My £1,800 Book Marketing Disaster: What I Learned About Outsourcing and Avoiding Scams

Photo by Ron Lach

Have you ever felt like you've been suckered, albeit mostly due to your own idiocy? If you have, you'll know that even worse than the money you've wasted is the sense of embarrassment and humiliation you feel. In what follows, I want to share my own misadventures in book marketing—embarrassing though they are—in the hope that they serve as a lesson and a warning, along with what they taught me about marketing books, or, rather how not to market them.

The Context: An Experimental Press

In 2022, I set up an experimental press called Caw Press with the goal of publishing nonfiction by scholars that was written (and priced) for the public but not dictated by what the publishing industry thinks the public want. Our first—and to date only—book was a collection of essays I wrote called Silent But Deadly: The Underlying Cultural Patterns of Everyday Behaviour. I once read an interview with Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, where she advised "hiring your weaknesses." For this reason, I decided from the outset that book marketing would need to be outsourced.

Finding a Marketing Firm

Although I was aware of some good firms through my masters in Canada, as I was now living in the UK, I wanted a London-based firm. I therefore started where you might expect, with a Google search. One UK company kept showing up on top 10 lists, and they, in turn, quickly became the top of my own list. Frequently characterized as "award-winning," albeit mostly by themselves, their website seemed impressive, and was full of pictures of celebrities. In hindsight, this was my first mistake. It was only later that I realized that they didn't make any claims about actually representing these celebrities, although their website was clearly designed to cultivate this impression.

Without further ado, I initiated contact and had a phone meeting with the director. In the meeting, it became clear that I was being interviewed, rather than the other way around. They were a boutique firm, I was told, and selective about the projects they took on. The director emphasized that they couldn't guarantee sales, but they could guarantee media coverage. It was this guarantee, he said, that separated them from other book marketing firms. I ended the call convinced that I had found the right company and nervous that my profile and book wouldn't be compelling enough to take on. While waiting on tenterhooks to hear back, I didn't follow up with the other two companies on my list, which was my second mistake.

The Proposal and Red Flags

A few days later, I received a proposal for a book marketing campaign. Immensely relieved that they thought I was worth taking on as a client, the proposed fee was nevertheless eye-wateringly high—£4,599 plus VAT, putting it close to £4,599 total (over USD$6,700, for reference). The campaign proposal looked very impressive at first glance. Beyond articles in the national press and broadcast radio interviews, they promised to secure coverage in a variety of additional publications, none of which I'd heard of except Reader's Digest—although that alone got my attention.

Still, once I started looking into the other publications they promised to secure coverage in, I became a little concerned. One looked like a blatant content mill. Moreover, it explicitly stated on its "Advertise with us" page that "Unlike many online publishers, all our writers and editors are in-house," suggesting that the firm was basically offering a paid advertorial. All the additional publications they named had a low-quality feel and didn't seem likely to reach my target audience.

With alarm bells now quietly starting to ring, I asked point blank whether they were essentially paying these companies for advertorials. I was assured that "Unlike advertorial/sponsored content, our content can be (and occasionally is) edited or rejected, even at the last minute." My numerous questions were reframed as a positive part of the process that enabled them to clarify the kind of coverage I wanted so they could develop a more customized campaign.

In hindsight, this is when I should have walked away. Clearly, there was already a mismatch between the price they were charging and the quality of the coverage they were offering—something I would have known if I'd bothered to contact the other two companies on my list. However, I made my third mistake, which was to ignore my misgivings and ask for a modified proposal focusing on national media coverage without radio interviews. I also asked for placement in Reader's Digest alone, although I didn't want an author interview but a book excerpt. Did they think this was possible? They assured me it was and a modified proposal was duly sent. Significantly, the price dropped to £1,999 plus VAT.

