Marketing has its own vocabulary, and once you learn it, everything gets easier. The problem is that most authors are trying to build a platform, run promotions, and interpret analytics while half the conversation sounds like jargon.
In this Marketing 101 post, we define 12 essential marketing terms every author should understand, then show how each one applies to selling more books, growing your newsletter, and making smarter decisions with your time and budget.
Lead magnet
Thomas: Our first term is lead magnet, also called a reader magnet. I used to call these “carets,” but lead magnet is the standard industry term. A lead magnet is the immediate reward someone receives for signing up for your newsletter.
This is not just for authors. Any business might offer a tip sheet, a free story, or access to a course in exchange for an email address. At AuthorMedia.com, for example, we offer a free course on building an effective author website. It is a complete course that might normally cost 25 or 50 dollars, but it is free for subscribers and delivered over several emails. That is a lead magnet.
PR (public relations)
Jim: PR stands for public relations. Most of you know that, but let’s define it clearly. PR is free exposure for you and your products. It can happen online, on radio, on television, in newspapers, through interviews, or through word of mouth.
You may hire someone to secure that free publicity, but the exposure itself is not paid advertising. You can also create your own PR if you are willing to do the outreach. We recently did episode 175 on how to generate your own public relations.
Thomas: And for more on lead magnets, see episode 145 on creating one and episode 118, another Marketing 101 episode, on marketing funnels. Funnels show how a lead magnet fits into your overall strategy.
Advertising
Thomas: Our next term is advertising. Jim, what is advertising, and is it the same as marketing?
Jim: It is not the same as marketing. Marketing is the umbrella. Under that umbrella are tools such as PR and advertising.
Thomas: All ham is pork, but not all pork is ham.
Jim: Exactly. Advertising is any time you pay for exposure. If you run a Facebook ad, an Amazon Marketing Services ad, a radio spot, or a television commercial, and you are paying to get the word out, that is advertising.
Thomas: Marketing is broader. It includes everything you do to promote your book, from your author photo on the back cover to your website. Advertising is the subset you pay for. All advertising is marketing, but not all marketing is advertising.
KPI (key performance indicator)
Jim: Our next term is KPI. Authors need to understand this and apply it to their careers. Thomas, define it for us.
Thomas: KPI stands for key performance indicator. This is more common corporate jargon, but it applies to authors as well. A KPI is something you measure to determine whether your performance is improving or declining.
Was 2019 better than 2018? You look at your KPIs. Examples include number of books sold, total revenue, or profit. You might sell more books by buying many ads, but if your ad spend exceeds your additional revenue, your profit could decline. That is why you need multiple KPIs.
If you only track books sold, you can game the metric. Lower your price to zero, and you will increase units sold. But that may not serve your larger goal.
Other KPIs might include media mentions, podcast interviews, or blog features. Anything measurable that reflects progress can serve as a KPI.
Jim: You might decide that for the next month your primary KPI is newsletter growth. For example, you want to add 100 subscribers per week. That clarity helps you focus your efforts.
Thomas: KPIs apply to writing as well. You might track number of words written per day, chapters completed per month, or books published per year. For data-oriented people, tracking KPIs in a spreadsheet can be motivating.
Jim: Without a KPI, you are like Alice in Wonderland asking which road to take without knowing your destination. Once you define a measurable goal, your next steps become clearer.
Thomas: Finally, KPIs should be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Strong KPIs include all five elements.
Earned media
Thomas: Our next term is earned media. Jim, what is it?
Jim: Earned media is closely related to PR. It is exposure you receive when someone voluntarily shares your content. If a reader shares your Facebook post, that is earned media. If a post goes viral, you are receiving a great deal of earned media.
Any time people share your work on social media or recommend it to friends without being paid, that is earned media.
Conversion rate
Thomas: Now let’s define conversion rate. This can function as a KPI and is often used to measure the effectiveness of specific pages.
Before that, a quick bonus term: landing page. A landing page is a specific page you show to visitors through advertising or promotion. It is not your home page. It is designed to prompt one specific action.
Sometimes a landing page is also a squeeze page. A squeeze page offers only one option, such as filling out a form or clicking a button. There is no navigation menu, no links elsewhere. The page is designed to “squeeze” visitors toward a single action.
A conversion rate is the percentage of people who take that action. If 100 people visit your landing page for a free short story and 50 download it, your conversion rate is 50 percent.
If you remove distractions and convert the page into a squeeze page, you might raise your conversion rate from 50 percent to 60 percent. That increase can significantly affect your overall results.
Jim: Knowing your conversion rate helps you allocate your limited time. If one marketing channel converts at 5 percent and another at 25 percent, you can either improve the weaker one or shift more effort to the stronger one. Understanding conversion rates helps you make strategic decisions about where to invest your energy.
Bounce rate
Thomas: Bounce rate is the percentage of people who come to your website and leave without visiting another page. In Google Analytics, a lot of people obsess over lowering bounce rate, but for authors it is often misunderstood.
If you run an ecommerce store, bounce rate matters. Someone comes looking for “blue widgets,” cannot find them, and leaves. That is a bad outcome.
But if you are a blogger, bounce rate can be misleading. A reader might spend five minutes reading a post and then leave. That is still a “bounce,” so it shows up as a 100 percent bounce rate, even though it was a great experience.
