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Marketing is a big freaking deal when you’re trying to be a professional author. Which is unfortunate, because it feels like an exercise in futility. “Focus on the marketing things you like to do!” is a common nugget of wisdom from the pros. But what if you don’t like any of it? Then it sucks to be you!

Okay, there’s a teensy bit of it I liked, which I’ll detail later.

For my latest release RECKONING in July, I decided to put together a no-kidding-for-real marketing plan, detailed below, along with my assessment of its effectiveness. Results may vary from author to author, but in case you plan on trying your hand at publishing a book and your publishing company (if you have one) offers little to no marketing backup – which is unfortunately typical – then at least you can use my toiling as a place to start!

The key metrics are: 1) website traffic; 3) newsletter subscribers; 3) books sold. The first two in theory should directly lead to the last.

• Schedule daily Facebook posts once a week – RESULTS: minorly effective; most posts had a fairly low # reached rate, though the number of people following my feed did steadily increase over time, so a slight positive net effect
• Write a blog every two weeks (STRETCH: once a week) – RESULTS: ineffective; writing posts is important to keep your website from growing stale, but I had very few comments on any of my posts, making interactions with my potential audience non-existent
• Spend 10 minutes each day liking/responding to other author’s Facebook posts; RESULTS: ineffective; okay, this is my fault because I didn’t do much of this; I’m just not a social media person, and perusing Facebook feels more like a chore than a way to keep up with friends
• Compile a list of authors for blurbs/reviews – RESULTS: N/A; I didn’t end up doing this due to the intensive logistics required, though I might try it for my next release
  • Send author requests for blurbs/reviews
  • Offer to send authors all three books
  • Send ARCs to those who respond; follow up with those who don’t respond
  • Have some suggested blurbs ready to make it super-easy for authors short on time
• Compile list of romance book review blogs, ask them for reviews – RESULTS: effective; though I didn’t get reviews in any major blogs, the ones I did get were good and resulted in some traffic to my website  
• Update website to focus on my story, not my books – RESULTS: ineffective; I thought about doing this, but decided against it; this is more of a strategy for someone releasing a non-fiction book, where an author’s personal story or expertise is relevant to the book
  • Focus on what makes me unique/newsworthy/worth following, and what I can do for my readers
  • Books should be secondary focus (even though primary goal is to sell books)
• Find out what a pre-sales list is, try to make one myself – RESULTS: N/A; didn’t need to do this 
  • Pre-sales list is a list of places that will pre-sell your book, like Amazon and Google
  • Already have pre-sales going on via my publisher, so don’t need this
• Create a sell sheet – REVIEW: N/A; didn’t need to do this
  • Used to convince bookstores to sell your books
  • Not necessary for me
• Create an online media kit – RESULTS: effective; the online press kit was helpful to send to possible reviewers and anyone else who asked for more information, though the press release was unnecessary
  • A PDF file or webpage (most ppl prefer PDF, cuz it’s easier to copy from) that bloggers or other media people can use to quickly write a story or review about your book
  • Keep it simple; ppl want to easily skim it and find the info they need
  • Include in the kit:
    • A press release, usually the one you write for the book’s launch.
    • Author bio, including previous publications and qualifications to write the book. Include author’s platform information. (keep it very short)
    • Author photo, and it’s smart to include high-resolution files for print and low-resolution for online use.
    • Book photo, with the same resolutions as the author photo.
    • Any awards the book or series has won
    • Testimonials
    • Sample interview questions and Q&A
    • Excerpts from the book and sample chapters
    • Links to everything and contact info
    • Here’s a good example: <https://michaelhyatt.com/platform/media
• E-mail press release to media and bloggers – RESULTS: ineffective; even though I subscribed to HARO (Help A Reporter Out website), it became clear over a few months that nobody was looking for a story like my press release; this could be useful for non-fiction books where an author wants to advertise the fact they’re an expert at something
• Create some memes (put name & website on them) – RESULTS: effective; good for sending to bloggers who reviewed my book and posting on my website
• (maybe) Create a book trailer – RESULTS: N/A; didn’t end up doing this, but worth a try for my next release
• Come up with special promotion offers ~1 month before book release – RESULTS: mostly ineffective; offering Amazon gift cards to people who signed up for my newsletter or commented on a post had a negligible effect on book sales; probably better than nothing, but mostly a waste of money as people would sign up for the gift card, then unsubscribe shortly after; need less costly promo offers next time, or none at all
• Day-of live Facebook celebration – RESULTS: ineffective; gave away books to my friends, ended up talking to myself for three hours while no one watched; either don’t do again for next release, or keep it to an hour with a specific structure/script that I can edit and use later
• Set up a blog tour – RESULTS: effective; writing guest blogs was probably the best tactic in my strategic toolkit, as I usually had a (small) surge of people who signed up for my newsletter after my guest blogs were published