I knew that paying for marketing was a gamble that might not pay off, but I saw this as part of an experiment for the budding press (albeit an expensive one) to figure out what did and didn't work in terms of marketing. Sure, it was still a lot of money, but, I told myself, much less than it had initially been. Besides, what if it actually worked?

Working with the Publicist

With the contract now in place, I proceeded to the next steps with my assigned publicist. Here is where I had my first rude awakening. I was expecting someone I could bounce ideas off, drawing on their expertise to ask questions. Should I put up an advance reading copy on NetGalley? Should I be pitching articles in publishing outlets myself? Could we draw attention to the tendency to confuse my name with that of the actress Kristen Bell as part of the marketing plan? But the publicist wasn't interested in answering these questions. He didn't know anything about NetGalley and, even worse, had no idea who Kristen Bell was. From his point of view, he had two jobs and two jobs only: to finalize the Reader's Digest excerpt and write an article that would result in coverage in the national press.

I created the condensed excerpt for Reader's Digest and he worked on an article that would become the basis of the national coverage. Naturally, he wanted to play up the fart angle. Initially, I didn't have a problem with this. After all, I'd deliberately chosen that name for the book on the premise that it would attract attention, although the subtitle made it clear that this was not its sole focus. But it soon became painfully evident that our goals—never aligned to begin with—had now explicitly diverged.

My goal was to increase the profile of the book amongst people who might buy it. His goal was to get me national press coverage of any kind so they could fulfill this term on my contract. And for him, that meant something highly sensationalized. Not insisting on a more balanced piece was my fourth mistake, although I repeatedly expressed my reservations, because it seemed to me that any newspaper likely to pick up the story would not cater to the sort of audience likely to purchase the book. Still, what did I know? They were the experts. Who was I to teach them how to suck eggs, when that's precisely what I'd hired them for in the first place.

The Results: A Marketing Disaster

Probably inevitably, the only newspaper to pick up the story was the Sun, a tabloid paper (owned, ironically, by Murdoch himself) whose greatest claim to fame is inventing the Page Three Girl—boobs and farts are basically their bread and butter. However, they had reworked the article into something bearing little resemblance to the piece I'd seen (and markedly worse than the version I'd reluctantly approved, which I hadn't thought possible). To give you a flavor of its content, it was officially authored by "Alex Gass" and titled "Geeky bum time: I'm an expert on farts and have written a book all about why we pass wind."

Mainly an excuse for the Sun to discuss "farty facts" and "fart slang," it inaccurately described my book as a history of farts. Although I'm as fond of the fart Olympics as the next person (fonder, probably), the article made me sound vaguely unhinged. For instance, it didn't say I'm an expert on the anthropology of farting. It just said that I say I'm an expert on farts, which isn't quite the same thing. I cringed when I read it and prayed that no one I knew—and especially my university—would see it.

Suffice to say, the article did not lead to a single sale. Moreover, the book marketing firm wasn't even aware of its existence. I found out it had been published purely because I was contacted to do a radio interview on the basis of the piece. Now, in theory, that sounds great, but given the misleading nature of the coverage in the Sun, these were the sort of jokey interviews that are accompanied by fart soundtracks. I stopped agreeing to them when I realized that no one actually wanted to have a conversation about the anthropology of farting. Unlike me, however, the firm was ecstatic with the coverage. From their point of view, their job was now done—and I had the article and radio interviews to prove it!

The icing on this particular cake was the Reader's Digest excerpt, which appeared on their website shortly after the Sun article came out. Riddled with typographic and formatting errors, it was branded as "Partnership Promotion"/"Promoted Content." As I'd suspected all along, they were paying for placement and had given themselves a hefty commission for brokering it.

Knowing that publishers typically pay for book excerpts rather than the other way around, and in light of their earlier assurances that they did not pay for publication, I expressed concerns that I'd been misled. Although they insisted that this was all just a big misunderstanding with the magazine, to placate me, they offered to pull the piece and refund me £500, which I immediately agreed to. (For the record, I later got the book excerpt published in Sapiens, an online anthropology magazine and, yes, they paid for it.)

