Tag: selling books

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Social Media Priorities and the Trouble with TikTok

First, a quick update, because you have to eat your meat before you get your pudding.

November was a very productive month for me. I’m flirting with a repetitive strain injury with all the time at the keyboard, but it’s really paying off. I participated in the ProWritingAid Challenge (the replacement for NaNoWriMo) and finished the first draft of my next thriller. It’s about a retired FBI forensic psychiatrist whose past comes back to haunt him. I’m plowing through the second draft now and loving it. More on that in the new year.

This fall, I started up the Vocab Menace Series, putting out videos every day. I LOVE WORDS! I love learning their origins and playing with ideas and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I will continue, but not every day.

Evaluating Social Media

For years, I posted regularly on my writing blog (ChazzWrites.com). That was helpful early in my publishing career. I connected with some wonderful authors and made allies. Eventually, I decided it was best to consolidate my posts on my author blog and only post when I had something new and trenchant to say.

I found that posting everywhere (Bluesky, YouTube, Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, TikTok, and the Book of Faces) takes a lot of time. Not all those platforms are worth the energy I invested.

My take on social media is below, but for a view from all angles, read Enshittification by Corey Doctorow.

And this is the link to Mr. Doctorow’s piece on Medium titled Too Big to Care: Enshittification is a Choice.

My impressions of the usefulness of social media platforms (your mileage may vary):

I find the user interface for Bluesky and Threads unfriendly. The people are nice, but the platforms are not where they need to be yet. Discoverability is an opaque enigma wrapped in a burrito of mystery.

YouTube is good. Eventually, YouTube might pay me actual money.

One of the most active content categories on Medium is writing. Put that in your keywords, and people will look. Medium’s interface is cool, but following and connecting with people there is probably more useful than dedicating too much time to post every day. Because they are so alike, I feel similarly about Substack. I’m posting less on Medium now, more on Substack.

I’m not looking for a job or writing business books, so LinkedIn is a waste of time and energy.

I like Instagram. As a news source, I find many of the creators I follow there provide thoughtful commentary.

For the authors out there, BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

As for Facebook, you can have a lot of followers, but your audience is far too throttled. They want you to pay to have your content seen. There are many ways it’s problematic. However, I connect with my inner circle of readers there.

I enjoy Facebook for my fan page and hope they never delete it. That happens sometimes, and when it happens, you probably won’t even know why. As a writer hoping to sell my work, it’s always best for me to have my own platform that can’t be ripped away.

The trouble with TikTok

TikTok has really fallen in terms of usefulness and tone. I used to be addicted to political debates there, but my favorite content creators left the platform. Others are competent, but very repetitive. Mostly, the live debates are angry people talking over each other. (Oh, and don’t forget the racist trolls. Lots of those.)

TikTok is a special case in some ways. BookTok can be great, but is often repetitive, covering the same few books (read: rarely mine). Also, some of the BookTok drama is ridiculous.

I would pursue book promotion there more avidly, but things are about to change for the worse. If you’re a Canadian author, sending review copies to the United States is expensive. To complicate things further for non-American authors, TikTok will soon become a walled garden, for the United States only. The details on that change are muddy, but when that happens, I won’t be able to reach my American readers through that platform. (That’s a shame. Most of my readers are from the United States.)

Conclusions

  1. When my American readers can only see other Americans on TikTok, the platform’s value will plunge even further.
  2. Between the forest of TikTok-friendly language and the suppression of posts meant to appease political actors and the new owners, TT’s once robust foundation will eventually sink into the shifting sands of irrelevancy.
  3. Unless another app rises in TikTok’s stead, the change in ownership will benefit Instagram.
  4. LinkedIn is for business. Not my business, though.
  5. If you post for self-expression alone, enjoy using whatever platform you like.
  6. From a time management perspective, don’t invest too much energy trying to post everywhere. It’s a lot to keep up with, and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
  7. For gaining visibility and leverage social media platforms, follow and engage with people you enjoy.
  8. Authentic engagement has more value than solely sending out signals.
  9. Agents and publishers are obsessed with follower count. They shouldn’t be. Follower count means much less than engagement.
  10. Social media is free to use for book promotion, but you get what you pay for. Author Jason Pargin posts excellent content. He has said that even with all his followers, that work does not translate significantly to a greater readership.
  11. There are plenty of book marketing strategies out there. Some gurus push complicated flow charts of funnels. They all enthuse about newsletters. Some content creators make money from sharing “the newest trick.” The solution to selling books may be going direct, going wide, learning how to advertise (and funding it), keyword optimization, consistent branding, or some combination of all of the above, plus something else. Answers abound, but social media alone surely isn’t the cheap, easy solution.
  12. You can’t make a viral video happen. Others choose that for you. I’ve gone viral once, but only because I made a lot of trolls angry. TikTok hid a lot of the nastiest comments because “the collapsed comments could be detrimental to your mental well-being.” Ha! As if my mental well-being was all that great to begin with! I could see the threats, and I had a peek. I just had to click on them to see the tidal waves of crash-outs.