A couple months ago, a fellow romance author posted a funny comic about motherhood on her Facebook page. She included words to go along with it to this effect: “This comic about the frustrations of being a mother is hilarious! I had to skip over the feminist stuff tho, cuz men and women are biologically different and there’s no getting around that, but if you ignore that stuff then it’s so true!”

I was gobsmacked that a fellow romance author, of all people, could forsake feminism as a lie women tell themselves in order to deny nature’s truth. Then James Damore, aka “Google Bro,” released his “Women Are Biologically Inferior” manifesto and it got me wondering: setting aside the loaded question of whether women are inferior to men in general, how biologically different are men and women to begin with, and how do those differences affect our behavior?

Romance is filled with tropes that assume certain stereotypes about how men and women should act, from the virginal, chaste heroine (who is pure and beautiful and therefore worthy of love) to the aggressive, alpha male hero (who is brave and strong and therefore worthy of love). Of course we recognize these tropes as fantasies with only a passing resemblance to reality, but the aforementioned author’s Facebook comment suggests there are a significant number of romance readers and authors—maybe even a majority—who believe these tropes are based on real-life hardwired differences between the sexes.

But if you’re going to make a claim supposedly based on science—hence the term “biologically” rather than “according to the MRA subreddit I frequent”—what does actual scientific literature have to say about it?

Well, I happen to be a big-time science nerd. I have college degrees in technical fields (engineering and physics) and subscribe to lots of scientific journals and blogs where articles about this topic sometimes pop up. In fact, this month’s issue of Scientific American just happens to be all about gender—how convenient! As any good scientist will tell you, no complicated issue is ever black or white, especially when it comes to human behavior. You’ll find “evidence” for any crazy-ass thing you want to believe if you fish around long enough. But if you’re a critical thinker, open to having your beliefs contradicted by reality, and then changing your beliefs as a result (which is a lot harder than it sounds—cognitive bias is very powerful), you look at the preponderance of evidence and come to an educated conclusion about what is probably true.

(Note that in this case “truth” = reality, not “my own truth,” which is psyching yourself into believing bullshit.)

So are women and men biologically different in ways which affect our behavior and validate the tropes?

TLDR Answer: No. Gender-specific behavior is based on cultural standards, not biology.

Long Answer:

(Get ready for some citations!)

The “biology made me do it” line of thinking comes from the assumption that you can observe an animal’s behavior and directly extrapolate a reason for it based on the animal’s biology. For instance, if you’ve read a science book or two you may assume people love babies because animals are hardwired to take special care of their offspring to maximize the survival of their species. However, there are clearly people who don’t like kids or babies, and many parents who don’t love their children. This is because humans aren’t normal animals, and our reasons for doing things are more complicated than a cursory reading of biology and psychology can explain. The key difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is that our prehistoric biological hardwiring is easily overridden by cultural forces.

Take another example: racism. It’s tempting to strike a superficially objective pose and say that racism is “natural” as a product of our innate dislike for anything that is not like us, in order to protect our genes (it all comes down to survival of the species, right?) [1]. However, this explanation ignores the fact that humans have extremely low genetic diversity. Every human being on the planet shares about 99.9 percent of their DNA with every other human [2]. In fact, two separate chimpanzee populations (our closest non-human relatives) living in geographic proximity to one another are still more genetically diverse than the entire human race [3]. We are basically clones of one another, and yet we seize on differences that are literally skin deep in order to justify one cultural population’s “superiority”—and therefore right to hold power—over another. While our dislike of things and people that are different may have been a hardwired instinct we acted on millions of years ago, we’ve since coopted this hardwiring for purely cultural reasons; the biological differences between races, which white nationalists often cite, do not actually exist.

This distinction is what tripped up the Facebook author and Google Bro: you can’t make generalizations about human behavior based on our biology because cultural forces trump nearly everything. If you’re going to make the case that gender-specific biology accounts for behavioral differences between men and women, you first need to prove that the null hypothesis is false—that the differences are not due to something else, like cultural factors.

