How do I market the books already published and have time to write the new books?
How do you corral the social media? It’s taking over my entire life!
I can’t focus on the new book when I’m so into promotion for the recent one. Help!
These are normal questions. This is the age-old question for any artist. How to make a living and create amazing art at the same time? I don’t think we’ve yet hit a solution either. I hear novelists, artists, screenwriters, actors, producers, and directors asking the same questions all over? Been on any art or writing forums lately?
There is no easy one-size-fits-all answer.
It depends on your work. What strategy do you have in place to write new work and promote the published work? How do you keep yourself sequestered to bring forth the new dream when every day Twitter scrolls by like textual diarrhea?
I like to think of marketing as playing a game. Robert Middleton of Marketing Ball fame talks about how marketing is like a game of baseball. You move from base to base as you answer the questions your prospective customers ask of you. For book authors, prospects are asking: Does this author know what she’s talking about? Is she a good writer? Does he provide practical tips for me? Do I learn what I need to know from this guy’s book?
Think about how you can create a marketing strategy from just those questions. You could start a blog or eZine and answer those questions in different variations using different mediums. A blog post talking about how you discovered the steps you give in your book, an eZine sharing a case study about how another professional you know tried their own method, then found yours and they had much more success. Get the idea?
Another strategy would be to tell a story. And we’re writers, this is what we do for a living, right? The story can be how all your life you were drawn to this certain kind of cheese (bad example, but bear with me) and then suddenly, one day you realized that this other cheese suited your needs better. And voila, your life was changed, the world opened up, the sun came out, and so on and so on. You engage your audience (and their questions) by telling them how you experienced those same questions and how you decided to answer them. And then you publish that “story” as a manifesto or as a white paper or as a series of blog posts that people searching for you on Google will find when they click on your web site or blog. You’re preloading your content with the most likely questions. And then on your blog, you host a link to our book from independent booksellers and Amazon so that people who see that you do know what you’re talking about. They realize you will answer all their questions and they will learn something from you and they order your book. Or they leave a comment or they lurk for several maddening weeks until they buy.
You can’t force people to buy your book. You can’t force anyone to read your blog. You can, however, make it so inviting, so interesting, so intriguing that your target readership just can’t resist.
Action Tip: Information no longer goes out to an audience. The audience comes looking for information (mostly via the Internet). How can you take advantage of this shift in our society (called inbound marketing) and use it to your advantage?
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