By now, you've done the easy part; you've written and printed your book. Now for the hard part: getting your book into the hands of your readers. This involves two of the most harrowing ordeals you'll have to face: mastering the distribution network and marketing to your audience. Both require a document that I rarely see amongst my clients: the marketing plan.
Marketing Plan
You have a story to tell, and it's important to you that you tell it. But who will listen? Over eight thousand new titles are published every month, and yours is one of them for just one month. The odds are stacked against any single title pulling ahead of the rest, but some do. What's different about those titles? How do they differ from the competition, and what are the books in competition with yours? You're spending five to ten thousand dollars to tell your story, but how do you get people to listen to your story rather than someone else's? That's what marketing is all about: getting your book bought and your story heard.
The Push-Pull Approach
Marketing is a twofold process of "push-pull." Book distribution is a pipeline from you to the retail customer. The "push" involves you moving books into the pipeline and the "pull" involves readers taking the book out at the other end. Both are essential.
The way to begin planning for this crucial aspect of your literary success is the marketing plan. A formal, written plan:
- gives you a roadmap for the journey.
- forces you to look ahead. There's danger in projecting the past forward to predict the future in these changing times, so you need a framework within which to be creative.
- focuses you on key issues. Without that framework, you can be a butterfly, jumping from one creative idea to another but losing sight of the big picture.
- gives you a schedule. Publishing a book can take from six to 18 months, and marketing activities should start long before the printing presses roll. A marketing plan tells you what to do and when.
- shows the world, especially distributors, that you're serious. To the distribution trade, your book is just a means of making money. A good marketing plan shows that you mean business, and distributors are more likely to accept you.
What's in a Marketing Plan?
A book's marketing plan fulfills three essential tasks:
1) It identifies the key marketing issues, such as marketplace assessment, opportunities, and how you will seize them.
2) It lays out marketing tasks and goals, and who will do what, when, how, and for how much cost.
3) It states how success will be measured, so you'll know when you've succeeded.
Your marketing plan should address at least the following four main points:
The market: Who your is book written for, and why? How do you expect your book to change your readers' beliefs, educate them, inspire them, or just plain entertain them? Remember: readers don't buy books. They buy what your books do for them, the value they receive in exchange for cash. For example, if you've written a book of easy-to-prepare recipes, the value is that readers will have more leisure time.
The competition: Who's already out there, and where does your book fit in?
The strategy: How do you propose to inform the marketplace that your book is out there and persuade people to buy it? For example, do you have a unique selling advantage on which you could capitalize?
The budget: How much money do you have available to support your strategy, and how do you propose to allocate it to the various parts? Expect to pay at least as much in marketing as it cost to produce your book.
The Market
Early on in the writing phase, take the time to answer some difficult questions. You'll be glad you did because of the focus they provide:
1) Why did you write your book? Fame, income, share your message, help others, get credentials, set a new standard, change the world?
2) What are you really selling? Information, inspiration, education, entertainment?
3) What is your market? What's special or different about your readers? What else do they read? Who do they talk to? Where do they congregate? How will they regard your book? How do you want them to regard it?
The Competition
The concept of "competition" is not really valid in many genres of books. A best-selling book such as The Celestine Prophecy actually served other metaphysical writers by opening up the market and creating many new potential readers. However, there's little room for yet another dictionary of angels or another personal "wake-up" story. Talk to bookstore owners to find out how well books similar or parallel to yours are selling.
Communication with the Market
In order to prompt people to buy your book, you must tell them enough about it to get them into a bookstore or order it from one of the many online bookstores. What's unique and different about yours? What are your special qualifications for having written it? How will readers benefit from reading it? How will it change their lives, make them happier, richer, sexier, more fulfilled, more knowledgeable?
Books are combinations of tangible and intangible elements. People do not buy the tangible paper and ink. They buy the intangible benefits, what the book will do for them. For fiction, this is fantasy, romance, adventure, or mystery. With nonfiction, they are buying information, inspiration, motivation, and help. This intangible value is the message you must take out to the world.
Communication Tactics
Now that you know what you want to say, how will you deliver your message? Advertising is the traditional vehicle, and the easiest. You pay someone to reach your target market for you. Getting yourself on radio talk shows and on the speaker panel of conferences is harder, but effective, rewarding, and great fun.
Below are a few tactics for reaching your potential readers and pulling books into the pipeline. Prioritize them and feel free to add some new ideas of your own:
- Ads in magazines, newsletters, newspapers, catalogs
- Interviews on radio, TV, other media
- Online via your own Internet site or online "chat rooms"
- Indirectly via articles for newspapers, magazines, newsletters
- Direct mail to mailing lists using your list or one you buy
- Network or speak at seminars, expos, etc.
- Guerrilla marketing, where you go to your readers, such as the author who painted the book title on his car roof for people in high-rise offices to see.
Marketing Budget
What's your monthly or annual budget for funding the marketing process? Your book won't generate income for the first year, and must be supported by you, so how much support can you give it?
Some tactics cost very little, such as hosting an online chat room, but consume a lot of time. Others are more expensive, but are less demanding. Strive for a balance of time, effort, and hard cash. Once you've defined your book's "monthly allowance," how will you apportion that among the tactics that you've selected?
In parallel with budgeting your dollars, sketch out a preliminary schedule around major events, such as a big distributor's spring and fall catalog, or the local Whole Life Expo. Then fit the other tactics around those major milestones.
Finally, figure out what you would consider "success" in terms of book sales: 1,000 in the first year, with 5,000 sold in total over five years? More? Less? And try to find a way to "track" your marketing tactics. For example, how many book sales can be attributed to a specific magazine ad, a book signing, or a guest appearance on a radio talk show?
Distributors and Wholesalers
You can sell a lot of books at the back of the room after your speaking engagements, or via an 800-number fulfillment service after a radio show interview, but you will also need help to get into the bookstores.
Distributors have a sales staff or reps that call on chains and regional stores. They also produce a catalog and work closely with publishers. Wholesalers, on the other hand, do no pushing, and have no sales staff. They simply respond to bookstore orders by picking, packing, and shipping. The publisher must cause those orders to come in to the wholesaler, so, in a nutshell, wholesalers work for bookstores, filling their orders, whereas distributors work for publishers, promoting and actually "pushing" the books to the bookstores.
Wholesalers often buy from distributors, because distributors usually specialize in what they carry. Since they represent particular publishers, they know more about the products they represent. Distributors will rarely take on a single-title publisher, so this is where having a credible marketing plan helps.
One important thing to remember is that distributors, wholesalers, and bookstores each have too many titles, too many prospective customers, and not enough time to sell every title to each buyer. The ultimate responsibility for selling any title rests upon you. God and the book trade help those who help themselves! Successful book marketing requires that you actively promote your title. The more you do, the more you'll receive.
Truly successful people believe in something beyond themselves, and measure success in terms unrelated to the size of their bank accounts, so you must have passion for your book. Eat, sleep, breathe, and dream it, and make sure your passion shines through in your every message. If you don't love your book, how will anyone else?
I wish you well.
Tony Stubbs is a freelance writer, editor, publishing consultant, and desktop publisher living in southern California. He is also the author of An Ascension Handbook. He can be reached at (909) 672-6115 or <tjpublish@aol.com>.
This is the sixth in a six-part series on getting your book published, written by Tony Stubbs exclusively for The New Times. Please send SASE for any reprints desired.