    My question: If the platform’s AI detects mean messages suggesting harm to me, why doesn’t the platform ban those trolls?

    The hullabaloo hardly mattered in the end. The experience did lower my estimation of my fellow humans, but I didn’t respond to the trolls much. Arguing with fascists who are determined to be idiots is the ultimate waste of time. Always preserve your peace (between the punching Nazis thing, I mean).

    On reaching readers:

All social media platforms suppress your signal to some degree.

To break through all the noise requires time, talent, energy, editing, and savvy marketing. Consistency is paramount, but only if you have the time and energy. As much as I love posting Vocab Menace content, it was cutting into my writing time. To get the next book out, protect that time. Prioritize productivity.

My writing time and energy is paramount to me at present. That much is working. My next thriller will be released early in 2026. That’s a concrete achievement I can measure.

~ REMINDER: Buy your books for Christmas now so you can read them before you wrap them for others. Happy holidays!


FYI: All my work is available on Amazon. Endemic is available everywhere.

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How to Spot a Book Promotion Scam

Every day, another book marketing scammer hits our inbox. Lately, it’s two a day. The basic pitch is almost always the same. It goes like this:

1. We came across our book (Endemic, This Plague of Days, Vengeance Is Hers) and it is…

2. Insert a long, flattering, and flowery description of the book here. There’s enough detail, you’d almost think they read my work. What they’ve actually done is scrape social media and book reviews for their pitch.

3. The pitch is to market my work to their secret group of 2,000 readers or to their book club. Another variation is to act as a book marketing coach with all strategies conveniently provided by ChatGPT. (Sometimes they pretend to be a famous author who loves your books and is eager to pass on the name of their book promoter to help you out.)

Spot a Scammer

The first thing you may notice is that the grammar and syntax miss the mark. The sender’s first language is not English. That alone is not disqualifying, of course, but it’s not a good sign if they intend to market English books for you. When I turned down a chancer, they asked, “Why? Do you think I am scam?” (SIC)

The less sophisticated emails are more generic, and the template they’re using for mass emails is evident. (e.g. “I just ran across your excellent novel <<title of book>> by <<Author>>.)

For some reason, the name of the book promoter is often two feminine first names. Sarah Sally is excited to read and sell your book for you!

Like any author, I need more reviews of my books. Several times, I’ve been approached by someone whose marketing plan would contravene Amazon’s terms of service. So, they get money, and I lose my account and livelihood? Great! For them.

More Tip offs

The salutation says, “Hi Author Robert!”

They have no website and no or very low presence on social media.

Their email is a generic Gmail address. (e.g. bestbookmarketing.au.bookbar.uk@gmail….)

They impersonate a real book marketer from a reputable company, but when you go to the real person, the contact info doesn’t match. When that happens, I let the impersonated person know.

HOT TIP #1: Always research by going to the source directly. Do not click a link within an email.)

In the past couple of days, I’ve received offers for deals on their book promotion for “the festive season.” It’s already December 3. A little late to pull together a helpful book marketing campaign for Christmas, isn’t it?

Some scammers are persistent to the point of aggression, sometimes even harassment. When I ignored one particularly relentless scammer, I suddenly got a one-star rating on my latest book. Can I be sure it was the suitor I rejected? No, but the timing was suspicious, and it hurt because the book has, as yet, so few reviews. After that, instead of ignoring scammers, I opted to reply with a polite but firm, “No, thank you.”

It’s exceedingly rare for authors to get approached for something they didn’t sign up for. Real book promoters simply work with authors who come to them, not the other way around. That stipulated, I have had a few entreaties from real agents, publishers, and book promoters. When that happens, I have to look at them really hard before I can take them seriously. That’s part of the problem.