In the end, I paid a sum total of the £1,500 plus VAT (£1,800 in all) for a single article in the Sun that was never going to sell any books. The worst part is that I got exactly what they promised, so I couldn't even claim that I'd been ripped off, although I broadly felt that I had been. While I felt they were misleading, this wasn't a scam, although they probably skated close to some legal boundaries in terms of what they didn't disclose. (For instance, it turns out that the director of the firm is the editor-in-chief of one of the publications they offered to secure publication in.) It's even possible that their approach works for some authors, as they do seem to have some genuine endorsements on their website. Still, it was clearly never going to work for me and, more to the point, that was never their goal.

Key Lessons Learned

First, don't rely exclusively on information provided on Google searches to find book marketing companies. Beyond the fact that they pay for placement, a lot of sites providing "helpful" lists of services simply take these companies' claims at face value, especially if they appear to be verified elsewhere. But this means that all a company has to do is pay for a few sponsored Q&A posts in an online content mill where they describe themselves as "award-winning." Et voilà, they have achieved independent verification of their claim by Wikipedia's standards.

It's critical that you do due diligence beyond superficial checks. Are their claims verified? In other words, is anything they claim backed up by concrete evidence that holds up to scrutiny? Look beyond the hype. Because marketing is their schtick, it's unwise to take anything at face value. Do separate searches on the authors listed on their website to independently verify what coverage they have received and where.

Second, if you have misgivings—any at all—don't proceed. I know it's a cliché, but listen to your gut. Unfortunately, this is where hopes and dreams get in the way. Hopes and dreams are clearly critical to producing a book. None of us would do it if we didn't think we were creating something that people might want to read. But when it comes to marketing, you must get your head firmly out the clouds, and away from the smoke being blown up your arse, and become a hard-nosed realist.

Third, does what they are proposing make sense for your intended market? Sure, I'd heard of Reader's Digest, but its reputation in 1985, where it could be found in toilets across Australia, was very different to its reputation in 2022. (In point of fact, the UK edition folded less two years later.) A good book marketer will care about reaching audiences who might actually want to read your book. A model of "guaranteed publicity" means less than nothing if it doesn't target the audience you are aiming to reach. You should have a sense of who your audience is and so should they. If they don't care about this, the flag isn't just red, it's on fire.

Fourth, before you approach anyone, think about what you want to spend on marketing and be realistic. The money I spent on Silent But Deadly (sadly, there were other failed marketing experiments) has basically guaranteed that I will never break even on it. Given that the entire premise of Caw Press is that the books are affordable to the public (i.e., trade paperback prices), my profit margins on each book sale are very low. This is because nonfiction is more popular in print and my model relies on low capital outlays at the outset, limiting me to print-on-demand.

Based on what I spent on producing, marketing and distributing this book, I would need to sell at least 2,000 copies just to break even. In hindsight, and given what I now know about how many copies of books publishers typically sell, I'm both amazed and appalled by my optimism that this was feasible. You see, I'd forgotten the critical caveat to Sara Blakely's advice, which is to "hire your weaknesses as soon as you can afford to." In hindsight, before leaping into paying for overpriced marketing that was clearly never going to work, I should have done far more to explore it myself.

This brings me to my final point. The problem is that I didn't just want to outsource marketing; I wanted to outsource even thinking about it. This is something no writer or publisher can afford to do. In fact, I doubt that my lessons—hard won though they were for me—will surprise a single reader of this site, simply because good advice on how to market books (and how not to market them) is so freely abundant, if I'd actually bothered to look for it.

So, here I am, four years later, with a press that still lingers in the experimental stage. Older and hopefully wiser, I've decided that one more test book is required before I give up on the idea entirely. I'm thinking of this as basically a do-over, where I correct all the mistakes I made the first time around. Because I still might not know how to successfully market a book, but at least I now know how not to market one.