volume comes out, it’ll sell a million copies overnight. Not just because it’s a great book: because of the buzz.

Linda (caller): Doesn’t the genre determine that you market to a specific demographic?

Richard Lowe: That’s vital. You market to a narrow focus. You don’t have Budweiser or McDonald’s money to market to the whole planet. For LinkedIn, my audience is people who want to get employed, so I market to them. Too wide, and you’re wasting your money and your time. I made that mistake too.

Name recognition without a name

Brian Jackson: I’m a reader. I know my King, my Patterson. In my mind, the only difference between knowing you and Stephen King is that I’m not familiar with you. How hard is it to get name recognition?

Richard Lowe: The way you do it is not by posting about how great your book is. You give away the first chapter. You make a prequel that’s 10,000 words instead of 100,000. You get into conversations about how you created your characters. On my next novel, I’m going to blog the whole process of writing the book, which pulls readers in like crazy, and ask them questions: what do you think about this character? What should he do here? Throw “buy my book” out there and nobody buys unless you already have a name. Put out a free chapter and ask what people think, and you’ll start selling. And it takes time.

Here’s the ladder: my first book has sold maybe 12 copies in the five years it’s been out. Your first book probably isn’t going to sell. Your second sells a little better. Your third will probably sell pretty well. So publish quick ebooks first, get the bugs out of your writing, then work on the bigger one. You’re building an audience. That’s what you’re doing.

Brian Jackson: You’re the first guy who’s said the truth. You know what gets on my nerves? The hobbyists: people who just want to say they wrote a book, with no interest in marketing or the hard work. I like the author with the business behind it. Show me an author, and I’ll show you a barista at Starbucks.

Richard Lowe: I had an interesting situation there: I left my job at Trader Joe’s, making quite a bit of money, and decided to be an author. I had no choice at all but to make it work. I didn’t want to go back to corporate America, so I said: I’m going to make it work. That was jumping off the cliff with barely a parachute, and I’m not saying people should quit their jobs to write. But it was right for me, and I ran into freelancing and ghostwriting and make a good living at it.

And here’s the thing: a lot of people take a couple of writing classes and then wonder why the book isn’t selling. If you were going to be a chiropractor or a nurse’s assistant, you’d go to college for years and learn the whole thing. Did you do that with your writing? You learned to write, but you didn’t learn to market, promote, run the business, or pay the taxes. Learn the other stuff, and you’ll have a real chance of succeeding.

Why do writers fail at making money?

Richard Lowe: One reason is the reason my own first books failed: I didn’t research whether anybody wanted the topics. I wrote a book on computer security, and nobody wanted it. I wrote a book on surviving disasters, and nobody really wanted that either. Look at your genre first: do people want a romance set in ancient Rome? Maybe a thousand people on the planet do. Make it zombies versus vampires in ancient Rome, and you might find a much bigger audience. Research whether you’re writing a book anybody wants.

The second part: constantly building yourself up, and most writers don’t, because there’s this idea in the back of the head: I can’t talk about myself, nobody wants to hear me toot my own horn. You’d darn well better be doing it. Not by saying “I’m the best,” which would be dumb, but by helping people, explaining, talking. I tend to be an introvert, and here I am on a radio show, my third radio show in the last week, plus speeches. Because that’s how you build a name, and without the groundwork, your book’s not going to sell.

Suspension of disbelief, and the worst advice in writing

Brian Jackson: But here’s where writers get in trouble: they know the romantic side of Rome and gladiator love, but they don’t know the adjacent subject they’re threading in, and the book falls apart.

Richard Lowe: There’s a great explanation of this from Walt Disney: how can a cartoon character walk out onto thin air, do fine, and only fall when he looks down? That violates physics. It works because of suspension of disbelief. Your readers have to be willing to suspend disbelief. Look at Game of Thrones: dragons, zombies, dead people walking, and you believe it while you’re watching, because it’s very well written, with a lot of show, not tell. You’re seeing things rather than being told things.

And this is why “write what you know” is, in my opinion, and a lot of authors will be mad at me, one of the stupidest pieces of advice an author could take. Write what you feel like writing, and research it, the R word, and build a world that makes sense. Plenty of science fiction has faster-than-light travel, which today’s physics says is impossible, and readers just accept it, because it’s written so it works and doesn’t throw them out of the story. Write it jarringly, or stop to explain all the physics, and you throw your readers out, and they don’t come back.

