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.
In order to build a sustainable business writing and selling books, Matt Holmes suggests you think like a publisher, not an author:
Authors think: “I hope readers find my book.”
Publishers think: “How do I get my book in front of the right readers?”Authors think: “I’ll write the best book possible and hope it sells.”
Publishers think: “How can I deliver a quality book to the market profitably and enjoy writing it?”Authors think: “Marketing feels icky and sales-y.”
Publishers think: “Marketing is how I serve readers and connect them with books they’ll love.”
I’m thinking of that second question right now: How can I deliver a quality book to the market profitably and enjoy writing it?
One pivot I’m making is towards writing a self help guide rather than a memoir. I will use pieces of my memoir in it, but self help sells a lot better than memoir. And it probably is a better fit to who I am as a writer anyway, as I’ve always leaned towards non-fiction essay style pieces, not creative fiction or nonfiction.
Now the task is to write a quality book. Holmes emphasizes how important this is in his article What We’d Do If We Had to Start Again:
But ultimately, no amount of advertising is going to sell a wishy-washy book with no substance, reads like it was written by an AI Bot, and has all the quality of a Macdonalds Happy Meal toy.
And if you do make a bunch of sales with a book like this, when the reviews and ratings start coming in, they’re going to be brutal and ruin any chance you have of turning things around.
If it takes 6-12 months to write a single book, there’s nothing wrong with that, whatever differing opinions you read or hear about.
This is your business, build it your way.
Quality books will ALWAYS beat quantity, especially in the long run.
This also means I would invest in a professional editor and a proofreader. Worth every penny.
I feel confident in my ability to produce a draft manuscript of a book that will be appealing to readers and garner generally good reviews. Now the task is to actually produce that manuscript, and then move to next steps: find an editor to work with and a proofreader.
I’m actually excited for every step of the process:
- Writing a quality draft manuscript
- Hiring helpers to improve it through editing and proofreading
- Putting together a solid and appealing book product page, with an enticing book cover and blurb, and a sample of the book.
- Marketing the book through paid advertising and other channels.
- Continuing to build my email list so that I have a dedicated list of people who appreciate and want to support my work.
I appreciate Holmes’ advice that this is a long-haul game not a get-rich-quick scheme. “Think 3-5 years, not 3-5 weeks or even 3-5 months,” he writes. That’s exactly the attitude I’m trying to cultivate by making this blogging project a 1000-day project, which may not even be long enough—1000 days is just under three years.