If you’re learning the ropes of how to market your book and speak to audiences online, you might be having mixed success rates… and I bet I can guess immediately at least one reason why that might be.

My many years working with online business owners and writing copy and content for service industries in general has taught me so much about how to angle content to sell to audiences.

But the biggest lesson I’ve learned, that really came along the way through experience, was the difference between selling services vs products… and having that product be an entertainment product.

Yes, this truly a key differentiator and it makes all the difference in whether your marketing is effective. This is also why authorship can be a tricky gig if you’re learning your marketing foundations from a generalised, one-size-fits-most marketing educator or agency.

Most haven’t worked in entertainment, so most haven’t experienced this unique difference.

Why traditional, pain-point marketing doesn’t work for fiction:

A lot of online marketing advice will tell you to focus on people’s pain when marketing a product. For example, if you had a non-fiction book that helped people improve their health, you might craft messaging for your social media posts and content like:

“Lose 10 kilos following this 4-step workout plan.”

“The secret salad that will double your daily energy.”

“How you can build muscle in 30 days just by walking.”

Note: I’m no health expert, so I completely made these examples up. But you get the point—each of these targets a specific desire: lose weight, have more energy, look better, etc.

Obviously, this isn’t going to translate well when selling a fiction novel, because:

“Fly through this fast, 100 page adventure novel.”

“Save big with this eBook—only 99 cents!”

“Read all about made-up dragons!”

…doesn’t quite hit the same, does it?

The key difference is that, while problem-based products need to target specific problems, entertainment-based products need to speak to an emotional promise.

And we’ll talk more about what the heck that actually means, and how to do it, below.

What is an emotional promise?

There’s lots of ways to do this, but we’re specifically talking about messaging today.

A good example to help you grasp this concept is the tagline that appears on a lot of movie posters and books. That little bit of text is designed to evoke an emotional reaction, which acts as a prelude into what you’re about to experience as a whole when you embark on any journey with a piece of media or literature.

Some of my favourites include:

• The School for Good and Evil -> “There are two sides to every story”
• Stranger Things Season 5 -> “One last adventure”
• The Housemaid -> “From behind closed doors, she sees everything”
• Fourth Wing -> “Graduate… or die”
• Red White & Royal Blue -> “True love isn’t always diplomatic”

You may notice that all of these are written to pose a question that leaves you questioning and wanting more. It’s enticing, and that’s the goal.

Anyway, your job when marketing your book? Is to get clear on what that one emotional feeling you want people to feel is… and make them feel that with every piece of content, social media, and print marketing material you put out into the world.

So, you can be doing this not just with your messaging and copy, but also with your visuals and overall brand direction too. Again, look at the posters for Stranger Things as an example… the characters are never standing on the season posters smiling or posing silly. They always look mysterious, brave, and sometimes a little fearful… and all of that is designed on purpose to evoke that emotional response.

Identifying the hidden desires

Marketing that truly lands and resonates with people (also the type of marketing that tends to get more shares and engagement) is marketing that says what people are too afraid to say out loud.

It speaks to their hidden desires, and because it’s more tailored and specific, it’s more effective.

Hidden desires get your attention because it feels like the person is reading your mind, and you’re like “how did you know that about me?”

So, I’ve seen this done with books, but I can only speak to the genres I personally enjoy because that’s where I’ve noticed it resonating best.

But a great example is all the different types of romances that tend to land with different reader types.

Some people want the cutesy “I love you and we’re going to get married and have babies” type of romances, but others want the “I’d burn the world down for you and end your enemies just for looking at you” types of romances.

I’ve noticed that the more problematic or non-traditional a romance becomes… the more of a hidden desire it becomes (which is why it really works when someone is bold enough to spell it out in their marketing!)

As a niche example… monster romances started taking off not too long ago, and let’s be honest, would we really have seen books like Ice Planet Barbarians trending on TikTok and dominating bookshops even 10 years ago? The fact that this came out as popular and started a whole movement that normalised monster romances defines it as a hidden desire that, once spoken to, really resonated with a bunch of people to the point that it completely blew up!

I would say Hunting Adeline is another really niche example. These dark romances that explore really dark themes (to the point that they tend to polarise readers between either loving it or hating it) all speak to hidden desires, and they play into these emotions for what people are looking for in their ideal love interest characters, and how they want to be made to feel reading their stories.

People aren’t going to come out openly and admit that they want to read about borderline non-consensual romance or threesome romances with some of the smuttiest smut on the planet, or ask for romances where the characters feel like they’re absolutely obsessed with one another.

But they’re certainly going to pay attention if your marketing starts speaking directly to that.

So, apply this rule to other genres as you see fit. But again, you have to know specifically what your reader is missing and looking for that they can’t get elsewhere… and evoke that emotion through your words and imagery.

Focus on the experience

When I’m crafting a marketing campaign for a book, I’m always thinking about the reader experience and how I can essentially tease that emotionally evoked feeling in bite-sized ways through my content.

I used the tagline “He’s deadly. She’s deadlier” a lot when I did the campaign for my recent book, Blood Magic, and that evoked an interesting question for readers. It also painted the tone of the novel—full of mystery and suspense and showed that it had a darker tone.

But I was also thinking about the types of visuals that would marry up this experience for readers, so that with every touchpoint of interesting with my brand, my marketing, and the book, they felt those emotions.

The identity piece in fiction marketing

To take this whole concept a step further, the best thing you can do is create a movement around your work that allows people to buy into the identity of the work.

What I mean by this is that, when people consume it, they become part of a collective identity (or fanbase) for that movement.

For example, people who consume Taylor Swift music and consider themselves fan of her music are Swifties.

The stronger your identity piece is around your work, the bigger the movement becomes, and the more your community will promote the work for you (which is a massive help). I talk more about how to do this in this post.