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.