What Newbies Should Know About Book Marketing A Discussion With Rachel Thompson

Welcome to the Marketing Growth podcast. I’m your host, Shane Barker. I’ve been talking with Rachel Thompson about her journey into the world of book marketing.

In this episode, we’ll dive deeper and discuss what it takes to become a self-published author. I’m also curious to find out what new writers should do to create a buzz about their book. Let’s get the conversation started. You had the blog, and then you had—so when did you start the BadRedhead Media?

And that makes total sense. I think even today, brands—whether you’re an author or whatever it is—they still don’t get that. You don’t need to promote yourself every single day with 500 links. People get numb to that. Nobody really wants that anyway. There needs to be a strategy behind it.

There’s actually a really famous football player—I won’t say his name, and not that I think he listens right now, but maybe he does—and every single day, he has an energy drink that he promotes. And I’m a huge 49ers fan, so people might know who this is. And every day, he talks about the energy drink. And I’m like, man, there’s a better way of doing it. You’re a Hall of Famer, you’ve got a good following, but just every day you talk about it…

If you had a better strategy—you don’t always have to talk about it. You can just have it in the background. You can wear the shirt. People will subconsciously pick up on that. Like, “Oh, maybe this person’s using that. Maybe that’s how they get up in the morning.” There are other things you can do that are more effective. I probably will reach out to him and say, “Listen, I’m a huge fan. I’ll give you a half-hour consultation. Let’s talk about how you can do this better.” People will react to it, but right now, you’re just shoving it down people’s throats, and they’re not going to be a huge fan of that.

Before we get into the book and the self-promotion side—because that’s something I definitely want to touch on—tell me about your books. You’ve got Broken Pieces, you’ve got Broken Places. I know you won a number of awards for those. Give me a little background on that.

And so let’s talk about that. Obviously, you seem very selfless with this, and I can only imagine the transition—from saying, “Hey, this has happened to me,” feeling embarrassed, shy, nervous, ashamed, whatever those feelings are—and then being able to say, “Listen, I’m just going to tell the world my story.”

Doing that, I know, is extremely difficult. I know firsthand—there are things that have happened to me, not sexually necessarily, but just things in my life where I’m like, “I don’t want people to know that.” But really, once you get it out there and you start to see that people are relating to it, and they’ve also had things happen to them that you wouldn’t even imagine… And they didn’t think anything happened to you, and you didn’t think anything happened to them. When you let that go and release that out there, good things can happen. I think that’s awesome. I think it’s really cool that you’re able to tell your story and do the things that you’ve done.

I also think it’s helped you because you have a different mindset. A lot of people, when they create books, they’re looking at a few things—maybe they want to make a million dollars, which I’m not saying you can’t do that with books. You can. But I’ll tell you, it’s very difficult. Or they’re doing it for thought leadership, or to give back to the community and put something personal out there.

So when you talk about self-publishing—how did you go about doing that? Because obviously you were in the beginning stages of self-publishing .It was very difficult. You had the big three book distributors, right? The major ones that handled any real publishing deals. Tell us a little about that journey. If anybody’s looking to self-publish or come out with their own book—give us a little background on that.

Yeah, and I think that’s… if you’re talking to an agent or a big publishing company, it’s hard to say, “Hey, I don’t want to make a lot of money. I just want to get the word out.” They’re like, “What do you mean? You don’t want to make money?” You’re like, “No, that’s not my goal.” And they’re like, “Next person.” Because their thing is obviously revenue, and that makes it more difficult.

But I think your goal—of helping people and not focusing on revenue—is just awesome. Most people don’t think that way. But in your situation, you’re like, “These are the feelings I’ve had. This is the journey I’ve gone through. How can I help people better deal with that?” Because you had to deal with it—and it wasn’t easy—and it’s not going to be easy for other people. But the more support you have, like these Twitter chats and the free books… It’s awesome.

And unfortunately, more and more people are going to need that. Not everybody can pay $100–$150 an hour for a counselor. And when you’re going through traumatic events like that, it’s not like you go to a counselor twice and suddenly you’re a new person. It’s continued support, continued work, continued effort to assess what happened. So once again, kudos to you for doing that. It’s awesome—all the books you have coming out.

So in regards to the challenges—it sounds like, like everyone, you kind of go through these things. You got a manager, you got someone to help you with the books. That didn’t really work. You got your rights back. And self-publishing made sense for you because of your marketing background.

