Make Marketing Fun Again

I just ordered some masks, a cape, and BIG pencils

The world is so f*cking boring. Your book marketing probably is too 😴.

Boring marketing is expensive.

You have to spend lots of money on ads to get attention. Your conversion rate is just average, so then you have to fight in endless bidding wars for clicks with other authors.

It’s stressful and it sucks.

So I have a challenge for you.

Stop paying for your marketing and try to get PAID for marketing.

That sounds like lunacy. Maybe it even sounds impossible.

But that’s what hundreds of thousands of online creators in the world get paid to do. The largest revenue stream for YouTubers, TikTokkers, and many other online creators is brands PAYING THEM to market their products.

We like to call ourselves creative as storytellers.

Then why the hell is the best thing we can come up with paying some bald or balding billionaires to market our books?

To get paid to market our books, our marketing must deserve to be heard rather than be paid for to get reach.

We must make marketing fun again.

Make Marketing Fun Again

If you want to stand out, you have to break the rules. You have to do something unexpected. You have to do something that makes readers want to share the experience you created with others.

Readers First. Forever and always.

Here are 4 simple rules that change everything in making marketing fun again for you AND your readers:

1. Have fun! The best marketing is creative. Unleash your superpower to the world. Your version of great marketing will likely look different from someone else’s just as your stories do. Burn the cookie-cutter campaigns and copy.

2. Treat your marketing like a product. Don’t create ads, create entertainment. Make every piece of content, including your landing pages and book descriptions enjoyable for readers. If you do it right, you can even get people to PAY YOU for your marketing, such as by creating games, premium events, fun products, or even having brands pay you to reach your ever-growing audience.

3. Ditch the plans, and start experimenting. Why make a plan when you want to allow yourself to be creative and dream up new marketing activities on the fly? Don’t get me wrong, a bit of planning is healthy and needed here and there (such as email campaigns for your latest book launch). But trying to plan out a social media calendar for months or all of your marketing activities for the year just sounds… boring. Give yourself space to innovate and break the rules.

4. Amplify everything through social platforms. Guess what happens if you do an awesome and fun marketing activity? You can capture that content and post it everywhere on social media. Better yet, you can run paid ads to amplify your awesome content, drawing more people into your stories. The best ads are what grab people’s attention. Why not test and create things that are fun and that people want to share WITHOUT spending money, then double-down and spend on what works?

And here are 5 key examples of how authors can make their marketing fun (you should use these ideas as loose inspiration and get super creative!):

1. Unique online events for readers (characters getting married, character reunions, costume parties, etc.)

2. Unexpected promotional images (dress your dog up as one of your characters, do wild photo shoots with a cover model, etc. Hint: “Double-dip” and giveaway any props you use to your readers who buy your books or sign up for your mailing list. Double-dip is one of the superpowers inside the Author Marketing Superpowers Deck!)

3. Social hacking – connecting your book to a popular person or IP in your space and inserting it into the conversation (this is one of the superpowers in the upcoming Author Marketing Superpowers Deck!).

4. Unique product ideas (card games for readers, board games, recipe books, and more). These can be marketed using *any* of the above tactics and be unique funnels into your stories.

5. Turn signings and in-person events into content that you can post online (Bring unique props to your author table, do challenges with readers, and more. If you are attending as an author at Reader Nation I’d love to help you brainstorm some things since I will be helping to coordinate that event. James Patterson will be one of the signing authors… so not too shabby!)

Now, all of these ideas are great. But there’s one issue…

In this sea of creativity and fun experiences, what will YOUR relationship with your readers be?

It’s time for me to dig into my Author Sidekick closet of superhero gear 😆.

Let’s break out some author masks…

The 5 Author Masks 🎭

An Author Mask is the “who” tells the stories you create in your marketing to readers.

Now you might be thinking: “I tell the stories to my readers. It’s me.”

Well, that’s one option. But let’s be honest, how many of us want to be front and center in our marketing all the time?

Odds are that it makes you uncomfortable and you immediately start having less creative ideas and instead want to crawl up into a little hidey-hole.

What if putting on a different Author Mask can spark brand new ideas and experiences that we can give to our readers?

