Pubspeaks

Discover Your Inner Economist—Generate Buzz About Your Book with Incentives

By Kaofeng Lee, The Washington Writer Editor

Tyler Cowen

Well, author Tyler Cowen didn’t spend too much time talking about the supply and demand and negative externalities of love. Nor did he discuss the intricacies of gross national products and gross domestic products or trade deficits and inflation. Instead we talked about writing, and from his perspective, how an economist thinks about writing.

Cowen offered some pretty interesting insights into the art of writing. “Stop writing before you want to stop writing,” he advises. Stop when you’re really excited about what you’re doing. That way, when you pick up your pen or laptop again, you’re feeling fresh and you’ll remember that the last time you wrote, you felt good and was excited. As a result, you see yourself always excited and wanting to write.

Cowen also believes that writers should write for themselves. “Your prime audience should be yourself,” said Cowen. “Three-quarters of people who buy books don’t read them, and I love this fact.” People buy books because they want a relationship with the author, he explained. Because of this, as a writer, you have complete freedom to write whatever you wish and please yourself. Writing is about the process and one shouldn’t write with the objective of making money, Cowen adds.

As the evening progressed, Cowen talked about how he marketed his book. To generate buzz about it, he explained how he used prizes and rewards to get people to buy his book. One major vehicle he used was his blog, www.marginalrevolution.com. He cautions, however, “Don’t use your blog to market your book.” So how did Cowen use his blog to promote his book? By creating incentives for other things and tying his book to those incentives.

He created a secret blog and told his readers he’d send them the link if they emailed him and told him that they pre-ordered his book from amazon.com. One of the results of the “secret” blog was that it generated discussions as to the validity of the secret blog, since a clever google search could probably locate the “secret” blog, thereby not making it a secret or very special after all. Nevertheless, subsequent discussion and postings about the “secret” blog meant that the blog, and his book in relation, was being talked about at every posting.

Another idea he came up with was to do personalized podcasts. The point of podcasting is to disseminate information far and wide. Cowen’s idea, however, was to do a special, just-for-you podcast if you pre-ordered his book. “A lot of people wrote in,” Cowen said. Listeners were allowed to disseminate the personalized podcasts, and he believes that those podcasts have been disseminated more widely than his “free” podcasts. Again, the personalized podcasts were the incentives and his book, the tie-in.

Despite having over 40,000 readers a day on his bog, those readers are not key candidates for buying his book, Cowen admits. After all, the readers of his blog are getting his writings for free. But the key to using the blog as a marketing tool was to use the blog as a vehicle to provide incentives for readers to talk about his book and perhaps buy it.

Media is another audience blogs can reach. The media read blogs to determine how people are thinking about issues. “Even blogs with very few readers will have media reading it,” said Cowen.
As the internet gets more competitive, it speeds up reading, in terms of what people say about books. “The internet has changed the marketing of books. What works now can change very quickly.” Nevertheless, the internet is a useful tool in marketing books. “Make sure your book cover looks good as a small jpeg on Amazon,” Cowen advises.

In closing his talk, Cowen left us with one more pearl of wisdom, from an economic standpoint. “Think about writing in economics terms—in terms of costs and benefits. What is the reader benefiting from your book?”

As I reflect upon Cowen’s talk, I realize he didn’t talk about his book at all. He framed his talk around what would interest us: writing and marketing. That was his incentive. And as I share his thoughts and advice, I’ll mention, oh, by the way, his latest book is: Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate your Dentist.

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