Marketing Tips

We thought we would share some great tips with you on how a writer can market their work for little or no cost. All of the following tips are from “Guerrilla Marketing for Writers”
1) Content: Publishers waste millions of dollars a year buying and promoting books that fail.
No amount of money or marketing can overcome a book that doesn’t deliver. So your first challenge is to write a book that is the best it can be. The content of your books will determine how you sell them to publishers and promote them to book buyers. Content precedes commerce.
2) Commitment: You must make a commitment to your marketing program.
Talent isn’t enough. You need motivation—and persistence, too. —LEON URIS
Once you decide on the best promotion plan for your books, make the commitment to stick with it.
The only time you can safely stop promoting your books is when you’re ready to stop writing them. Before then, commit yourself to the Rule of Five: do five things every day to market your books. Think of it this way: A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.
3) Investment: You must think of marketing as an investment in your future.
Most best-selling authors don’t strike gold with their first book. Their sales grow with a succession of books until they write the breakout book that catapults them onto the best-seller list, where they stay for the rest of their careers.
Until your promotional efforts pay off and you become a successful author, consider the money you spend on promotion as an investment that will pay for itself many times over.
4) Consistent: Your marketing must be consistent.
You must make your promotion consistent so that, over time, the media and your readers become more receptive to you and your books. One of the weapons in chapter 18 is the marketing calendar that you will create and tweak as needed every year. But once you’re convinced about the most effective way to promote your books, don’t change your approach. Make your promotion, like your books, consistently first rate. Also be consistent about the frequency with which you write your books and when they are published. One book a year is the usual pace.
5) Confident: You must make potential readers confident in you.
Consistency creates familiarity, familiarity builds confidence, and confidence is the most important factor in determining what makes consumers buy. It’s more important than quality, selection, price, and service.
6) Patient: You must be patient with your marketing.
If you’re doing all you can for your books, take two more steps: • Follow up on your efforts. • Have patience with your promotion plan, the sales of your books, and the development of your career.
7) Assortment: You must use an assortment of weapons to ensure the success of your marketing.
Small businesses shouldn’t try to use all the weapons in their arsenals at once, but should unleash them over time with a well-thought-out plan. Unfortunately, this is a luxury writers don’t have. Unless publishers make a commitment to a book, they test-market it with the first printing. To sustain your publisher’s belief in your book’s future, you have to create maximum promotional firepower for it during the crucial four- to six-week launch window when it’s published.
Firing as many weapons as you can integrate effectively into your plan is the best way to accomplish this. If your book doesn’t gain momentum fast enough, your publisher will give up on it and go on to other books. Make it your goal to use at least sixty weapons. The wider the assortment of weapons you use, the wider the grin on your face will be when your royalty check arrives. However, if you can’t use a weapon effectively, don’t use it at all.
A Web site alone will not make your books successful, nor will a media kit. Regard every weapon as 1 percent of your promotion plan. The best way to guarantee the success of your books is to use as many weapons as you can. The more weapons you unleash on publication and the more completely you integrate them, the more powerful each of them becomes. Unity and variety are two of the keys to victory in the publishing wars. The bigger your arsenal, the greater your victories.
A bookseller who was chosen to receive the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year Award was using seventy-four guerrilla marketing weapons (and he was still trying to figure out how to use the other twenty-six!).
Guerrilla Marketing for Writers: 100 No-Cost, Low-Cost Weapons for Selling Your Work – http://www.bookdaily.com/book/1034711
~~We hope this helps you as an author to get your work out there to the waiting reader! K.R. and I are working diligently, daily, to put into practice all the things we read about and learn. The above are some great encouragements that have helped to keep us motivated to move forward. Another great resource, is MasterKoda on Facebook. This author/editor/illustrator/marketing group is full of people who know the real meaning of putting others first. Join us, you won’t be sorry you did.

Tamy Burns