This is why your KPIs matter. If you sell books directly from your site, bounce rate can be important because you want readers clicking deeper toward checkout. If you run a blog, bounce rate may not matter, and time on site may be the better KPI.
Jim: That helps. The key is knowing what the metric means and whether it applies to your goals.
CTR (click-through rate)
Thomas: CTR stands for click-through rate. It is the percentage of people who were shown your ad and then clicked it. You see this with Facebook ads and Amazon ads. In general, the higher the click-through rate, the better, because it suggests your ad matches your audience.
If CTR is low, many things could be wrong, from targeting to copy to the image to the offer.
Jim: Here is the visual. You have seen Amazon Marketing Services ads, those “Sponsored” listings at the top of a page. When an ad is shown, that is an impression. When someone clicks and goes to the product page, that is a click-through.
If you have 10,000 impressions and only two clicks, that is a very low click-through rate. If you have 10,000 impressions and 10,000 clicks, that would be a very high click-through rate.
Thomas: Also impossible. Nobody gets a 100 percent click-through rate. If you do, email us at NovelMarketing.com. We want you on the show.
Jim: If you are getting that kind of response, you are probably giving away gold bricks for free, and even then people would not believe it.
Friction
Jim: Friction comes from physics. It is anything that slows motion down. In marketing, friction is anything that slows someone down from learning more about you, exploring your site, or buying your book.
In practical terms, friction is anything that creates confusion or resistance. If your site loads slowly, that is friction. I think the statistic is that if a site takes more than three seconds to load, people tend to leave. Is that right?
Thomas: Yes. The longer your site takes to load, the fewer people stick around. Even when they do wait, they spend less time on the page and they are in a worse mood. Amazon has tested this extensively by intentionally slowing the site for some users to see how behavior changed. Speed has a huge impact on engagement.
And speed is only one source of friction. Others include too many clicks, confusing navigation, or unexpected outcomes. For example, if someone clicks a book cover on your site and it opens a larger image instead of a page where they can buy the book, that is friction.
Amazon.com is designed to remove friction, one-click checkout, stored payment information, direct purchasing on Kindle. Reducing friction is one reason Amazon dominates. They are constantly optimizing for the customer experience. They do not care about you as an author. They care about their customers.
Jim: This is why we encourage you to ask new visitors for feedback. If your site is confusing, too busy, or unclear, that friction will hurt you. Swap website reviews with other authors. Ask, “What worked? What did not?” Over time, you can dramatically improve your site.
PPC (pay per click)
Thomas: PPC stands for pay per click. It is one of the most common online ad models. In the early internet days, banner ads were priced by impressions, similar to television or radio. That pricing model often used CPM, another bonus term, which means cost per thousand.
Jim: Cost per thousand.
Thomas: Right. It is CPM because the “M” is the Roman numeral for 1,000. I did not make the acronym.
The impression model helped fuel the dot-com crash in 2000 and 2001 because of “banner blindness.” People stopped noticing banner ads. Their eyes automatically ignored them.
PPC became popular because you only pay when someone actually clicks. If people never notice the ad, or if the website hides it in an unhelpful spot, you are not charged for the impression.
Facebook, Google Ads, Amazon, and many other platforms use PPC as the primary model, even though some platforms offer additional options.
ROI (return on investment)
Jim: ROI stands for return on investment. It is an evaluation of what you gained compared to what you spent. The “investment” is not always money. It can be time.
Our friend Randy Ingermanson often brings this up. An author will say, “Facebook is working great for me.” Randy will ask, “How do you know?” They respond, “I get lots of comments.” Randy presses: “What is the ROI? Did you sell more books? Did you gain newsletter subscribers?”
Maybe your goal is not book sales. Maybe your goal is newsletter growth. Great. But you still need to measure the return on your time and effort. Otherwise you can spend hours on activities that feel productive but do not actually serve your goals.
Thomas: Could we say ROI is a key KPI?
Jim: I love it when you talk like that, Thomas.
Thomas: If you understood that sentence, you are paying attention. ROI is an important key performance indicator, not the only one, but a crucial one.
Evergreen
Jim: Evergreen is content that stays relevant for years. A great cookbook, a timeless personal finance book, or a story like The Chronicles of Narnia can sell for decades. That is evergreen.
Something like a book about the Y2K crisis is not evergreen. Celebrity books often are not evergreen either. They can sell for a few years, then fade when the celebrity’s moment passes.
Here is an example. Thomas, your blog post on courtship went viral. That kind of post can be evergreen for a long time. Would you agree?
Thomas: Interestingly, it is no longer the most popular post on my blog. The debate over courtship has largely been settled, at least online. People still hold those views, but they are not engaging publicly the way they used to.
The post that has become my most evergreen piece is about why women feel unwanted and men feel undatable. It is about confidence. That post consistently gets views and flares up on social media. The courtship post still gets read, but the confidence post is the current evergreen star.
I only know that because I track views in Google Analytics.
Jim: That makes sense. The courtship topic had a season of intense debate, but dating and confidence will likely remain relevant for a long time.
So here is the encouragement. Some topics fade quickly, like yesterday’s news. But also create content, blog posts, articles, resources, that readers can come back to in a year, two years, even 10 years.
Thomas: And there is nothing wrong with writing about current topics. Michael Hyatt became a New York Times bestselling author by writing a book about Y2K. That book launched his career.
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