The steps: tools, output, and the receptionist test

Brian Jackson: You convinced me. I want to be an author, Richard. What are the steps to writing and publishing a book?

Richard Lowe: My book, Make a Living as a Professional Self-Published Author, goes through all the steps. But basically: first, know your tools, and your tools as a writer are your words, your grammar, your style. Take classes at the community college or online. Get the Chicago Manual of Style and start reading it; I read a chapter every week or so, learning where the commas go. If you don’t know the basics of grammar and spelling, making it as a writer will be very difficult.

Brian Jackson: You know what? I’m lazy, and I’ve got money. I’ll hire a proofreader and make all the typos I want. What’s your answer to that?

Richard Lowe: A proofreader catches basic grammar errors. You really need to know how to write in order to make it as a writer. Period, end of story. Your basic tool is your words, your grammar, and your style. And there are shortened versions of the Chicago Manual if the full one is daunting. Then the other tool: a word processor. I use Microsoft Word, and Office 365 online is absolutely free. Or Scrivener, or any of the others. Learn your tools.

Then write, and if you’re a writer, you’d better be writing. I make a living at this, a six-figure living, between ghostwriting, writing, and freelancing, and my quota is 3,000 words a day minimum, every single day, and that’s words ready to publish, not notes or journal scribbles. You have to produce like that to survive as a writer. Especially at the start: those first books are you feeling your oats, and they’re probably not going to sell, so get them out fast, short and sweet, one, two, three, four.

And writer’s block? If you worked a job and told your boss, “I don’t feel like working today, I’ve got receptionist block, I’m not going to do receptionist today,” your boss would give you 30 seconds to fix that. Treat your writing the same way. Get up, walk around, look at butterflies, whatever it takes, then keep writing. Two hundred words a day and three proud paragraphs won’t build a career.

And network: find writers, and more importantly, find your target audience and network with them. Which can surprise you. I have a book on how to make friends with women without being a sleaze, and I had the target audience completely wrong: I thought it was men. It’s women. Everybody who’s bought it has been a woman; men don’t care. Apparently women want to say: this is how you be my friend. I wrote it in a weekend, from years of photographing dancers and models, sitting there while they did their makeup, getting earfuls about what men are doing wrong.

The wrong ways to market

Brian Jackson: What is the wrong way to market yourself? Because I see people posting: here’s my book, here’s the link, buy it, buy it.

Richard Lowe: Several wrong ways. Number one is exactly that: the Facebook groups full of “here’s my book, here’s the cover, here’s the link.” Notice that absolutely none of it works, because everybody’s posting and nobody’s looking. They’re advertisements, and we’re inundated with advertisements. Just don’t do it at all.

Mistake two: not knowing your audience, posting to the wrong place, and just annoying people. Mistake three: not marketing at all, throwing the book on Amazon and waiting; nobody knows it’s there. And mistake four: leaving money on the table. If you wrote nonfiction, you can do courses, speaking engagements, T-shirts if appropriate. All my books are in paperback, hardcover, audiobook, and Kindle, all four, because it’s essentially free: audiobooks on a 50-50 split with the narrator, and translations the same way. The translations make me maybe 40 bucks a month, which is a couple of pizzas I don’t have to do anything for. Done right, it also makes your readers happy: they’re engaged, and they want the audiobook version too.

What is a ghostwriter?

Brian Jackson: Explain for people who are just starting: what is a ghostwriter?

Richard Lowe: A ghostwriter writes something for somebody else, and their name is not put on it, for the most part. I could write a blog post for you, and you’d say you wrote it. In my case, I find entrepreneurs and CEOs who want a book about themselves and their business, a way to brand themselves, like a business card, and I write it, and they put their name on it. It’s still their ideas, their concepts, their thoughts, their life if it’s a memoir. I’m the contractor who built the house. You don’t say “this is my house, but this contractor built it”; you say it’s your house. Same with the book.

And it’s a lot of work: interviewing, research, and in memoirs, often a lot of tears, because you’re talking about somebody’s life, and suddenly you’re therapist and writer, working them through it.

