Marketing. Sales. What beautiful words, because they mean your book will be selling, right? And the answer to that question is Yes—IF the marketing is done right. However, look back at the previous part of this article to see some of the problems we face in marketing in the general publishing industry. The subject is very complex, and not many publishers have any kind of true (see my definition in the previous part) marketing program. As I said before, it will most likely come down to YOU. How much effort are YOU personally going to put into marketing your book?
Last time we talked about your personal website that will feature you and your book, and here’s another little tidbit I didn’t mention about your site. While it’s okay to use many sites, yours or others, to put out the word about your book, on your personal book site, don’t mix anything else on it. This is a site that’s about YOU and YOUR BOOK, and you don’t want to have visitors looking at family pictures, your dog, the products you sell at your business downtown, etc. You want them concentrating on you and your book. You can set something up on YouTube or one of the other social sites as long as it features only your book, but don’t combine anything else on this site. (Get more sites if you want them and link them, but don’t combine them.) If you have several books, then it’s okay to put them all in one site. James Patterson and Steve Martini only have a single site each showcasing all their works, but that’s basically all they have on their sites.
Once you have your site and you’ve looked at it and looked and looked and have finally decided it really does look professional, how do you get anyone to find it and look at it? You can pay a lot of different companies a lot of money for them to guarantee some kind of perfect placement in Google and others, but as I’ve said before, do you have a lot of money? If you do, you would likely be much better off hiring someone to actually market your book for you and put your money where it will do the most good. The facts of Internet marketing, though, are that there are literally millions of people and companies out there trying to use the same venue as you are to market their product. That includes at least thousands of other authors trying to sell their books. How are you going to get noticed in and around all of the other ads.
There are people out there who can do a reasonable job of getting ads out where you will be seen. But, look at their pitches very carefully because there are a lot of shysters, also. I bought into a “mass e mail” program because I wanted to get my book out in front of millions of people for exposure. It only cost me about $40. But, I knew in advance that it was an “almost spam” thing that wouldn’t likely get really noticed by most of the people that got e mailed. However, I figured if my ad got out in the mail to three or four million people, maybe one percent (30,000?) of the people might get interested. Even 1/10 ? Could sell a lot of books, right? There are lots of companies out there that you can buy into for small amounts of money, but just be very aware of what they are really going to do.
Before we go further, it would be a really good thing to define a major question: Who do you think is going to buy your book? Because virtually all marketing efforts will depend on who your potential market is and how you might be able to reach that market. Here you need to get pretty specific. If you’ve written a children’s nursery rhyme book, you are not likely going to get much response by advertising in a hunting magazine or a mechanics website, even if they are really cheap. You probably need to find ways to get it into churches, day care centers, young mothers groups and so on. If, on the other hand, you’ve written an analysis of the best techniques for building porches, sheds and lawn furniture, you should be trying to get noticed in Popular Mechanics magazine, the local carpenters club or other places made for DIY ers (Do It Yourself ers). Maybe the toughest project around is finding where to reach people who are interested in plain old mystery books. Dime a dozen; libraries and bookstores are full of them. How are you going to get exposure for yours? It has to be a major question as you try to market your book: Who is your target audience?
I mentioned libraries. Good place to try, right? If you only got each library in the country to buy one copy of your book, that would be about 15,000 copies. So, how do you get into libraries? There are several ways to do this, and they come in stages.
We’ll pick the subject up again in Part 15.
Care to comment? Write to me at JimMagwood@aol.com.
And visit the website at http://www.JimMagwood.com.
Also, drop in to The Author’s Inn, a site designed to showcase author’s works and connect them with readers. http://www.the authors inn.com.
Author Resource:
Jim Magwood is the author of the international mystery novel, SANCTION. Visit him and SANCTION at his website, http://www.JimMagwood.com . Jim is also the webmaster of the site, The Author’s Inn, dedicated to showcasing author’s works. Visit The Author's Inn at http://www.the-authors-inn.com .
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