The decline of organic reach

I've been listening to a lot of marketing podcasts recently and one of the things I've been hearing about is the so-called decline in organic reach. What this is chimes very much with my own experience over the years I've dabbled in the Internet and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was really easy to get lots of traffic just by putting quality stuff on the Internet. The search engines and indexes noted you and sent traffic to you without any effort.

However things have changed. Though they look the same , things are very different. I've been puzzling about this sitting in my room and then what I was hearing from the podcasts reinforced my own experience. It seems the engines like Google and Facebook and other big big companies have finally decided to come more commercial in outlook. Once upon a time they gave traffic away, but now it seems that they are only going to send you traffic if you pay them.

The other problem with the Web is there is just so much noise out there now. Once upon a time there were only five quality websites for providing information and say on haunted hotels. That was my area. And now I find that there are thousands of pagess and so we don't scroll down more than one or two pages on Google so if you are down the page of that, no matter how good your website it is you just aren't going to get seen.

I've even written a little blog about Cumbrian place names which is a pretty specialist area. If I say so myself it brings a lot of learning and scholarship and research to it and I put up tens of high quality posts that will provide lots of information for people looking for that. But if I search for that website, I simply don't find it on on Google. So does that mean there are now a lot of websites about the subject? I don't think so. It's just stuff is harder to find.

So I think your days of putting stuff up and just hoping and actually succeeding are gone. There's so much noise out there that even if your product is top quality unless you promoted it using money and probably more clever marketing techniques, you won't get seen.

So that leads me onto my new endeavour – finding clever marketing techniques!

Emotion Machines

Recently become almost possessed by marketing. And I was thinking well what are we actually selling through the medium of stories? And clearly it's emotions. Now when you take that into account and you look at the bestseller list on Amazon – particularly the best selling categories, then that's quite interesting.

The bestselling category of all is romance with a R. So the emotion that the people who want to read those books are looking for is a kind of ... (I said vicarious but the app dictated carious love affair – I like the idea of the carious love affair - one that is full of holes. I've had a few like that. ) come to think of it though, looking for love through story sounds little bit insulting. But I don't mean it like that. I think fiction allows is to live lives and go places that we otherwise I'm free to do. However the fact that so many people want to read about other people's love affairs and thus create emotions in themselves suggests that there is an awful lot of people living without love.

The next best selling category is suspense/adventure. I guess hear this suggests that there are lots of people living quite boring lives would like to aspire to be a cop or a fire fighter or a jet pilot. Or even a spy.

And then there's erotica. I have even been guilty of writing erotica but not under my own name. What would my mother think! (I hope my mother doesn't read that kind of thing) what would I think if she did? Even so, I think my theory holds true. If people are reading erotica that suggested the kind of emotions and feelings that literature instills in them meets a need that they're not having met in their real life. 

There are lots of genres of course but I write horror. I have suggested that in writing and reading this kind of literature stories we are looking for an experience of the other – some kind of presence or intelligence that isn't human. But I guess it might be a lot simpler than that. It may just be people looking for some kind of entertainment. Because it is ultimately entertaining to have these emotions go through our bodies and minds in a controlled way. I may want to fantasise about being a jet pilot shooting enemies down and we never really want to do it. Or I may want  to imagine being in love with someone wonderful - a perfect woman or man but wouldn't really do anything about that because I'm very happy where I am. And  as for erotica I guess I may want to have those feelings and imaginings but never ever want to pursue them in real life.

I talked elsewhere about stories being a kind of inoculation. So it's about our fear of being predated being prey and getting eaten And it might be quite thrilling just to have a little bit of that but not too much. And I guess that's true about romance, suspense, erotica and all the rest.

I just want to have a dabble  at feeling things but not do them in real life and that's why they invented stories.

Pinterest

I joined Pinterest over a year ago but I never really bothered with it. I had my Tumblr account to collect my pretties which is here and I have collected very many pretties over the years, so I didn't see the need for Pinterest.

However +Angela Booth in her fantastically helpful blog here says that it is the marketing tool for indie publishers. She says that you should be marketing things with images.  She gives the example of how a writer called Vic Sandborn created a Pinterest board, or boards, that made people who were interested in the world of Jane Austen come to her, and how then this became a powerful tool for Vic to market her writing.

I can see that. I suppose it's helpful if you fix your genre or writing subject and then create your board based on that. I have tried to do this for the Moberly book I've just reissued.

Check out the board - here

But I think I have some way to go.

Here's a link to The Adventure. Currently FREE!  Get it now! But it's your choice, dude.

Visibility

When I was at school, which is some time ago now, there were only a few bands you could listen to. I would say that all the bands that anyone listened to - that were on the radio, that were in your record store, that your friends, and even your enemies listened to or went to see was less than 200.

That included every genre, every style. So, amongst those 200 some got to be very big. They had all the focus and all the visibility.

But what happens now is that there are thousands if not tens of thousands of bands. Some of them are pretty good. You'd really like some of them a lot, if you could only find them. The music industry is now fragmented and diffuse. There are some big names up there still of course which have huge marketing machines behind them, but increasingly good musicians are playing to smaller audiences.

It strikes me that the same thing is happening with authors. There are hundreds and thousands of authors publishing their books and ebooks now.  Most of those are never ever going to be professionally reviewed. Unless they break out and sell millions like John Locke or Amanda Hocking that is.

So, even if you have a good book, you are going to struggle to be visible. And by the old statistical bell curve of normal distribution, some books are going to suck, a lot of books are going to be ok, and some books are going to be brilliant. But how to tell?

John Locke says that his books are ok. I read one recently and it was absolutely that in my humble opinion. I'm not saying I can write better - I certainly can't sell better.

But we like to think that our work would succeed on merit - that if it was a wonderful piece of writing then it would rise to the top of the pile.

There are two questions I have here:

1) Would it though? Even if wonderful, does the huge ocean of other books drown it out?
2) Is our writing really that good? It might be ok, but the critical acclaim (I'm not talking about 2-3 positive reviews) is still not there. Maybe because it just moderately blows. And even if it doesn't blow, maybe it just doesn't shine.

Only time will tell (this is my favourite saying at the moment).