Why do I shy away when people ask me for specific help marketing their books? After all, I am the guy who brags in forums and Facebook comments about having thirty years of sales and marketing background*, right?
Because marketing is both harder and easier than people believe. It’s hard to get right. It’s easy to do.
Today, I’m beginning a series of posts about how you, the Indie Writer, should handle marketing. Every week ~or so~ I will take you through some basic concepts and break it down into easy chunks that even wallflowers will love.
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The idea behind marketing is to make people drool over the bacon sizzling in your pan. The trick to marketing is aromatic bacon cooked where the right people will smell it. (Not the religiously offended, fitness fanatics, vegans, etc).
The catalyst for writing this post was the brilliant and spot-on article by Tiana Warner, 7 Things I Learned from the World’s Best Marketers on Jane Friedman’s blog. Take a moment to read her post. All of her points are true -but- they’re presented as hard facts.
The only fact in marketing is this: Every successful marketing campaign is unique. What worked for Joe cannot work for Mary. What worked for Mary will not work for Fred. Etc. If there was a method to marketing, you would use the Mastercard campaign (most successful campaign ever) and insert the name of your book, “Some things in life are priceless. For everything else there’s ____.” Yeah. Doesn’t quite have the right ring to it, does it?
Before we get into the specific steps you need to take, you need to understand some basic concepts.
The key to successful marketing is YOUR attitude:
1) Respect your reader
2) Comprehend the standards of your industry & genre
3) Know your competition
For writers, that means:
- Put your best work in front of your readers. Study the craft every day. Read books on writing. Listen to podcasts. Use critique groups and editors.
- Have a realistic grasp of where your book fits in the industry and act accordingly.
- Read every day, not so you can dismiss others for their mistakes but to find and learn from their successes. Everyone does something right–find it. Read great authors, classic authors, debut authors, unknown authors, bad authors. Always have a book in your hand.
No amount of marketing will sell a badly positioned product. The lesson of the Edsel is the classic lesson in marketing. Ford gave it the biggest marketing budget in the history of the automotive industry—but the product sucked. End of story.
Quality product (a damn good book) is the first and most important aspect of your marketing campaign. How can you tell if your product is ready to market? It will have a life of its own.
No book will go viral without effort. People want to believe that Hugh Howey’s WOOL took off without help. Not true. Look at this post from November 8, 2011 called “Maybe I should finally mention Wool.” Now look at his blog stream**. His post the week before was about NaNoWriMo. After Nov. 8th, most of his posts are about WOOL.
Classic marketing from Mr. Howey: write several great stories, recognize the one that resonates with readers, flog it.
Next week, I’ll dive into more detail about positioning your book in the genre. After that we’ll talk about finding your target audience. Check out my free books, upper right, as they will be discussed in future posts.
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Peace, Seeley
* I spent thirty years as a global account manager focused on data centers, networks, storage, and infrastructure. Nerdy stuff, I won’t bore you with the details.
** Depending on when you read this, you will have to fish around on Mr. Howey’s site to find the dates because it renumbers the pages as new posts are added.