If you want to start freelancing, the first thing you’ll find is the content mills: the sites where you write a thousand words for five bucks. They’re a way to break the ice and learn how to deal with a client, but as soon as you can, dump them and go out on your own. Those platforms shield you from your client, which is great for introverts and bad for your business. Get out there, virtually and physically: Chamber of Commerce meetings, networking events, and you’ll find somebody who wants a book, a blog, or a LinkedIn profile worked on. Get on LinkedIn and start connecting. Some people will accuse you of spamming; okay, sorry, move to the next one. I had one person tell me I was going to hell for messaging them. Dude, it’s an email. I sent you one message saying “hi, I’m a writer, want to talk?” You can’t get your feelings hurt.

And work the chain. “I don’t have any writing work.” Okay: do you know anybody who does? “Well, my friend Joe in accounting at this other company.” Keep working down the chain. By the way, this is also exactly how to find a job: don’t play the resume game through HR; network to the person who actually wants to hire you, and then go through HR. My target is CEOs, the top dog or the one just below, and a lot of them are women, interestingly enough. At first I was intimidated: why would the CEO of a billion-dollar company talk to me? Guess what: they love it.

Echo chambers: how the feed decides what you see

Richard Lowe: One more thing about social media, because it matters: what you post, comment on, and like is what you get more of. Connect with an SEO spammer just to tell them off, and LinkedIn thinks you want more SEO spammers. Comment on a post you hate, even to say you hate it, and you’ll see more like it; use the hide button instead. And this is causing a real societal problem called the echo chamber: people are becoming polarized, especially politically, because social media only delivers what they’ve already engaged with, and they never see the other point of view. There’s a fascinating TED Talk where a man on the political left built a second profile that engaged only with the right, and what he found was: they’re the same as him. They just have different viewpoints.

Linda (caller): There’s a reason you see some friends’ posts and not others: the algorithm decides based on who you interact with. And commenting matters more than liking.

Richard Lowe: Exactly: a like is “eh, whatever” to the algorithm; a comment says you really wanted to see it. I’ve been training LinkedIn to show me my target audience, CEOs and entrepreneurs, and now the connection requests from high-level people are coming in like crazy. That was a successful action. And Linda’s other point is right too: what a self-publisher needs isn’t just a proofreader, it’s an editor, someone who critiques style, not just spelling, because when we write, we already know what we meant, so we overlook our own errors.

Two cautions on spending, though. There are lots of people who will take your money to “train” you, from 30 bucks, which is what my courses cost, up to thousands of dollars. Be very careful where you put your money. And don’t dump money into Facebook or Google ads when you’re starting: without the marketing groundwork behind it, promotion won’t do squat. You’ll be throwing money down a rat hole, and the rats will eat it alive. And always: self-hosted WordPress blog. Facebook owns Facebook, and I’ve known many people who put years into a page, got locked out, and lost all their content. On your own blog, you own it.

The craft corner: backstory, info dumps, and character arcs

Brian Jackson: You know what annoys me as a reader? Too much backstory. I’m into the story, and suddenly: by the way, James Bond was brought up as a little boy in the woods. I lose interest.

Richard Lowe: Funny you ask: I do writing coaching as well as ghostwriting, and this exact question came up this morning from a client in Israel with a complicated science fiction universe. Look at real people: they don’t tell each other things they both already know. “Yeah, I’m in the house, and there’s a chair here, and I grew up in ancient Greece.” So why are you telling the reader that? Use show instead of tell. When backstory bores you, it’s because you’re being told it. Don’t say “it’s hot in here”; that’s telling, and it’s boring. Show people sweating, the air over the sidewalk roiling the way it does in real heat. Pretend you’re a camera, wave it around, and show what’s going on. And give the reader action and emotion: two characters walking down a street don’t say “well, here we are in Las Vegas, where everybody gambles.” Nobody says that except to inform the reader, and that’s exactly what makes backstory boring. Stop it. Just stop it.

Linda (caller): You weave the backstory in at the appropriate moments. I’ve read popular novels where I had to sit through two chapters of backstory.

Richard Lowe: Exactly. Watch The Expanse: at the start, the characters are just characters, and all you know is there’s tension between Earth and Mars. Three seasons later, you’ve lived their lives and there’s a full interplanetary war, and nobody ever stopped to explain it; you absorbed it. Game of Thrones does the same: at the beginning, all you know about Daenerys is that she’s an heir being sold off as a wife. By season three or four, you know everything, and nobody ever said, “Let me tell you about Daenerys.” Boy, that would be dull. Info dumps are bad, normally; occasionally you have to, but normally, weave.

