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The 12-Step Approach to Book Marketing
So you’ve written a book. Whew! Most writers think that the hard part is now long behind them… unfortunately, that just isn’t true. Gone are the days when all an author needed was a good book — and time to spend traveling around on the publisher’s dime doing readings and signings. If you’ve self-published, you already know that the marketing piece is in your court; but now even traditional publishers expect their authors to do the lion’s share of the book marketing.
No, no one likes to do it. We’re all artistes, after all, we’re above all that money-grubbing stuff, right? Not so, Grasshopper. Suck it up. You want people to buy your book, you have to sell it.
The first thing you need to do is get some materials together that will help you sell. Write a summary of your book and categorize it into a genre if applicable: This is important to do, and important to do right. Try it verbally as an elevator speech: condense the book’s summary into the time it would take an elevator to go up three floors. This is what will be your marketing handshake.
The next question you need to ask when you’re putting together your book marketing plan (um, you are putting together a book marketing plan, aren’t you?) is this: who is my audience?
If you can’t answer that, then selling your book is going to be an uphill battle…
