PREQUEL
TO
BOOK MARKETING
Courtesy of
Ira Blacker
G'day folks,
Welcome to an article written by Ira Blacker. Ira is the primary blogger for Printing By Design, a commercial web and
sheet fed printing company, specializing in book printing, magazine printing
and catalogs along with all of the other assorted commercial color printing for
both sheet fed and web.
"You’ve
read the book or in my case the blogs all about how to market your book. Now
let’s take a look at what happens before you start exhausting the list of what
to do, how to do it and so forth. In the very beginning and at the earliest
stages before you even start on your first marketing journey you need to
understand “the prequel” of the story of book marketing.
So what
you may ask is the “prequel”? It is your guideline for much of all that you
will be doing once you get your book back from the printer and start your book
marketing campaign. If you were shooting an arrow and wanted to successfully
hit something, you would need to know what and where your target was. It is the
same with your book when you first consider marketing it. You need to
understand and define WHO you are marketing it to.
Ideally
before you even start writing your masterpiece you should ask yourself the
following questions: “What is my book about?” “Who will it appeal to?”
“What makes it stand out?” To what demographics will it register with?” “Will
it take place in a particular location or country”?
There are many other
questions you could pose in order to best identify who your potential reader
is. Is it a he or she, white or black, young or old, upper class, middle or
lower class? If you know if similar books that you have read that aim in
the same general direction to all or any one of these groups check out their
blogs, webs and articles and see who is commenting in order to help you form a
profile of what may be your audience to be. You can interview bookstores,
libraries, forums, book clubs and ask them who the typical reader may be of the
books you may find similar to what you will be writing about or have written.
Once you
have a handle on who you are marketing to then you can market directly to them
and rifle your time spent rather than shot-gunning it. If you know that your
average would be reader is of a certain type you can go after radio interviews
on stations that broadcast to that demographic. If your book is one that would
generally appeal to women, offer your services as a guest speaker to women’s
groups. If a central plot in your group is about a person with a medical
condition, offer to speak at hospitals or if your main character is about a
business type then you may do well speaking in front of a chamber of commerce
at their luncheons. All of these instances do more than just offer you a public
relations forum and help establish your “brand” as an author. In most cases you
will be allowed to sell your book at the end of the speech or if on the radio
you can let listeners know either how to purchase your book or where you will
be speaking live next.
Once you
have identified your audience you will find many ways of getting in contact
with potential readers and can develop a marketing plan based on knowing
exactly who you are marketing to. A good example of how to use Twitter and
other social networks once you have this knowledge is to see what is trending
that relates to what you wrote about in your book.
Utilizing hashtags you can
tweet your plot or a section of the book that relates to what is currently
trending in order to wind up in the buzz going on. An example of how to do this
would be if you had a storyline about two lovers separated by a long distance
and trying to maintain their relationship using the streaming video and voice
or text using ipads, you could create a clever tweet from your story line and include
#ipad which is a very popular stream on Twitter.
I am sure
once you grasp this as a concept, as a creative mind and writer you can take
this concept and run with it quite well. You will be then better able to
“rifle” your marketing time spent in the direction that can provide you the
most results and provide you with the optimal ability to market and sell your
book. So, keep an eye on the target once you discover what and who it is and
good hunting.
Clancy's comment: Many thanks, Ira, for sharing this. More of Ira's tips and wisdom can be found on his blog:
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