Brian Jackson: What about lead characters who are too complicated? Conflict on every page, and I stop identifying with them.

Richard Lowe: Simplify the character; people aren’t usually that complicated. Let the complexity accumulate the way The Expanse does: simple at first, deep by the end. That’s the character arc, the three-dimensional character, and it’s the problem with a lot of movies now: the character is identical at the beginning and the end, and you wonder why you watched. And when the characters don’t develop, the writers compensate by inventing six magic stones that will destroy the universe, because the actual characters and story aren’t carrying it. And don’t overdo the arc’s justification either: John Wick’s puppy died, and I’m sorry, that really doesn’t justify killing 76 people in cold blood. He’s the same man at the beginning and the end; the movie’s good because he’s very good at it, not because he changes.

The uncomfortable scene: writing outside your box

Brian Jackson: A political question. I know a woman author writing a good book who has a difficult time writing a sex scene: how graphic to go, words she’s uncomfortable with. Men have no problem writing about sex.

Richard Lowe: I’m going to disagree with you there: I have the exact same conflict. I don’t like graphic scenes, sexual or violent; it’s one of the things that turns me off about modern movies. The older films implied it, and the implication made them better. Same with books. It depends on your genre and audience, and there are genres where explicit is appropriate. But I take a step back and stay general: the reader doesn’t need the up-close details unless the genre demands them. And there are actually books on Amazon full of alternate vocabulary for exactly this, how to write romance scenes without being pornographic; she should look there.

And second: if it’s making her uncomfortable as a writer, great. That means she’s out of her box. Get out of your box. That doesn’t mean crawl onto the limb and saw it off; it means stick your toe out. I’m writing a novel now where one of the main characters is a woman, and I’m not a woman, so I’m interviewing women to find out how she’d act. I call up friends: okay, she’s a space captain, she’s in this situation, what does she do? And they tell me: she’s going to be attracted to this man, and given how long she’s been in space, she’s going to do this. And I’m uncomfortable even having the conversation. Good. I’m out of my box. Write outside it, research it, and you’ll write something more interesting, and you might learn something.

Brian Jackson: Is the audience ready for a heroine who’s genuinely flawed, a barbarian woman who takes what she wants, without labeling her?

Richard Lowe: Let’s write some and see. Why put stops on things? And if you want evidence the world is ready for heroes who aren’t pure, watch Game of Thrones: those are not the Lord of the Rings perfect people. If the world’s ready for Game of Thrones, it’s ready for what you’re describing. It’s up to the writer to write it well enough that the reader is engulfed in the world. And for the record, on Fifty Shades: what I see in it is abuse, mind control, a man tormenting a woman, and it’s not even well written. It would be one thing if it were well-written garbage. It’s not.

Closing

Richard Lowe: Three websites. thewritingking.com/ has 200 articles on freelancing and ghostwriting, and a contact form; I’m happy to answer questions, unless I get 10,000 of them. FictionMasterclass.com has my writing training. And CoolAuthor.com goes straight to my Amazon page with all my books, including Make a Living as a Professional Self-Published Author. I’m on Facebook as The Writing King and Fiction Masterclass.

One last thing. I love reading books by people of other genders, other cultures, other social classes, because I get to see viewpoints I don’t normally see and think: that’s interesting, I never looked at it that way. So to everyone hesitating to write, for whatever reason: write, so we can learn your point of view, your culture, your values. It helps bring us together. I’m a firm believer in human rights; humanrights.com lays out the thirty rights as outlined by the UN, and part of it is living together as human beings and being nice to each other. What a concept. Everybody’s so angry and irritated, and there’s really no need: we’re all just human beings with different challenges. Listen to each other, understand, maybe disagree, and move on rationally. Don’t get mad because somebody disagrees with your point of view.

Brian Jackson: Richard, you’re brilliant, and he’s already coming back next month. Everybody: Richard G. Lowe, Make a Living as a Professional Self-Published Author. This is the guy. Thank you, sir.

Richard Lowe: You’re welcome, and thank you.

Find Richard Lowe at thewritingking.com/.

Quotable moments

Frequently Asked Questions

Part of Richard Lowe on Air, his complete run of podcast, radio, and video guest appearances.