This Crazy Writing Life’s Conversation with Emma Boyer of Written Word Media

By Steven Womack

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I’m fascinated by origin stories. The most amazing things in life sometimes start as tiny little, almost-random occurrences. The story that intrigued me today was how a digital marketer’s mother wrote a book in 2011 and had no idea how to sell it. So the daughter stepped up, developed some new ideas about how to get an indie-pubbed book out there, then shared those ideas with other writers. The next thing you know, it’s all snowballed and taken on a life of its own.

That digital marketer was Ricci Wolman and out of those early efforts, she—together with her business partner Ferol Vernon—started Written Word Media in 2014, which today is one of the top marketing firms in the indie-pubbing arena.

I recently had the chance to have a conversation with Emma Boyer, Written Word Media’s Vice-President of Digital Operations & Author relations. Boyer joined Written Word Media four years ago and has seen the tremendous changes and growth in the independent publishing industry.

Written Word Media started out with its two best-known digital marketing platforms, FreeBooksy and BargainBooksy, but since then has branched out and created new, more targeted platforms like Red Feather Romance and NewInBooks, as well as Audio Thicket, which promotes audiobooks on numerous platforms. They also have a program that creates both Facebook ads and Amazon ads for indie authors. Another program helps authors grow that all-important author newsletter email list.

They’ve also partnered with other digital marketing platforms like Hello Books (created by those Self-Pub Formula guys James Blatch and Mark Dawson), Fussy Librarian, Ereader News Today, and Book Barbarian.

I asked Emma what the biggest challenge to beginning indie authors was. Writing a book is hard enough, but once your book is done, edited and polished, then typeset and uploaded to a publishing platform, the real struggle begins. With so many writers working and competing in the indie pub space, what’s the hardest thing to do?

“I talk to a lot of authors in my role as VP of Author Relations,” she answered. “It’s very much my job and my team’s job to talk to authors every day. What I hear the most from new indies coming into the space is that marketing is hard and that most of them did not get into writing books so they could figure out how to market them. So I think the biggest challenge, on a broad scale, is where to start. There’s a lot of information out there and you have to sift through it to find out what’s good and what’s bad. Usually, indie writers don’t have a big budget to start with, so finding things that are effective to connect with an audience is tough.”

For the past few years, Written Word Media has conducted end-of-the-year surveys to find out more about the authors they work with. The results are revealing.

“Although there are definitely some very business-minded indies out there who are making six-figures and crushing it, I would say a big, big percentage of our authors are just starting out and they just want to find readers. They just want readers to read their book. How do they find an audience? They haven’t even started to think about monetizing yet.”

For many authors who are either new to this or not yet on the Stephen King level, a key marketing strategy is to give books away. Yet for many, this seems counter-intuitive. How can you make any money giving books away?

“There’s a great debate among authors,” Emma said, “over whether or not you should give books away for free. But especially in the beginning of a career, it’s the only way to get readers. But more importantly, it’s a sound economic strategy. And remember, giving away something valuable for free is hardly something indies invented. Almost every company you can think of offers a free trial: the free samples at Costco, for instance. This strategy is not something that’s specific to books. The theory is that giving your book away for free—especially if it’s one in a series—is that for a short, concentrated period of time, you drive traffic to those who are willing to take a chance on somebody who’s not on the New York Times Bestseller List.”

There’s another benefit to this strategy. By concentrating the push in a very short time—a common WWM strategy lasts for three days—the algorithms take notice. It’s common for authors who deploy this successfully to find their Amazon ranking takes off, sometimes to #1 in a category.

This is a leap-of-faith, but Emma emphasized that there’s got to be something underlying the effort.

“You have to believe in what you do. You have to believe that your book is good.”

Then she adds, “If you don’t believe it, then maybe this isn’t the right business for you.”

When everything comes together, then momentum begins to gather. “Motion begets motion.”

