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    How To Build A Book Marketing Strategy: Writer's Reach, #1
    How To Build A Book Marketing Strategy: Writer's Reach, #1
    How To Build A Book Marketing Strategy: Writer's Reach, #1
    Ebook95 pages1 hourWriter's Reach

    How To Build A Book Marketing Strategy: Writer's Reach, #1

    By A. J. Sieling

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    About this ebook

    You've published your first book. But you've only made one sale. (It was to your mom.) So you pop onto your favorite writing forum and ask, "How do ya'll market a book? I just published and can't seem to get anyone to buy it."

    Two days later, you have eight thousand suggestions, from "update your book covers" to "pay for ads" to "offer a sacrifice to the wolf god on the night of the blood moon." There are endless options available, and the one piece of advice that keeps rearing its ugly head is this: "You should try it! ...but what works for me might not work for you."

    So how do you choose where to spend your marketing time and money? With seemingly infinite options and zero guarantee that anything will work, how do you decide what to try and what to avoid, what to pay for and what to save for later?

    In How To Build A Marketing Strategy, you will learn exactly what the title says: how to build a book marketing strategy. It will go over the various components of a strategy, how to harness your own skills and resources to market your books, and how to grow your marketing strategy as your author business grows--all while allowing you to remain flexible, and do this marketing thing your own way.

    Don't flail around in the dark anymore--make a plan and follow through.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAriele Sieling
    Release dateMar 23, 2021
    ISBN9781393834069
    How To Build A Book Marketing Strategy: Writer's Reach, #1
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      Book preview

      How To Build A Book Marketing Strategy - A. J. Sieling

      Marketing is the Worst

      I hate marketing. Marketing is the worst.

      If you’ve never said this, you’ve heard someone who has.

      There seems to be a general theme in the writing community that marketing is the worst thing that could ever happen to you, the worst chore the universe ever invented. If you ask a writer why they want to be published by a major publisher, nine times out of ten, they will say, Because I don’t want to do marketing. (Spoiler: these days, chances are you’ll have to market one way or another.)

      I’ll admit, I’ve personally said it too. I’ve complained bitterly that the lot of a writer is the lot of a marketer. I’ve heard other writers say, I hate marketing, or I’m really bad at marketing, or marketing is evil, and I’ve commiserated, meaning every moan and grumble from the bottom of my soul. I’ve seen huge, long posts in Facebook groups about how marketing is impossible and chimed in with the chorus. I’ve heard it at conferences. Read it in books. Agonized over every little option, opinion, and whine.

      But I kept at it. Because my dream was to be a successful indie author, and from what I could see, marketing was the only way to make that dream a reality.

      Then, a few years back, I came to a realization: if I really, truly, need to do all this work to market my books, must I hate it so?

      And the answer is no. There are thousands of ways to make marketing easier, but the primary method is by going about it smarter.

      In this book, I’m going to walk you first through the process of not hating marketing anymore, and then through how to do it smarter.

      The one thing I will say at the beginning, however, is this: there is no one correct way to market a book. There are lots of ways. There are lots of tactics, ideas, and methods to structure your approach to book marketing. If someone tells you, THIS is the way to market a book, but it doesn’t seem to be working for you… drop it and move on to something else.

      That’s the power and beauty of being independent. You can try anything you want to whenever you want to. And if it doesn’t work? You move on.

      What Is Marketing?

      First off, let’s figure out how to stop hating everything about marketing. To do that, I’m going to take you to the very beginning.

      What exactly is marketing?

      Easy: it’s communicating to interested parties about your product (or service or institution).

      For authors, it’s this: telling readers about your book.

      And what exactly is so bad about that?

      Now, whatever voice in your head is saying, I don’t like put myself out there, or I worry no one will like my books, or I don’t like to be the center of attention, to that voice, I say, STOP.

      If you knew the person listening to you wanted to hear about your books, would you like talking about them? Do you like talking about your books to your spouse? Your closest friend? Your beta reader? Your reader group? Yourself?

      If the answer is no, then it might be worth choosing a different career path.

      I personally love reading. I love books. I love my books. I love people who love my books. I love talking about my books. I love my characters, my worlds, and my ideas. And I could talk about them all day long if someone would actually listen.

      So if that’s all marketing is, why is it so hard?

      It’s not. What’s hard is talking about our books strategically. What’s hard is finding people who want to listen. What’s hard is knowing what to say and when.

      We love our books, presumably. And we love talking about things we love. We love talking about our books.

      So perhaps the thing we hate is the feeling that we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know what to say and when. And when we try, it’s like we’re doing it all wrong.

      What we hate is not marketing. It’s the feeling of failure.

      The feeling like we’re throwing paint against the wall and hoping it makes a picture. Or setting monkeys free at a keyboard and hoping they type out a screenplay.

      The truth is, nobody likes to feel stupid. And marketing, while simple in concept, is an extremely complex thing in practice. After all, there are people in the world who have paid tens of thousands of dollars to get bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees and PhDs in marketing. And big companies pay individual people to do little tiny slivers of the whole of marketing—one person is entirely responsible for all emails that a company sends out, while a completely different person is responsible for social media, and another person is responsible for making the plan or measuring the outcome. And sometimes, these people have even more people under them who make content and figure out analytics and do design work.

      In comparison, we authors are doing all the planning, all the content development, all the design work, all analytics, tracking, and all the everything all by ourselves. If we are lucky, we have someone helping us—a spouse, a friend, an employee. But most of us are completely on our own

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