I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Marketing, I research, plan, and evaluate my marketing and promotion activities.
As I’m thinking about self-publishing my eventual memoir and promoting it myself, I need to start learning how I would go about marketing that book.
In 4 Pillars of Book Marketing, or How to Sell More Books in Less Time, book marketer Matt Holmes outlines the four things someone marketing her book needs to consider:
The book product page. He writes, “Your book sells your book.” You must have a high-quality book presented well with good reviews and ratings. Your book must have an attractive cover, description, pricing, and reading sample.
With a compelling and engaging book product page in place, all of your marketing and advertising will perform that much better because your conversions (i.e., sales directly from your ads) will be higher.
Traffic. Get eyeballs on your book product page via advertising (such as Facebook ads and Amazon ads) and publicity (reviews in traditional media, podcast interviews, social media mentions). You don’t have to do everything you can think of to generate traffic:
[There] are many forms of traffic generation, including, but by no means limited to advertising, newsletter swaps, group promotions, and promotional sites. But you don’t need to do all of them. When you’re just starting out, pick one or two platforms and really get those dialed in before you start adding more to your plate.
Audience building. Build your own email list, don’t just rely on your followers on some social media platform such as Twitter or Facebook. You can get banned from those platforms or they can shut down.
[Make] sure you are de-platforming people by encouraging them to join your email list, which is best achieved through offering them something in return for their email address, such as a short story, a novella, a bonus chapter, or even a full book; this is commonly known as a reader magnet.
And he advises, “Remember, you are communicating with real people, so be sure to treat them as such. And ultimately, be your true authentic self.”
Profit. Unless you’re independently wealthy (and I am not), you won’t be able to continue writing full time without generating a profit. Holmes suggests tracking royalties earned, total ad or marketing spend (perhaps broken down by platform), total orders, total page reads (for Kindle Unlimited), email subscriber count, and profit.
I really enjoyed that blog post, so I checked out Holmes’ website where he offers a lot more advice to authors looking to promote their books. In The 11-Year “Overnight Success” Story, he writes about the compound effect of writing books and marketing them over time:
Success isn’t linear. It’s exponential.
Which means:
- Your first book teaches you how to write and publish
- Your second book teaches you how to market
- Your third book is where things start clicking
- Your fourth book is where the compound effect begins
But most authors quit after book two because they’re comparing their Chapter 1 to someone else’s Chapter 20.
I love this because it gives me the idea that the first book I write is not for making lots of sales and money but rather for learning how to write and publish. That makes it much lower stakes… and it makes me think that maybe I need to just get the thing written and figure out how to publish it and market it.
And it also makes me wonder if what I really want to write and publish for my first book is a memoir. Perhaps instead I want to do a nonfiction book, with similar content (about midlife romance, creative confidence, personal sovereignty)?
It probably doesn’t matter what I start with. The main thing is that I get a book published and work on promoting it. I’m not intending to just write one book and be done.