One thing I noted that Written Word Media brings to the table—which so many other internet marketers don’t—is that the millions of emails that go out every day aren’t spam. Written Word Media’s business model is to target the emails to an audience that: 1) signed up for the emails; and 2) has requested specific genre book offers. So if you got a Freebooksy email in your inbox offering free Cozy Mysteries, it’s because you signed up for them and specifically requested cozies.

Written Word Media is transparent about the number of subscribers in each category. I recently did a three-day promo for the re-release of my traditionally published suspense/thriller Blood Plot. Day #1 went out to Hello Books, #2 to FreeBooksy, and on Day #3, Fussy Librarian. Over this three-day period, my book landed in over 973,000 inboxes, every one of which requested to see it.

By the end of the second day, Blood Plot was #1 in the “Serial Killer” category.

So I asked Emma the obvious next question: how did you guys compile such a huge database of potential customers?

“Well, not overnight is the answer,” she said, laughing. “We’ve been in business for fourteen years and we work hard to find those readers. But one thing I will say is that we have been very rigorous in making sure that we have high-intensity matches with readers and authors. We ask our subscribers very specific questions about what they want and what they do not want. I think that’s why people are happy and active and remain on our list. They forward it to their friends. And our subscribers can change their preferences any time they want.”

The partnerships with other platforms have also helped grow their customer base.

“We’ve been able to grow our audience by magnitudes that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. That’s a win, win, win…”

What’s the best way for a new indie author just coming into the indie author space to take advantage of what Written Word Media offers, I asked. Is there a secret handshake?

“What I hear sometimes from new authors,” she offered, “is I’m overwhelmed. I don’t even know where to start. So I think my real, true, concrete advice is to write to us. You can send an email to hello@WrittenWordMedia.com and someone from my wonderful team who loves books and authors will answer you. If you don’t know where to start, if you’re not really sure what genre your book falls into, if you’re not sure your cover looks enough like a fantasy/romance, if you’re not sure what kind of promo you need to start with, then the answer’s different for everybody. You don’t even have to be our customer; we’ll be happy to answer your questions. Just shoot us an email and we’ll point you in the right direction.”

As our conversation came to a close, I asked Emma if she had any last word of advice to offer indie authors.

“I think the takeaway that I always want to impart to authors is that it’s a lot harder to start than it is to keep going. So once you kind of have some momentum, keep it going, in whatever capacity you can. I would encourage anybody to just start.”

In that respect, the marketing of books is kind of like the writing process itself. Get moving, gain some momentum, and then keep going.

If you’re thinking about taking the leap, it’s a lot to think about. That’s it for this month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life. As always, thanks for playing along.

Oh, and my three-day promo for Blood Plot? Readers downloaded just over 3,900 copies of the book, which I guaran-damn-tee you, is more than it sold when one of the Big Five published it a long time ago.

Why I Hate Self-Publishing

By Steven Womack

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Some time ago, I gave a talk at the monthly meeting of the Middle Tennessee Chapter of Sisters-In-Crime. A week or so before that, I’d read an installment of Clay Stafford’s writing blog that put forth the proposition that writers should not give their work away. A writer’s work has meaning, Clay wrote. It has value and to give it away for free sends the wrong message to readers and to the world in general.

I’ve known Clay Stafford a good couple of decades now and have always regarded him as a wise and successful friend. When he speaks, I listen—and usually take notes.

This time, however, I had to disagree.

It’s not that I disagree with his notion that a writer’s work has value. It does, even if sometimes it’s only to the writer him/herself. All writers put an enormous amount of work and heart in to getting those words onto a page. But that doesn’t always automatically translate into value, especially value measured in sales/dollars. When there are roughly 2.2 million new books published every year (according to UNESCO), the competition is pretty rough out there and it’s hard to convince an audience that your book has value; in other words, it’s worth reading.

So I put forth the notion—based on my own experience—that the best way to get attention for your book was to give it away. In February, I had my first BookBub Featured Deal and in a four-day period gave away 24,897 eBook copies of the latest installment in my Music City Murders Harry James Denton series, Fade Up From Black. Through the rest of the month, that resulted in over 200,000 page reads. And since Amazon’s policy is to pay page reads on book giveaways if the book’s enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, I made money giving stuff away.