Now, of course, there are companies that can help with all that, depending on what your goal is and what your budget is. So if we had some first-time writers—somebody that wants to write a book about anything, whether it be marketing, childhood, a biography, fiction—what would you say to them? What’s the starting point? If someone’s listening to this and thinking, “I’ve got an idea, I want to write a book,” where should they start?

It’s funny. So, I mean, that’s when I used to do a lot of crowdfunding. That’s what people would come to us with. It’s like, “Hey, 30 days—I just submitted two weeks ago. We have two weeks. What do you think I should do to promote this?” And I’m like, “Start six months ago.” Like, you need a three-month to six-month ramp before you even launch. I mean, most of your work is literally done before you even go live. Yeah, right? And so it’s always hard. It’s a difficult thing. It’s like, man, I want to help you, but you’ve got two weeks.

Same thing with you—it’s like, at least with yours, there’s not an end to when they can stop getting money, but it is kind of like, well, you missed that whole PR piece, and getting people excited, and the launch, and getting it hyped up. You miss that part. Now you’re out, and it’s like, well, now how do we regenerate that vibe of people getting excited about it when you’ve already launched?

I think that’s the big thing. I always tell people, like, listen, here’s the deal. If you’re going to post the same thing every day— It’s like, let’s say I’m on a walk and I meet the same person every day. I walk up to them and say, “Hey, I’m Shane Barker, and I’m a blogger, and I sell books.” And they’re like, “Cool, thanks, Shane.” Then you see them again the next day. “Hey, my name is Shane. I write blogs and I write books.” They’re like, “That’s really cool, Shane. It’s nice to see you again.”

Next day… they’re avoiding me, right? They’re like, “God, we’ve got to watch out for Shane when he’s walking his dogs, because all he’s going to do is tell me the same damn thing he told me yesterday.” And that’s super awesome. I get it—you write books. I get that if I need a book, I should come reach out to you.

It’s the same thing I tell clients. Think about having a conversation. If you want to have an engaging conversation and you say the exact same thing every day, you’re going to lose your mind—or people are going to avoid you like the plague.

I probably should have said “like the coronavirus.” That might make it a little more relevant these days.

But that’s the thing—you have to think, “If we’re having a conversation and people are going to be engaged in your feed,” which is really the goal— Like for me, I talk about craft beer, I talk about speaking… I don’t need to tell people every day that I’m a speaker. I don’t need to tell people every day how they can hire me. Honestly, I probably don’t even talk about it enough. I’m more of a hands-off, “Hey, come read my blog, and if you like the content, we can talk.” I should improve all that, but for me, it’s more about educating. And then hopefully you get to a point where you think, “God, I really want to do this. I’ve read 50 of Shane’s blog posts. Who should I hire? Oh yeah—Shane.” That’s the aha moment. And hopefully, it gets to a situation where now I can help that person.

That’s what I try to tell people—think about having a normal conversation. It’s the same thing I talk about with influencer marketing. If you want to hire an influencer and their engagement is all emojis—that’s not really engagement. If I walked up to someone in a restaurant and I just did a heart emoji gesture—you guys can’t see because we’re on a podcast— But if I just do that every time, people are going to be like, “What are you doing?” Have a conversation. That’s engagement. That’s true engagement when we look at the definition of what it is.

Pull yourself out of the situation and look at yourself—would you want to go meet yourself? No, you don’t. You don’t want to meet Shane every time you walk around the park and see him and think, “Oh god, he’s going to talk about the same thing.” You don’t want to be that guy.

Nobody wants to be the annoying one. It’s like when people break up—nobody wants to be the boyfriend that’s stalking the girl, or the girlfriend that’s staring him down. Nobody wants to be that. But we get to that point. You can tell a friend, “Hey, don’t do that. That’s stupid.” But when you’re in the middle of the situation, you’re doing the stupid stuff. And you’re like, “Why are you doing that? You told me not to do that a month ago.” It’s different when it’s you. Because you’re thinking, “I’ve got to make a sale,” or “I’ve got to do this.” Take a step back, look at yourself in the mirror, and ask, “Is this the person I want to be? Is this how I’m really going to sell this product?” Would I buy from this person? The answer is probably no.