The key here is that we can put on one Author Mask, then take it off, and wear another one in a different circumstance. These are the 4 Author Masks:

1. Neon Mask: this is you! You are the person telling the marketing story (cause all marketing should be a fun and entertaining story). You don’t have to show your face, but “you” are the person doing the telling here.

2. Phantom Mask: this is a pen name telling the marketing story. The difference between a Phantom Mask and Neon Mask is you can develop elaborate backgrounds for a pen name (that would be inauthentic if you kept your own character) allowing you to tell and share different kinds of stories with readers.

3. Avatar Mask: this is when you tell a marketing story from the perspective of your character. Imagine a Facebook Ad where it’s the character talking to you. A newsletter that when you sign up you get emails from your main character. Or better yet, a personality quiz you create for free using something like Tally.so that then allows you to assign readers to different characters to hear more from them on your newsletter, community, and social media.

4. Dragon Mask: your readers and the experiences they inhabit become the voice of your marketing story. This looks like encouraging and fostering spaces where readers can become a part of the creation. Fan fiction, fan art, group mailing lists where readers can add their own content (Letterloop allows this and is just $5/month), etc.

5. Oracle Mask: this is “you” but coming from the perspective of a guide along someone’s journey for knowledge and transformation. This is when your marketing story will often involve advice and education in a variety of formats for your readers.

See how powerful the Author Masks can be?

What’s wild is that Author Masks is just one of 50 superpowers inside the Author Marketing Superpowers Deck. I’ll be sending everyone here the digital version FOR FREE in a couple of weeks. However, I’d be super grateful if you followed me on Kickstarter so you can get the physical cards with beautiful illustrations and some other exclusive benefits when the campaign drops.

Note: If you’d like me to develop a free quiz for you to determine your dominant Author Mask, I’d be super happy to do so! Let me know if it’s something you’d be interested in. I’d also like to do one for capes (your storytelling medium) and belts (how you tell your marketing stories). But let me know if you’d be interested!

The BIG Pencil Party 🥳

YOU ARE INVITED TO THE PARTY OF A GENERATION.

Friday, March 14th from 4 pm to 5 pm ET (the same day I plan to launch Author Marketing Superpowers on Kickstarter), I am throwing a costume party for authors.

The author that our esteemed panel of judges votes with the BEST costume will earn an obscenely massive pencil, custom engraved with ‘Author Sidekick’.

The party is completely free, and you can RSVP here.

There are no rules for costumes. You can dress up as a bat, a wizard, a superhero, your celebrity crush... or even a character from your book (hint: that's how this entire party can be a tax write off!).

​AND you don't even have to dress up. Your entry can be a pet, a friend, or even a plant (can plants have costumes?)

​If you don't want to dress up, no worries! The costume party will take place for the first 10 - 15 minutes. Then I will be sharing with you:

1. ​The story and secret strategy behind Author Marketing Superpowers and how you can apply it to your own business

2. ​An overview of the types of Author Marketing Superpowers and how you can apply them to your business

3. ​Wild and fun ideas to make marketing fun again and help your books stand out

​If you can't attend the event live, you can still enter the Big Pencil Party by posting a photo of your entry on social media and tagging Michael Evans or emailing him at hello@authorsidekick.com. Just make sure you do so before the event starts at 4 pm ET on March 14th!

And let me tell you, this pencil is going to be HUGE.

Pictures will be coming in the following weeks leading up to the event. Never thought I’d be sharing pencil pics online with thousands of authors – but gotta pay the bills somehow 😳.

Oh… how life comes full circle.

I’ll see you all in a few days with another episode of the Beyond the Book podcast: “Book Marketing So Good It Should Be Illegal”. No ginormous pencils will be making an appearance in this podcast.

In the meantime, don’t forget…

Together we are boundless,

Michael Evans

The Author Sidekick

P.S. This article was inspired by the amazing book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World by Mark Schaefer. I highly recommend reading it, and if anyone knows him personally, I’d love a connection since he’d be a great guest for the Beyond the Book Podcast.

P.P.S. In the Beyond the Book Accelerator, I am going to share with you all how to step by step put your Readers First and create incredible experiences, products, and media that grow your audience and revenue. You can join the waitlist here (launching in June).