Kind eReader,

I have over 15 years experience in the marketing field, so I’ve dedicated a lot of time over the years to working on ways to get people to want things they didn’t necessarily want in the first place.  Up until recently, I truly thought of marketing and advertising as ways to persuade, and I guess traditionally that’s what they are.  Interestingly, the internet has dramatically changed all that.

Bringing shoppers and goods together has now become much more a matter of simply helping people find what they wanted in the first place.  The greatest example of that is eBay.  For the most part, eBay doesn’t try to tell you what to want.  It simply provides a huge marketplace full of stuff and the tools to dig up your heart’s desire.  So, if you’re trying to find a circa 1968 stuffed Nauga doll like the one you had as a kid, you can find it and buy it there.  No one talked you into wanting that Nauga.  You came predisposed and eBay simply met your need.

Amazon operates in much the same fashion, selling by doing all it can to put goods in front of you that you arrived wanting in the first place.  And the greatest megamall in the known universe?  It’s Google.  C’mon, you can’t tell me you haven’t wanted something and simply googled it to find where to buy the thing…that’s how we found the beautiful computer desk we just bought, when all local stores we searched came up short (and it led us to a local store we’d missed!).

Well, you know what?  It’s the very same thing for authors nowadays.  When I started in the romance fiction business in 2004, I was ready to try anything to market my books.  I tried banner ads, hanging out in chat rooms, posting on Yahoo groups, buying magazine ads, yadayada.  Of course I put up a website, and before long started one of those new-fangled things called a blog.  As a marketing babe, I used tried and true methods to observe and analyze everything I did.

As the years passed, I drew some pretty obvious and interesting conclusions.  They all boil down to one key principle:  the best way to sell books is to let people who like your work simply find you.  There are a lot of readers who enjoy the sorts of books I write, and more specifically, the particular way I write.  The vast majority of them haven’t heard of me.  But a small but significant percentage of those, left to their own devices, will find my books and buy them, given the right tools to do so.

No amount of flashing banner ads in people’s faces will have that effect.  No magazine ad, no matter how large and colorful, will do it either.

Let me tell you what I’ve seen from my website tracking. 

* 16% of my visitors learned about me from an interview, an article about me, or a book review.

* 9% of my visitors came because they read a sample of my work somewhere:  an essay or one of my free stories.

*  75% of my visitors–yes, a full three-quarters–found me by doing a search.

All these sources have a common theme:  the person who visited my website came out of need, interest, and desire.  Either they were intrigued by an interview or review, they had actually read my work and liked it, or they were deliberately looking for something they thought I might have to offer.

The internet is an absolutely fantastic place for authors especially to be found by shoppers in need.  Why?  Because on the web you get to literally demonstrate your wares.  It’s writing!  For example, I operate my blog “Erotica with Soul” and post about once a week.  Every single day, two or three people who have read my blog visit my website.  That’s right, my spouting on about whatever’s on my mind attracts a good dozen new “potential customers” every week…that’s like 600 a year!  And every one of those visitors was intrigued enough by my blog to want to consider my books.  Meanwhile, I get another good thousand people a year to look into me from reading my free online stories.

I also get a lot of visitors from my book pages on Amazon, at least one a day.  That just goes to show me how many shoppers are constantly browsing Amazon.  I’m not so famous that many people begin by looking for Diana Laurence books.  They are merely looking around the romance section, or the erotica section, or the paranormal section, and hit upon one of my titles.  I’m sure the number who are intrigued enough to click over to my website are a small percentage, and that just tells me what kind of browsing traffic happens on Amazon.

But my best source of traffic is Google.  Over six hundred people in the past year came to my website simply because they googled “romance fiction.”  Out of the 1,190,000 results you get for googling “romance fiction,” my website comes in at #6.  (That isn’t accidental; I work pretty hard doing what it takes to get that placement, but still, no one is more amazed than I am…and it’s been that way for years now.)  I can’t tell you what percentage of books I sell just because romance readers can find me, but I’m sure it’s not small.  You simply can’t sell books to people who have never heard of you.

So, to a marketing babe like me, all this is pretty darn amazing–and refreshing!  In this world of Google and Stumble Upon and eBay and Blogger, if you put a quality product out there, the people who genuinely want it are going to find it.  You don’t have to shell out big dollars to some medium to promote you.  You don’t have to trick the public, hypnotize them, or bribe them.

If they want you, they’ll find you.

eRead on,

Diana

Diana Laurence“>Diana Laurence is the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies of erotic romance fiction, and released her latest book “Bloodchained” in September 2007 (www.bloodchained.com). Diana’s works are published by Living Beyond Reality Press (www.livingbeyondreality.com). Visit her at www.dianalaurence.com or enjoy her blog at www.eroticawithsoul.blogspot.com.

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