But most of the time, there’s not that self-reflection. There’s not that moment of, “What do I look like right now? Do I look like a lunatic?” If I’m just saying the same stuff every day, I’m wondering why I’m losing followers or engagement or why people aren’t buying my book— Guess what? Nobody wants to hear about your book every day. Nobody cares. That’s not an engaging conversation.

Yeah, and just—this is a PSA—not only are writers lazy. I think everybody seems to be lazy.

There’s that quote—something like, “There was something that came and it was disguised as work or something” So the idea is, once you really understand what it takes to promote a book, it isn’t, “Hey, send out six tweets and let’s sit back and watch it happen.” I deal with this in influencer marketing. People say, “All I have to do is hire Kim Kardashian. I give her half a million dollars, she posts once about my supplement drink, and I’ll make millions.” No, no—that’s a terrible idea. It takes work. Everybody’s going from the 10-second ab to the 7-second ab. Now it’s the 3-second ab. Now they’re saying, “I just want someone else to do it for me.”

And sure, maybe not fitness-wise, but yes—you can hire someone to do it. But expect that either you’re going to need a lot of money, or a lot of time. Anything you do is going to take time. Nothing is an overnight process.

Like being a sales rep—what about when you were a pharmaceutical rep? Let me guess, the first month, you crushed it, right? No. Nobody does. It takes a year. It takes two years. You start to learn the process. Same thing with anything—video, blogging, being an author. It takes time.

If someone tells you they’ve got a magic formula, be cautious. You can absolutely get tips from mentors or people who’ve done it—hire someone like you. But just know—it’s going to be a grind. If it weren’t a grind, everybody would be doing it. If it were easy, everyone would be making millions.

We’d have one marketing company, and that’s it. It’s work. You’ve got to put in the work. That’s why, when I work with potential clients, I send out these expectation forms—questions like, “What do you expect? What am I doing? What are you doing?”

Because in my early days, that got messy. I’d say, “Sure, I’ll do this.” And then later they’d say, “Wait—you’re not doing that?” And I’m like, “How would I promote your book better than you? You’re the author.” That’s where contracts come in. Clear expectations. Because again—it takes work. It’s not easy.

So once again, I know that right now your books are free. So if somebody wanted to do a book—and I’ve had plenty of people reach out to me and say, “Hey, I’ve got this book, I’m gonna write this book, I’m gonna make millions”—I’m not here to squash dreams or anything like that.

But I do want to keep things realistic when it comes to self-publishing. I understand self-publishing is exactly where you’re going to get most of the profit—unless you’re doing something with Amazon, obviously, and their percentage is there. But you also have to do your own marketing. You’re the president, the secretary, the treasurer—you’re everything. You’ve got to do a lot of that stuff.

So how realistic is it to make money from producing a book? What are we looking at? I know there are different niches, different audiences, a lot of moving pieces to that. I just want people to be realistic. When you go and self-publish your first book, and you expect to make a million dollars—somebody has, I’m sure. But be realistic about what that outcome could be.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s the same with products. Somebody comes to us and it’s just not a great product. I can probably get you some sales, but at the end of the day, I’m also promoting something that I can’t fully stand behind. So there’s a disconnect.

I should call it Shane 1.0 and Shane 2.0. Shane 1.0 was like, “Oh yeah, I can do it! No problem, let’s go!” Now Shane 2.0 is like, “That’s gonna be a lot of wasted effort.” The expectation from them is, “I want sales.” And my expectation is, “I don’t know if we can do it.” I mean, maybe we can, but you’re just not there yet. People reach out and say, “Hey, I’ve got a logo and an idea.” And I’m like, “That’s awesome!” But you’re probably not there yet in regard to what we do. Unless you’ve got millions of dollars and you’re willing to spend a lot of that to accelerate things, you’re just not ready.

So I’ve been wanting to write my own book for a long time. I have a lot more ground to cover with you, Rachel. Since we’re running short on time, we’ll continue this conversation in the next episode.

We’ll be back soon. Stay tuned to Shane Barker’s Marketing Growth Podcast.

Oh, one more thing for all my podcast listeners—I know doing branding and marketing yourself can be rocky terrain, especially if you’re just starting out. If you need some expert help, you can always reach out to me at shanebarker.com. My team will help you formulate a customized PR strategy and amplify your online presence, regardless of your industry or company size. We’ll make sure you get tons of exposure. I promise.