How to Market a Travel Book from Your Bed (During a Pandemic)
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At the intersection of motorcycles, motels, and retro Americana you’ll find Andrew Beattie—author of Sleeping Around in America: Revisiting the Roadside Motel, published with FriesenPress.
With its origins as a bucket list 50th birthday gift, Sleeping Around is a 10,000+ mile exploration of and love letter to fifty of America's remaining iconic neon-hued roadside motels. Drawing upon decades of lived experience—road trips, a motorcycle obsession, and a career in the hotel and hospitality industry—this photo and story-filled work is the culmination of years of writing, research, and preparation.
Author Andrew Beattie
The book was published on March 16th, 2020—the day FriesenPress and many others started to work from home due to COVID-19. As we now know, this marked the beginning of an extended period of quarantine, self-isolation, and sheltering-in-place. What’s an author with a travel book to do?
If you’re Andrew, you get creative. Since quarantine began, the author has been racking up thousands upon thousands of views of his Bedtime Stories with the Motelorcyclist Facebook video series on Facebook and plenty of sales of his book.
We caught up with Andrew from his home in Ottawa to ask him about his creative approach to marketing a travel book in quarantine, his digital marketing successes, how-to’s and tips for other authors, and so much more.
You’ve just published a travel book and, currently, our ability to travel is extremely limited. Can you talk a bit about the folks who are interested in and buying your book?
There’s a timeliness [to the book], especially now, as we all harken back to times when we could travel around. And we wish that things were a little simpler and there weren't millions of Americans and Canadians who are out of work, and life seemed to be a little more clear. I think the nostalgic element of this book now is more timely than probably ever.
There's going to be a huge demand for regional travel again—we're starting to see it in the United States already. People are going to go on road trips because that's the only option that they have. And motels are probably, after camping, the safest alternative because no one wants to stay in a big hotel anymore.
How did you build your following prior to publishing your book?
It's important that you know who you're targeting as your reader. What’s the audience that you're trying to attract? In my case, I was targeting motorcyclists. There are 11 million households in the United States and Canada that own at least one motorcycle. I knew that was the size of the primary market I was going after.
The median age of a motorcycle owner is 50 years old. So that tells me where I'm going to find them or what channels I would be using. I'll give you an example: at 50 years old, most people on social media are using Facebook more than they're using Instagram.
So to build my audience, I started the process really early and just posted content [on Facebook] I knew they would be interested in. I also spent a little money on Facebook advertising because you can get exceptional reach and build an audience very quickly for dirt cheap. By the time the trip came, I had around 10,000 followers on Facebook. And in the 10 or 11 months since returning, I'm up somewhere around 20,000 followers.
I also put an offer out there: if you subscribed to my newsletter, I'd give you something in return. I had already created a directory of motels that people could download for free by just subscribing to my newsletter. And I built a pretty comprehensive back-end website to support the whole project from the beginning.
Since we’ve been collectively sheltering in place, you started Bedtime Stories with the Motelorcyclist—a twice weekly show streamed on Facebook which features you interviewing a guest. You’re getting thousands of views every week—describe the process of starting Bedtime Stories and what the response has been like from viewers.
[Bedtime Stories] was a way for me to maintain relevance in a time when I felt almost totally irrelevant. This should have been a big breakout moment—the book was launched. I had speaking engagements planned. I was planning a book launch. I had invitation lists all sorted out, news releases, and everything else. And it all just went flat. Literally overnight. So, within a couple of days, I said, "Okay, I’ve got to rethink this thing completely. So what am I going to do that's different? Let's find a way to stay connected.”
Bedtime Stories was originally supposed to be me doing chapter readings, just like you would at a book launch. So I started with that, but it wasn't quite getting the flow that I wanted. And that's why the show continues to morph. I started producing that as a live show and it took me 13 or 14 episodes before I realized...it didn't need to be live because that was making it way too complicated.
It's still a one-man show delivered from my bed. Bedtime Stories is a means for me to expand my reach beyond even the following that I had built by inviting people that are known within the genre to come on. A high tide raises all ships, and I would promote [the guest] to my audience. And hopefully, they will promote me to their audience. And, as a byproduct, it helps market books.
You’ve connected with many folks on Bedtime Stories—authors, business owners, content creators, all of whom are motorcycle and/or retro enthusiasts—how have you been able to book so many subject matter experts on your show? Can you tell our audience how you approach them?
I just reach out to them and ask them! It's nothing more complicated than that. For myself and my guests, the more press, the better, even if it's just 15 or 20 minutes. It doesn't matter. One blurb.
That's why so much of [the Chilton Method] focuses on the shout out. He's absolutely right. If you can get a shout-out anywhere, it just feels good. “Ask people who are very popular and have a following in the genre” is the approach that I took. I would identify who they are, or I knew who they were because I had already read much of their material or I'd looked at their formats or styles when I was writing my own book. And some I looked up to. They all had something to contribute. So I figured I would just invite them on and let them tell their stories. And that's what it's about. My story, I'm already an authority by the very virtue of the fact that I'm inviting them on and I already have a book.
I think the approach has got to be, "I want to share your story with my audience." I don’t frame my interview like I'm asking for tips or suggestions. No, I want to share your style. I want my audience to hear your story.
What are some tips you could give other authors who are unsure how to proceed with launching their books in a time of quarantine? Are there lessons you’ve learned?
You have to know who you're trying to reach. Once you identify who your audience is, then you just have to dive into answering questions like what are they doing? Where are they going? How are they finding information? What fulfills them?
Find your niche and then figure out a way to integrate into it that's either complementary to what's being done or not being done at all—a way that’s just different enough to generate some interest. When I first had the idea of writing Sleeping Around, I started by looking at what other books were out there. There are so many people who write travelogues about their journeys across Africa, Europe, and America—that's been done so many times there was nothing I could contribute of value to that body of literature. But nobody had written about motels and motorcycles together.
Separately, if you decide to go the interview route, be prepared for a no. After you've had so many yeses, it's almost hard not to be offended when you get a no. But you have to chuck your own ego aside at that point and say, "Hey, you know what? If this doesn't fit for them, move on." Don't take it personally—there's lots of people out there that your audience would be interested in hearing from.
One of the other cool approaches I had was to give all those speakers—who were very popular in my genre and better-selling authors than me—a free copy of my book. I asked them all for blurbs and posted those blurbs to social media, along with really nice pictures of the author and their book. That generated a lot of positive results as well.
After the world reopens, do you plan on continuing the interview series in some way?
With Bedtime Stories, it does look like something I'm going to do on an ongoing basis, even post-COVID. It might be fewer [episodes per week], but I’d like to continue to interview people in the genre and then develop this into a podcast as well. It's just another product offering that supplements and supports [the book].
Aside from finally selling your book and connecting with readers in person, what are you most looking forward to when we emerge from this age of quarantine?
The ability to travel again. To me, that has been the limiting factor of [this]. I don't travel into the States or in-province all the time, but when you're restricted or you have an inability to do it, that really bugs me. That's the one thing that I'm really looking forward to doing.
To end on a hopeful note: Has COVID allowed you to work on a follow-up to Sleeping Around in America? Can we expect book 2 at some point?
I'm continuing to interview moteliers that are not included in the first book, because that's forming the basis of a second book. In two years, I'll have the material researched and ready for a second book.
Learn more about Andrew Beattie at motelorcycle.com, and click here to purchase Sleeping Around in America from the FriesenPress Bookstore.