Enough to pay for the BookBub Featured Deal, anyway.

While I’ve given up predicting the future, I feel confident that at least a few of the people who downloaded those nearly 25,000 copies will like the book well enough to actually go out and buy the other installments.

It’s a whole new world out there, marketing-wise. Marketing in the internet age has a  very long tail, and to riff on my old pal Larry Beinhart, sometimes the tail wags the dog.

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After my talk, Clay wrote me a very complimentary note and asked if I’d be interested in writing a monthly column for Killer Nashville Magazine on self-publishing. I was very flattered, but the first obstacle to overcome was my loathing of the term self-publishing. Loathing? Seems kind of harsh. Why would anyone loathe a term like self-publishing, especially since some of the greatest writers in history published their own work? 

Disgusted with his usual publisher, Mark Twain formed a publishing company to publish The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Charles Dickens’s regular publisher showed little interest in A Christmas Carol, so Dickens hired artists and editors and paid for the printing himself. Beatrix Potter literally couldn’t interest anyone in publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, so she borrowed the money to print 250 copies. At latest count, there are some 45 million copies of THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT in print. Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. The rest, as they say, is history.

In our lifetimes, the stories of self-published books that sold gazillions are apocryphal. Amanda Hocking, Andy Weir, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Scott Adams… all have, at some point in their careers, published their own work. And let’s not forget that whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing.

So why such distaste for the term?

I confess here that I’m an old guy. I began seriously writing in 1970, fresh out of boarding school and working on my first novel. There was no Internet then, no such thing as an eBook, and everything was old school; no respectable publisher would consider an unrepresented book, so you queried one agent at a time and if they took six months or a year to get back to you, tough noogies. They were the gatekeepers and they made the rules.

Then, like now, it seemed that every sumbitch who knew how to type thought they could be an arthur (a term coined by the wonderful Molly Ivins, when someone introduced me to her as a mystery writer—Great to meet you, we arthurs gotta stick together…)

Then, as now, there were dozens of predators out there preying on the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers. Self-publishing then was a synonym for vanity publishing, and the vanity presses were raking it in from the naïve rubes. Vantage Press, Pageant Press, and Exposition were three leading vanity presses that were, by the 1950s, “publishing” over 100 titles a year each. 

Even I got roped in myself when I paid $400 to have the legendary Scott Meredith Agency read a novel of mine. Meredith, being one smart cookie, had created a whole separate company to sucker in aspiring writers like moi. I got notes back from some office drone, supposedly signed by Meredith, who needless to say, didn’t take me on as a client.

Not one of those books published by a vanity press had a chance of being reviewed by anybody, let alone a respectable press like the New York Times. No bookstore would carry them.

Writers have always been easy pickings for predators. The most egregious case in history was The Famous Writer’s School, founded in 1961 by Bennett Cerf, a Random House editor and regular panelist on the TV show What’s My Line? There isn’t enough space here to go into that con job, but it made millions by paying writers as diverse as Mignon Eberhart, Rod Serling, Bruce Catton, and Faith Baldwin to join their “faculty.” The suckers thought their stuff was being read and critiqued by Rod Serling, when in reality the work was being done by unknown copy editors. There’s not room enough here to really relate the history of this scam, but Google it. It’s an object lesson for us all.

If not self-publishing, then what?

The world of publishing today bears no resemblance to the publishing world I came of age in, and that’s a good thing. I’m already over my word allotment that Clay gave me for this column, so over the next few months (or however long this little adventure goes on), I’m going to talk about these changes and how my own experience in This Crazy Writing Life have shaped me and my career. To me, it’s not self-publishing. Self-publishing means your stuff’s so bad, you’re the only who’ll touch it.

I prefer the term independent publishing. Going forward, I’m going to talk about how we, as writers, can take control of our work and careers, take back the power from the gatekeepers, and become the kinds of writers we want to be, with the kinds of careers and lives we want to have.

This’ll be a journey we’ll share. After all, as Molly Ivins once said: We arthurs gotta stick together…