I’d like to thank for allowing me to subject you…er, rather allowing me this opportunity share with you my limited expertise in the field of book marketing. However, I do have over twenty five years of experience in the field of self promotion, and marketing of small businesses on less than shoe string budgets. My latest opportunity to practice my skills in self promotion and small business marketing is with my own writing career.
What? Did I just say, “Self promotion and small business marketing in the same sentence as writing career?” What? This is usually followed by the standard line of, “I’m not in business, I’m a writer!”
I’ve heard that line only a few hundred dozen times and I’ve only been blogging about the subject about six months. What many would be writers don’t realize is that writing is a business. A small business with potential of being a very big profit maker, but few of us go into writing worrying about how much money we’ll make writing our poems, short stories or even novels. We go into writing because we believe we have something to say or we can help people or we just have great story to tell. But the house hold names from the literary field, Grisham, Clancy, King, Roberts, Cussler, and several dozen more, did go into it realizing up front they wanted top make a living writing books and they approached it that way.
As a non household name, you need to stop and first of all, decide where you see your writing going. Do you see it as just a hobby or would you really like to have it make so much money you could quit your day job and write full time. For simplicity, we’ll assume that you want to be a household name. You want to be read in mass by the public and you want to be showered with acclaim as the next great literary genius. You just know you can stand on top of Hemingway and crush him…sorry. I get carried away when I start thinking about how my new novel due out this summer titled “Reprisal! The Eagle Rises!” could be the next great American novel.
But let’s get back on track here. You want to be more than just someone who hides in the spare room, yelling at the kids now and then to be quiet, with a shelf full of manuscripts that need dusting. This is where self promotion and marketing come in.
Sending off your manuscript to a publisher for their consideration is self promotion. It is also marketing. You’re getting your name out in front of the publishing company’s gate keeper, the person who does a cursory review of your manuscript and decides if it gets a closer look by someone else higher up the food chain. It is also marketing, in the most minimal of ways because your asking them to buy to your book. Maybe they will, but in the current market place, they probably won’t. The market is just too packed with good and or great stories and the only ones given serious consideration without the author providing proof of a following, by way of a career in the writing field in non fiction, such as reporting or commentary are celebrities. The Paris Hilton’s of the world or rock stars, former politicians and movie stars. If your not one of those people it doesn’t mean you can’t grow that following, create that buzz about your book or you can’t make money from your book. It just means you have to get serious, about self promotion and marketing.
Three paragraphs back, I joked about my desire to be a household name and of standing on top of Hemingway to get there, you of course groaned, but I got the name of my upcoming book in front of you. Quick what’s it called? Made you look. That’s a marketing ploy for getting the title of your work known. The New York ad men don’t usually use that style of plug when they do their multimillion dollar budget ads but then I’m on half a shoe string and even that maybe more than my budget can stand. The whole idea is to get exposure for you as a writer and for what you have written.
Everything you do, from this moment forward needs to be directed at developing a following for you, and here is a very basic plan for doing that. I can expand upon the different ideas here later, after you’ve enjoyed some minor success following the plan and have tuned your mind to the required setting to be able to shamelessly plug your book without making too many people barf and run away. That’s the real trick, doing it in a way that no one realizes it’s happened. I hereby claim the coinage of the name, “Stealth Marketing” But that’s only part of the plan.
Things you’ll need in order to be serious about marketing yourself and your book start with joining social networking sites. It’s easy and painless so just jump right in and start posting your opinions. Be sure to join a few of the sites to start with and then change sites, add some, lose some as you grow in confidence that you can write well enough to get your point across. That’s what the sites are for. Writing practice! So practice.
Then you want to get yourself set up with a blog. I was very hesitant to start blogging, myself. I knew it was a good way to get people to know about my work but I had no idea what I would write about. I knew I had a good story and I thought I had a publisher, so I wasn’t in any big hurry to blog.
Then my publishers announced that they wanted me blogging. They didn’t care where I did it, just that I did it. It was one of the ways they wanted me to get exposure and it was hoped that after a while, I’d develop a following. It was part of their marketing plan for any books they published. So get blogging. I’m currently blogging on Blogspot. Writerchriskeys.blogspot.com, check me out and become a follower. It’s a very easy site to set up your blog on. You can also get paid to blog and there are several sites where you can do that. A couple of pay per blog sites are, Today.com, Fanbox.com, and Hubpages.com. They will all pay depending upon the number of hits your blog receives.
One of the biggest social websites is Face Book. You’ll want to be setup there, for sure. Once you’ve opened your Face Book page you’ll want to start seeking as many friends as you can get. One of the ways I’ve been able to develop friends on Face Book is to ask friends that I already have to recommend friends that I can ask to be friends. On Face Book, you’ll post your excerpts, blogs, info about you and your writings. Don’t get too personal but do try to provide some insight into the inner workings of your creativity.
