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Why Word of Mouth Marketing Isn’t Working For Your Book

Jim: Word of mouth is consistently cited as the number one way to sell books. It’s also the most misunderstood. Let’s start with what makes it powerful.

The Good

Word of mouth is the highest-credibility form of marketing. When a friend tells you they’re loving a book, you’re far more likely to pick it up than if you saw an ad. It’s also free, and it snowballs: one person tells two, who each tell two more, and the momentum compounds. When it works, it’s the most powerful marketing there is.

The Bad

Thomas: The biggest challenge is that people live in bubbles. In theory, if everyone told nine people and those people each told nine more, you could reach the entire planet in about 13 hops. But that’s not how it works. People congregate around others who are like them. Most of your Facebook friends are the same political party, roughly the same age, and live in the same area. Word of mouth spreads very well within a bubble and very poorly between bubbles. You can be genuinely popular with 50 people in Austin and still have only sold 50 books.

Word of mouth also tends to kick in only after you no longer need it. “My book sells by word of mouth” is often code for having no marketing strategy. What usually happens is an author does well in their first year or two by selling through their entire existing network. Then word of mouth dries up and they assume something is wrong with their book. The book isn’t the problem. They’ve burned through their forest. Word of mouth won’t carry the book to the next one.

It also primarily benefits the very best books in a category, the ones people are genuinely obsessed with, not the ones that are pretty good. Think about how many books you read in a year versus how many you actually recommend to someone. Most books, even enjoyable ones, don’t make the cut.

Finally, it’s completely out of your control. If it’s not working, there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s a bad position for any author to be in.

The Hideous

Jim: People self-censor. Your book may never even come up. If someone asks me what I’m reading, I might be juggling six books and mentally filter out the ones I don’t think will interest the person asking. They only hear about one book, and it’s not because the others weren’t good.

Thomas: Some genres are almost invisible to word of mouth. A reader deep into romance novels may subscribe faithfully to a newsletter and buy every book in a series, but she won’t post about it on Facebook or recommend it to friends. The same goes for people who secretly love fantasy and sci-fi in social circles where that’s not the norm. They read quietly and self-censor just as much. If your audience falls into one of those categories, word of mouth is even less likely to work for you.

Jim: People also second-guess their own taste. If you’ve ever recommended a movie to someone who hated it, you know the feeling. A lot of readers genuinely like a book but won’t recommend it because they’re not confident their taste is right. That hesitation kills word of mouth before it starts.

Thomas: And even when people do want to recommend a book, they tend to do it only with their closest friends, not acquaintances. Malcolm Gladwell’s *The Tipping Point* cites research showing that most people have about 12 people in their lives whose death would truly devastate them. That’s the pool of people whose book recommendations really carry weight. Writers and readers, on average, have smaller social circles than other groups. That makes it harder for a book to spread than almost any other product.

What should authors do instead?

Jim: In our next episode, we’ll talk about how to make word of mouth actually work, and what you can do that isn’t that difficult to set it in motion.

Thomas: Specifically, we’ll cover strategies for moving your book from bubble to bubble, which is the thing word of mouth can’t do on its own. If you’re worried about selling through your existing network and stalling out, there are real techniques for breaking through that. We’ll get into all of it next week.

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