The Danger

A new one this morning came very close to getting me. The pitch was good, but the sourcing didn’t pass. Anybody (including authors) can plug a prompt into ChatGPT and get the same book marketing advice as the scammers do. These people aren’t adding real value. The trouble authors face is not having the budget to overcome the noise. Getting a signal through to actual readers and reviewers is difficult.

Beyond wastes of time and money and the damage to the environment, these AI scam pitches harbor a deeper danger. They poison our media environment. AI hallucinations and deep fake videos erode trust. With the newest gizmo, Nano Banana, you can’t trust anything you see. I loved images from the James Webb telescope, but stopped sharing them because I couldn’t tell what was real, what was enhanced, and what was fake.

If an honest-to-goodness pitch comes along, it’s become an act of self-defense to treat all information with a skepticism that devolves to easy cynicism. If there’s clear video evidence of a politician doing something heinous, they’ll dismiss it with “It’s just AI!”

Can’t write a book on your own? Flood the zone with prompts to an AI that yields trite, soulless regurgitation.

When you use your media literacy and critical thinking skills, the scammer replies, “Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your lyin’ eyes!”

Writing for a living is hard. Waving away the gnats would be a minor strain were it not for their ubiquity.

HOT TIP #2: When in doubt of a sketchy email, check it out. Writer Beware has a searchable database to check out the names and reputations.

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Do you want to know how I got these scars?

Breaking news! Endemic has gone wide!

Everybody relax. This announcement is not about measles. I’m talking about my multiple award-winning novel Endemic, Within Each of Us, A Power and a Curse. Despite Amazon sabotaging the release of Endemic, it went on to win first place in the genre category of the North Street Book Prize.

Now, I’m doing something different.

This dystopian novel has been exclusive to Amazon since its publication. No more! I recently published it widely (hat tip to Draft2Digital for facilitating that release). After getting such a nice review from Publishers Weekly, I decided that I needed to expand my readership and also get into more libraries.

The list is interesting.

There are so many book sales platforms out there, and a bunch I’d never heard of! Aside from the familiar ones like Barnes & Noble, Overdrive, Kobo, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Baker & Taylor, Endemic is also available on Everand, Odilo, Borrow Box, Vivlio, Tolino, Cloud Library, Gardners, Palace, and Fable.

ENDEMIC’s UNIVERSAL LINK

Selling entertainment sounds like it shouldn’t be hard, but book marketing is hard. Having a book on sale everywhere in some ways adds to that difficulty. On the other hand, Amazon already betrayed me with this book from the start, so I want to give it another chance with new readers.

I’ve experimented with going wide in the past and always came back to Amazon because they knew how to sell books. My faith in their system has since faded, and it’s time to expand my reach to new venues and tactics. I’ve written a lot of apocalyptic epics and killer crime thrillers. To reach new readers around the world, I’m committed to keeping Endemic widely available beyond Amazon and will publish more of my novels widely in the near future.

If you’re curious about Endemic, it’s about an introverted neurodivergent book editor turned urban survivalist gardener caught in the midst of a disaster. Hounded by marauders, bullied by her father, and haunted by her dead therapist, Ovid Fairweather has to make her way in a fallen New York City. She was a nail. She will become a hammer.

That’s Endemic by me, Robert Chazz Chute, and now it’s available on Amazon, but now, it’s also available just about everywhere else!

You can get the ebook, paperback, or hardcover. If you dig it, please leave a review. I’m new to all these platforms, so naturally I’ve got no reviews on them yet.

To clarify: Endemic is still available on Amazon, but here’s the universal link to everywhere else: https://books2read.com/u/bQvkGP.

Thanks! Have a great day, or make it one!

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For the Love of Bookstores

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I had a grand day out on Saturday. Though the egg crisis has finally hit us (fewer eggs, higher prices), at least we got out. That’s unusual. She bought shoes, and I got free popcorn at Skechers.

The highlight for me is always browsing bookstores. Not all chains are alike. When I was a book rep, I remember walking into a chain store in Brampton. It was as if all they had were remaindered books. The inventory was a mile wide and an inch deep. The Chapters in the south end of our city is far superior to the Indigo in the north end. I would have thought their inventory would be basically the same, but not so!

Funny, when I first visited Toronto, SWMBO asked what more I wanted to see of her city. Easy! Take me to all the used bookstores! She replied that she had already taken me to all the used bookstores. My suitcase was much heavier heading back to Halifax.

