MARKETING OUR BOOK
In my first book, Everything I Learned About How to Publish a Book, I shared the publishing process that I learned while helping my husband, Jack, publish and promote his book on bestseller lists in multiple categories on Amazon, get it into over a hundred libraries, and have it translated into Chinese.
If you’ve gone through the publishing process, by now you’ve probably discovered that writing and publishing are easier than getting people to buy your book.
If you are not ready to invest your time, money, and effort, this book is not for you. If you are reading this book, I am guessing that you have already published, want to run your self-publishing business successfully, and are looking for some extra information on book marketing. I have learned the ins and outs of the self-publishing industry and experienced many ups and downs while marketing my husband’s book. I want to share everything I know and have learned so far. This book will help you develop your own actionable marketing plan. It will help you save time, money, and unnecessary headaches as you move through the process.
When we decided to publish Jack’s book, because, we wanted to do a project together that would leave a legacy. I followed other authors’ advice on ways to promote our book to gain readership. Common activities like running promotions, doing giveaways, and participating in author interviews helped gained visibility and sales for our book, but the results were inconsistent and hard to maintain.
After about a year, I realized our approach to these isolated activities was not effective. We were using a variety of promotional opportunities and hoping the right person would see the right ad at the right time. On top of that, we were just one of many “me too” ads that got drowned out in all the noise. So all in all, it wasn’t the lack of doing but the lack of strategic planning that failed to sustain results. We needed a purposeful marketing plan that would yield positive, consistent and predictable results.
Although I am new to the publishing industry, I am not new to marketing. I am not an expert, but I’ve gained valuable marketing knowledge and experience from running my own businesses, from my studies, and from my research of marketing options specific to books.
Rather than giving advice, I am sharing my knowledge and experience with you. Inspired by various marketing concepts invented by great business leaders and marketers, I’ve taken many ideas based on fundamental marketing principles and applied them to marketing self-published books. So far, I’ve been able to implement parts of my marketing plan to create positive, consistent and predictable results. Everything takes time to do and I can’t wait to see the end result once my plan is fully implemented, but I am so excited that I want to share this with you now! I hope this book can be a signpost pointing the way for you, too.
There are many freely available recommendations that focus on ways to manipulate system algorithms and on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase visibility of an individual web page or an entire site. Because these tactics and techniques are susceptible to change and often require extensive technical knowledge, I have included very little information about them in this book. However, anything you can do to raise your book’s visibility will help, so please do implement these techniques if you have the desire and the time to do them properly.
The self-publishing industry will continue to evolve and improve, so certain tools, practices, and resources may change or cease to exist at any given time. For that reason, I did not include information on how to navigate websites or how to use the tools. Instead, I included the principles and my personal experiences to guide you through the process.
This is the second book in the Because Self-Publishing Works series. As in the first book, Everything I Learned About How to Publish a Book, I’ve made sure to include only the most practical and relevant content. I present it to you in an unbiased manner so you can reach your own conclusions and decisions. This book is designed to be both interactive and as a reference guide. It contains links to checklists, templates and tools. These are exclusively available to you and some are specifically designed to help you carry out the action items throughout this book. You can download them all at once or as you go along.
Are you ready? Let’s get started.