Then you’ll want to open a twitter account. I have to confess, I’m struggling with twitter. I’m unsure what to talk about and how to limit my word usage to 140 characters. After all I was politician and I am trained to expound upon a subject until at least fifty percent of the audience falls a sleep. I have trouble being brief, but I’m a reformed politician. Really I am. Honest you can trust me. To get a good handle on twitter, I’d suggest you check out a web friend of mine, Tony Eldridge, author of, “The Samson Effect” soon to be a major motion picture. He has a website dealing with marketing for authors, titled “Marketing tips for Authors”. I whole heartily recommend you sign up for his news letter, lots of great marketing tips.
You will next need to develop your own website. Yep, you need a website. It’s not as hard as it seems. There are several free website building sites and many, when they do charge for hosting are very inexpensive. Mine currently is only five dollars a month. I’m using Intuit-Homestead.com.
There are dos and don’ts, to having a website. A few of the major things to keep in mind: Your website needs to be user friendly and it needs ask the reader to buy your book(s), blog collections and /or your branded collectables. Yes, your website will be your book store, where you’ll sell your books and maybe posters, coffee cups, ball caps, pen sets etc. plus you’ll post excerpts from your books, info about yourself, maybe links with other authors and ads from Google and Yahoo to help pay for your host fees.
There are going to be some expenses in promoting yourself and your book for things like travel to book signings, book trailer video, book marks with your info, picture, book title and or other info you see fit to put on it, editing, book covers and listings on the right lists to insure that your book(s) are available to libraries and the major booksellers.
Now some of these costs you’ll avoid if you are lucky enough to get a traditional publishing contract but if your like the vast majority of us new writers, you’ll be self publishing until you develop enough of a following to ensure a strong likelihood that the publishers will make money off your book. By then though, you may not want to be with a publisher who is only willing to pay you 20% of the profit when you can get 85% of the profit when self publishing. Just a little something to remember as your writing career develops.
You’ll also want to learn all you can about virtual book tours, developing links with other authors by helping to promote them with blurbs about them and their books. Most of the other authors will gladly trade blurbs, which helps both of you. You need to develop friendly relationships with as many other authors as possible. Your success, as well as theirs, is dependent upon getting as many other people talking about you and your work as possible. Don’t worry if the other authors are new or old pro’s, because you never know who someone else knows, and who they might introduce to your writing, and where that might go.
I’ve mentioned a number of things so far and none of it is too taxing on your time or your wallet, but you still have couple of things to do. The last clear marketing item you need to be aware of needing to do, is also the first thing that you need to do -- ask for the sale! Ask on your blog, on your website, on your book marks, your book covers your email, your social interaction sites, everywhere. If you don’t ask, you won’t get. There are a few ways to ask for the sale, and it takes a mix of the methods to be successful in making the sale. Those ways are, directly, indirectly and the stealth way. To be honest, the stealth way is part of the indirect way. The direct way is when you come out and just ask some to buy your book. You know, “Hey, you should buy my book.” The indirect way is showing the picture of your book cover with a note about how you can use pay pal to buy it. The stealth way is showing a picture of your book cover and have a person reading it with a big smile on their face. You don’t actually ask them to buy it, but infer they will be happy if they do. Which if you have really good vision, that’s exactly what I’m doing in the background of this very page. There is a good looking man or woman, which ever works for you and their reading my newest story, The Fishing Trip-A Ghost Story and they’re wearing a great big smile. Well ok that’s not quite true, well actually it’s a lie but you get the general idea right?
So now you have the very basics for developing your self promotion and marketing plan, destined to make you a household name and get your books read by the largest possible number of readers, except for the actual book itself. When you get ready to publish, you need to be sure you are offering the very best possible product you can. Make sure you have had the work professionally edited, that the cover art is very professional, that the books layout is crisp clean and easy to read and that story itself is one that’s worth while for someone other than you to read. Five hundred pages about how your pet frog likes to eat fruit flies, instead of house flies just won’t draw as many readers as a rags to riches story of a handicapped individual who overcomes impossible odds to become the President, and then the U.N.’s leader, when all hostilities ended between Arabs and Israelis. If the work you’re selling isn’t very well written, or the story isn’t compelling, then at best you’ll only sell a few copies even if you have the absolute greatest marketing campaign ever conceived. The word of mouth of how bad it is will kill it. Unless of course that’s the niche you’re trying to fill, then maybe by telling people it’s so bad they need to read it, just might be the best way to market it.
Thanks for enduring, Chris Keys the author of Reprisal! The Eagle Rises!, The Fishing Trip-A Ghost Story and The Motor Home-God Does Work in Mysterious Ways! Look for all three books this summer as Ebooks and POD’s. Follow Chris on Blogspot, Facebook and Twitter, as well as, Writer’s World.
Books are what is meant to fill the space between your ears! You should read one or all of mine! **********
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