Marketing a book is the same as marketing music

Think about your favourite small artist. The one with a few thousand monthly listeners that you're weirdly protective of.

How did you find them? I'd imagine it wasn't through a traditional form of advertising.

It was probably a track buried two hours into a mix. Or a support act you only caught because you got to the venue early. Or a mate grabbing your phone and saying "you need to hear this."

Side note: I once saw Rag'n'Bone Man play to about 10 people in a tiny venue because he was first on the bill. Must've been two years before the famous album came out. That's happened to me a few times over the years just going to gigs early.

My point is you stumbled onto it, and that's exactly why it stuck.

I've been DJing and producing electronic music since I was a teenager and I work in marketing for a living. Safe to say, I've spent a lot of years watching how this works from both sides. Then I wrote a book for the first time, and realised I was about to find out if any of it applied to me.

Nobody wants to be sold a small artist

Big artists get marketed at you. Billboards, TV spots, the lot. That's fine, that's how big things work.

Small artists are different. The appeal of finding a small artist is that you found them first. There's a little hit of pride in being the person who knew about something before everyone else did. You become the person in the group chat with the good recommendations. The find is as much about you as it is about them.

Every DJ knows this feeling. Half the job is digging for hours and hours for a record, edit or remix that nobody else has, then watching people come up to the booth asking what it is. That moment is the entire point. You're not just playing a tune, you're passing on a discovery.

The second something feels forced on you, the soul of the thing dies a bit. Nobody has ever proudly told their mates about a band they found through a pre-roll ad. But they will about one they stumbled across on a playlist or a 1am radio show.

Books work exactly the same way

Think about the last book you properly loved that wasn't already a bestseller. Someone lent it to you. Or you picked it up in a charity shop because the cover was odd. Or a friend said "just trust me" and wouldn't explain why.

The big publishers can buy the front table at Waterstones. A self-published first-timer usually can't and honestly shouldn't try. Shouting "BUY MY BOOK" at strangers on the internet is the literary equivalent of spamming your SoundCloud link in the comments. We've all seen that guy. Nobody clicks.

So I've stopped thinking about how to reach everyone, and started thinking about how to be findable by the right few.

What that actually looks like

For me, it means putting the book in places where people can trip over it. A DJ mix that happens to have a book attached to it. A special edition that only exists at the studio where I teach, so the people who find it there feel like they've found something specific to them, because they have.

It also means making the thing easy to pass on. A title you can't really say in front of your nan helps with that. People like sharing something with a bit of mischief tied into it.

And the most important thing about being a small artist: it means being patient, which is the real hard part. Word of mouth is slow. A track can sit around for a year before the right DJ plays it in the right room. I'm new to the whole publishing a book thing but from what I've seen books are the same, probably slower.

So if you've found this book, or this blog, by accident, brilliant. That's how it was meant to happen.

And if you like it, you know what to do. Leave a review if you fancy it, but more importantly, just tell one person. Be the one who found it first.

The catch

None of this works if the thing isn't good by the way. You can't engineer someone telling their mate about your book or music. All you can do is make something worth mentioning and leave it where the right people might stumble across it... wait, this book is meant to be shit though right? I messed that up then.