Using Nonfiction News Hooks To Sell Your Fiction

A Literal Literary Loser Learns Lots

I know, I know, it’s been a super fun couple of weeks exposing book marketers’ illicit love affairs and then suffering the loss of a potential great love just because I was a writer.

But it’s time to get back to work. Because, fun as it may be, and as much traffic as it may drive, exposing book marketers’ scams doesn’t actually market books. And it’s time to resume my book marketing.

Back at the turn of this century, I have five Figure Skating murder mysteries published as paperback originals by Berkley Prime Crime. A decade later, I got my rights to them back and re-released them as enhanced e-books, with professional videos by the Ice Theatre of NY included as part of the story.

I promoted them during the 2014 Winter Olympics by partnering with two-time Olympic champion Dick Button to produce his live Twitter commentary and, during the commercial breaks, I tweeted about my books. This was a huge success for me.

For the 2020/2021 Winter Games, I paid for advertising. Books were sold, but not enough to turn a profit. (Full breakdown of what I spent versus what I earned, here.)

What I want to talk about in this post, however, is not how I marketed, but who I marketed to.

I didn’t market to mystery readers. I marketed to figure skating fans.

Even if they didn’t read mysteries, I gambled that they were interested enough in the subject to give an unfamiliar genre a chance. Especially since I priced it reasonably, five books for only $9.99! What a bargain!

Fiction is very, very hard to sell. Whether mystery or romance or sci-fi or historical, there is just so much competition out there. Odds are, your book isn’t that different from the rest. Love, murder, spaceships, warships.

So what can make it stand out?

Not the fictional components. The non-fictional ones.

Just like I market my figure skating mysteries not as mysteries but as a behind the scenes look at what goes on at a skating competition (I worked as a researcher, writer, and producer for ABC, ESPN, NBC, TNT and Lifetime - I know where all the bodies are buried), I market my historical fiction via its non-fiction aspects.

Do you know what Stalin’s Great Terror was? How many innocent people he sent to Siberia? What life was like for them there? Read “The Nesting Dolls” and find out!

Did you know that, twenty years before the establishment of the State of Israel, that great friend of the Jews, Joseph Stalin, created a Jewish Autonomous Region on the border between Russian and China? Read “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region” to see how that worked out!

The 2024 World Figure Skating Championships are taking place this week in Canada. You can bet I am going to be all over social media, spilling tea about the icy gossip. I even appeared on a YouTube show called Spilling the Tea to discuss precisely that.

Check it out below, let me know what you think:

And then share in the Comments about the non-fiction aspects which make your fiction marketable, and how you plan to exploit it for fun and profit!