When I look at these pics, I so respect all the work that went into writing and publishing these books. Since my brain works the way it does, I thought, what a great bookstore! And I’ll never live long enough to devour all the books I want to read! Damn! Well, I’ll put a dent in that TBR pile, anyway.

Because of my illness in December, my birthday was a bust. Compensation arrived when SWMBO bought a bunch of books for me! For starters, I am reading Getting Signed. It’s about finding an agent and landing a book deal, and it’s really helping me prepare for my upcoming pitch meetings.

Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore was my shrine until it closed. City Lights Bookshop in London is pretty good (and absolutely crammed). Fanfare Books in Stratford has stock that is expertly curated. It may be small, but they carry stuff you won’t find anywhere else, including my books! Another great one is Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia. When you walk in there, a pleasurable and leisurely afternoon of book browsing lies ahead.

Have you got a favorite bookstore? What is it, where is it, and what drew you to it?

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Tales of Humiliation

Recently, an author posted about how an up-and-coming writer’s book had failed to launch. The author claimed to be a bestselling writer, and boy, was she a scold! She was all up in her feelings about a self-published author’s debut that failed to sell many copies. Her core message was, “If only they’d done what I had done! If only she knew better!”

This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding some folks have about publishing books. There are too many variables outside the author’s control and no guarantees of success. You can do everything right, and still fail. In fact, trad or self-published, most books fail to find an audience. To become a bestseller in Canada, you have to sell a few thousand in a week. Less than 0.5% of the 100,000 hardcovers published each year make the New York Times Bestseller List. Novels have a spectacular failure rate (if your only metric is sales and reaching a wider readership. Some authors do not share those aspirations).

The bestseller criticizing the debut writer attributed her success to herself, her publisher, and her skill. There are many more factors than that. When people succeed, very few have the perspicacity to admit they were just plain lucky. Instead, they rationalize their genius moves after the fact.

You can optimize your chances of success, but the headwinds against you are enormous. The Netflix documentary featuring Fran Lebowitz was originally expected to air earlier than it did. Netflix put that off, and that turned into a happy accident for Lebowitz. That delay meant the show aired during the height of the pandemic. Many more people watched than otherwise would have because everyone was stuck at home.

Arrogance and ignorance can really drag an artist down.

During book promotions, many authors freely give away books to boost the store algorithms and garner more reviews. When my dentist asked about my work, I mentioned that I was running a promotion at that moment for my new book.

“You can pick it up for free right now,” I offered. Nice and generous, right?

“You’re giving it away?” His tone suggested I was making a rookie mistake in devaluing my work.

I still run into that attitude among some authors, but it’s a tried and true marketing tactic.

“Objection! Stephen King doesn’t have to do that.”

Ahem. You’re not Stephen King. Neither am I. There can be only one!

To be found, loss leaders are common and not at all shameful. It’s incredibly difficult to get people to review a novel, and harder still to sell a novel with few reviews. Many authors decide to give to get to increase their long-term sales. There are other approaches, but this is far from outlandish. Give a few hundred, and potentially gain a few thousand new readers and maybe a couple of dozen fresh reviews. Simple marketing, right? (It is, I’m not really asking.)

It gets worse.

On a Zoom call with fellow alums from my university, I discovered how I’d stumbled into a rather insulated clique. First, one woman didn’t believe I had attended our alma mater at all. “I don’t recognize you,” she said. It was a challenge. Amazing how casual some folks are about making an enemy for life, huh?

We attended a small university, but I wasn’t one of the cool kids. I recognized her from the cafeteria, but saying so would have made me feel even more inconsequential. She was active in clubs, at the bar, and getting lots of pictures of herself with friends she would keep for life. I was up in my dorm room reading and happy.

(Stay tuned. My humiliation continues below the graphic)

All that content solitude in university was one reason I got to do this:


mybook.to/TheEndemicExperience

It got worse.

On the same Zoom, an old friend said he had picked up Endemic for free. The other people on the call laughed at me. The friend asked if giving away books was worth it. In that moment, it sure wasn’t. I was in the wrong group, talking to the wrong people. Hurt feelings aside, I’ve never put hurt feelings aside.

Whatever you’re choices, there will be people who don’t know your journey, but they are certain you are doing it wrong. Don’t just agree to disagree. Disagree to disagree. Keep going, and do you, Boo.