Happy Returns: gauging the impact and efficacy of your promo efforts
by Damon Suede
(A-game Advice was a monthly column offering practical tips for winning promo that fits your personal style, strategy, and measure of success.)
In December’s
column I discussed the Measure of Success: the clear personal
goal which helps you strategize and motivate your career…the
prize you’re playing for.
Since that column, I got a ton of emails asking about the gauging
results so it seemed time for a look at
Return on Investment
(ROI). For best results, once you know exactly what you want you
should be taking pains to gauge your results to see just how good
they were.
As authors, we take all kinds of chances
and gamble at maddening levels. We plow time, energy and sanity into
writing stories that might
see publication, might
find fans, might pay us back with royalties, raves, accolades, and more. We
operate on faith (which is powerful) and we survive on hope (which
is essential). Unfortunately faith and hope remain impossible and
impractical to measure, which is where the fog and murkiness can
leak into a career. How it go?
Fine. What did they think? Great.
Was it worth it? Sure. Burying our heads in the sand can feel
comfy...easy…safe. It isn’t.
Once you know the prize you’re playing
for, how can you measure how far you’ve come or close you got? With
any given roll of the professional dice, what exactly is your
personal ROI?
My mother called investment “gambling for
people who know to do the math.” Yes you need to take risks, but
they should be smart ones and they need to get smarter whenever
possible. Risks and reward only improve if you do.
ROI gets tricky for authors because so
much of what we do is subjective and isolated. Can you ever really
know if the book was perfect, the lawyer was honest, that big
signing worth it, or the big deal was ideal? The industry mutates
daily, hourly even and
technology keeps moving the goalposts. We don’t all want the same
kinds of success, and when we aim at our personal goals, we can’t
ever know precisely how close
we almost got to them because art is subjective.
Inspect what you expect, before and after
you take that gamble. Not only do we all want different things, we
expect different kinds of dividends on our investments. One author’s
whinefest is the next author’s windfall. The risks and rewards are
generally vague and entirely personal. Knowing (and tweaking) your
precise expectations will help you make savvier investments.
To do a clear ROI accounting you need to
get pretty granular. Tally up all the things you actually invested
allowing some time for things to settle and seed so you can gauge
the actual dividends as specifically as possible.
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Resources: time spent, money invested, emotional/mental/physical energy.
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Allies: cohorts and cohosts, personal favors used and gained, support and sabotage.
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Logistics: venue suitability, complications and shortcuts, unforeseen flubs and bonuses.
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Consequences: positives and negatives, objective and subjective, personal and professional.
Once you have solid data, weigh the pros
and cons so you know what you did right and where you could do
better. If you don’t like the nitty-gritty or work better in tandem,
try analyzing this with your spouse, partner or closest cohorts
consider comparing notes and data with trusted colleagues. Look for
the lessons that will straighten your path to the ROI you
expect.
Even an RWA membership is an investment
of time, energy, and at least a hundred dollars. But the return on
that investment is exponential: professional education, supportive
communities of practice, industry access and advocacy, career
counseling, interpersonal support, networking opportunities, awards
and advancement, even promotion of our genre worldwide. That doesn’t
begin to cover the benefits of individual chapter memberships! I’ve
belonged to six or seven writers’ guilds and associations in my life
and I’ve NEVER seen an
organization that offers a more concrete, hyperbolic return on my
investment. Is RWA worth my $100-plus dollars?
Sh’yeah! For me, that
investment pays back crazy dividends every damn day…with cake,
glitter, and a Bollywood backrub.
Because so much of our business is a
crazy, pie-in-the-sky gamble some folks just roll the dice, jump of
cliffs, and burn bridges while they’re crossing them… like anxious
ostriches. Some people will tie themselves in knots to avoid getting
specific; they exaggerate rewards AND ignore them. In the interests
of courage or calm, they make light of risks or inflate them to
conspiratorial levels. They “guess” something worked or they
“suspect” that something has been done to harm them, but they don’t
get the facts about their business. That kind of willful blindness
and hyperbole may feel safe, but it does a world of damage to any
serious odds of success.
Professional ostriches practically beg to
be mauled and manipulated. By not examining or weighing the costs of
their actions, they give themselves permission to continue as was.
That’s a child’s strategy, like babies covering their eyes to make
the grownups go away. Some people also thrive without balancing
their checkbooks, but that doesn’t make it a smart strategy. To grow
and succeed, we have to take our lumps along with the rewards. We
have to do the math.
Everything in life is fun or educational.
For example, I love conferences. I enjoy
them personally and I’m kinda built for them because I’m
extroverted, gabby, and interactive. I know that conferences offer
me superb ROI because after each one I do a post-mortem to see how
and where it paid out. Over time, I’ve learned that genre gatherings
invariably reward my investment like crazy rigged slot machines…in
sales, advancement, fresh readers, professional hobknobbery, and
more. That investment gives me a wackypants return. That said, not
all events or authors are created equal. Just because the returns
are good for me doesn’t make “Cons=Great” a universal truth. Looking at ROI has
taught me which cons are worth my investment, so that I have a
better and more successful time at each.
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At the end of every conference (or contract or campaign or rollout or party) I sit down and do a hard accounting:
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What did I spend in time, money, energy, and more?
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What tangible rewards and downsides resulted during and after the event?
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What intangible rewards and downsides seem to originate from or intersect with the event?
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How can I invest my resources more wisely next time?
Part of your job as a professional is to
get better at whatever you do, however you do it. As a
career-focused author you have a responsibility to look at where the
chips fall and try to improve your odds for next time. Balance that
professional checkbook every time you time you take a professional
risk to make sure you have more than a vague (often inaccurate)
sense of how well you did.
By all means feel free to leap before you
look, but at least look after
the fact to see where exactly you landed.
Authors make mistakes, awful ones at
times. Our business operates at a strange intersection of art and
venality which encourages risky behavior on all sides. Some of your
investments will go bust. You will absolutely attend shoddy events,
waste money on risky promo, embrace iffy social media platforms, and
do business with folks who probably belong in jail at some point.
Just know that if you live and work as an ostrich, the leopards and
hyenas will find you.
Regret is just wisdom in a fright mask.
That’s the delicious tension in any
investment; if you weigh your results, do the math, take hard
retrospective looks at what went down, I can promise you that next
time may not be perfect, but it will be
better.
Look…we’re all different, yo, a veritable
blizzard of special snowflakes, so if you’re going to invest in
something, you owe it to your sanity to tally those dividends so you
don’t cheat yourself and your talent. Get your head out of the sand
and look at where you stand and far it is to where you want to go.
Hold yourself accountable!
When you try a new subgenre, attend a
conference, test out a funky new advertising strategy, sign up for a
new social media channel, hire an assistant, or sign with your dream
agent, success isn’t anything close to guaranteed. For your safety,
solvency, and sanity, you have a responsibility to weigh the pros
and cons of your latest attempt and hold yourself accountable for
the risks you took and rewards that resulted.
Always make sure the bang was worth the buck.
Originally published as part of A Game Advice for the Romance Writers Report.
If you wish to republish this article, just drop me a line.