It’s easy to look at the male and female body and assume that we are completely different (hotdogs vs tacos! Heaving bosoms vs washboard abs! Flowing locks vs flowing mullets!), and that these differences extend to our brains as well. It’s also easy to look at sex differences in the animal kingdom and assume that the clear differences in male and female behaviors within many species also extend to humans. But gender research doesn’t support this assumption. There is no such thing as a “male” and “female” brain [4]. To the extent which the brain controls sex traits, such as the amount of testosterone or estrogen produced, they vary wildly between individuals [5]. Everybody’s brain is made up of a mosaic of male and female traits which can’t be mapped back to a specific gender demographic [6]. Put another way—if you asked a neurosurgeon to map your brain simply based on your gender, they wouldn’t be able to do it. There is no universal brain structure which makes somebody with two X-chromosomes naturally “neurotic,” “emotional,” or “indecisive,” just as having a Y-chromosome doesn’t mean you’re naturally “assertive,” “aggressive,” or “brave.”

There are, of course, biological factors that do affect a person’s behavior, such as sexual preference (I always find it amusing when someone refers to homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, as if being vilified and alienated by large swaths of society is a fun choice). Mental illness such as psychopathy, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder will also affect a person’s behavior. But these biological factors affect people on an individual basis, not whole demographics. The stereotypical differences between male and female behavior disappear when environmental circumstances change. For instance, the “sexual revolution,” which marked a significant uptick in single women’s sexual activity, coincided not with the introduction of the birth control pill—a biological factor—but with the women’s liberation movement—a cultural shift (the pill had been available since the early 1960s, while the sexual revolution took off in the late 1960s and early 1970s) [7]. The belief that women are hardwired to prefer monogamy while men want to spread their seed around ignores the fact that both genders report similar sexual habits and generally prefer monogamy in equal measure [8]. There’s also no difference in men and women’s appetite for risk, despite the “men take more risks to attract females” stereotype [9].

So why are women considered inferior to men in a wide majority of cultures if it isn’t nature’s truth? One clue to the rise of the patriarchy comes from the Bronze Age in human history, when countries started establishing themselves on the backs of their armies. During the Warring States Period of Chinese history, samples of ancient human remains showed a significant drop in female nutrition from previous historical periods, likely the result of resources being diverted to males who could fight for their country/warlord [10]. Societies took advantage of the physical differences between men and women to achieve cultural objectives, and the “men are fighters/women are nurturers” myth was born. It’s not a coincidence that women are finally regaining some gender parity now that we live in a technological age where size and strength are no longer critical to success.

The point of this article isn’t to argue that it’s wrong to swoon for alpha males or that housewives should be ashamed of themselves. It’s not wrong to adhere to gender norms; rather, it’s wrong to label somebody who doesn’t adhere to those norms as “unnatural.” Human gender behavior doesn’t follow a natural order. It’s wrong—ethically and scientifically—to attribute cognitive traits to an entire demographic. Our love for the romance genre tropes isn’t hardwired into us; we love them because we have learned to love them. What makes a man a manly man and a woman a good woman are things we were taught by society at large and by our smaller personal spheres of influence.

So go ahead and love your preferred Romancelandia tropes and stereotypes! But recognize them for what they are—cultural preferences, with no biological foundation.

 

1. Rob Brooks. “The Origins of Racism.” The Conversation, 23 July 2012. http://theconversation.com/the-origins-of-racism-8321.
2. Roger Highfield. “DNA survey finds all humans are 99.9pc the same.” The Telegraph, 20 December 2002. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1416706/DNA-survey-finds-all-humans-are-99.9pc-the-same.html.
3. R. Bowden, T.S. MacFie, S. Myers, G. Hellenthal, E. Nerrienet, et al. “Genomic Tools for Evolution and Conservation in the Chimpanzee: Pan troglodytes ellioti Is a Genetically Distinct Population.” PLoS Genet, 2012. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1002504
4. Lydia Denworth. “Is There a ‘Female’ Brain?” Scientific American, September 2017.
5. Ibid, 40.
6. Ibid, 41.
7. Brenda Frink. “The pill and the marriage revolution.” The Clayman Institute for Gender Research, 29 Sep 2011. http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/pill-and-marriage-revolution
8. Cordelia Fine and Mark A. Elgar. “Promiscuous Men, Chaste Women, and Other Gender Myths.” Scientific American, September 2017.
9. Ibid, 36.
10. Angus Chen. “Of Meat and Men.” Scientific American, May 2017.