Understanding the Five Phases of Book Marketing
By Guest | September 8, 2013 |
photo by Tall Guy, edited by Mark Banks
Today’s guest post is from Kristen McLean, “book futurist, consumer zoologist, and idea omnivore,” as well as founder and CEO of Bookigee, a Miami-based tech startup that builds products and analytics for the book-publishing ecosystem. Kristen is passionate about helping authors navigate the abundance of options, tools, and channels for producing and distributing books. She’s an eighteen-year veteran of the book business, and as a leading industry analyst, she speaks around the world about the digital transformation of books and reading. In this post, Kristen talks about why one size doesn’t fit all. She said:
I’m super passionate about helping authors navigate this amazing (and sometimes daunting) publishing environment. On one hand we have an amazing abundance of options, tools, and channels for producing and distributing books. On the other, we are writing and publishing more books than at any other time in human history, and all that *noise* and conversation is making it hard to figure out how to reach an audience. You still have to write a great book (which is no easier than it ever was)…maybe BETTER THAN EVER to stand out. I do my best to help authors with good tools and helpful information. Because I love entrepreneurial authors who are paving the way for everyone in this kooky business.
Follow Kristen on Twitter.
Understanding the Five Phases of Book Marketing: Why “What’s working?” is not one size fits all
It is an amazing time to be a reader or a writer in today’s publishing landscape. We are reading and publishing more than at any time in human history, and it has never been easier to produce and distribute a book.
However, that same abundance is a double-edged sword, especially for writers who are trying to figure out how to get their work into the hands of their potential audience in such a noisy & overwhelming environment.
Up until now, the publishing transformation has largely focused on three things: new forms of production (self-publishing & print on demand), new forms of distribution (tablets, e-books, online reading communities like WattPad, Smashwords, and Kindle Direct), and new channels for sales (online retail, apps, supermarkets, big box stores, the Kindle & Nook devices, Kobo – basically everyone but the traditional bookstores).
But for a book to successfully find a reader, there are two big things missing from this “new publishing” equation: Marketing and Discovery. In other words, how do we (the content creators) tell people about our work, and how do they (the readers) find new things to read?
Traditionally, bookstores have had a very large role to play in both of these functions. Bookstores were the place where readers went to browse, and publishers could reliably reach those readers by working with bookstores and reviewers to get their books front and center. But now, there are a million channels competing for a reader’s attention, and we have not successfully duplicated the bookstore experience online—especially in a way that authors have any input.
For today’s entrepreneurial author, marketing is largely going to be about finding an online strategy. And it’s also important to understand that you, the Author, need to treat marketing yourself and marketing a book as equally important in the age of Social Media.
And when it comes to this stuff, “What works?” is the number one question authors ask me all the time.
My answer: it really depends on where you are in your career, and what your goals are.
The Five Phases
Through my work on the WriterCube Book Marketing Database—a product we developed specifically to help business-minded authors by collecting the best information and contacts they might need to market into a single database—I’ve had the privilege of talking to dozens of authors this year.
And I’m starting to get a very clear idea that we need to approach marketing more as a progressive and phased activity. A mix of different strategies is required at each phase, and authors will move up and down between phases kind of like shifting a car.
P1: Industry 101 – “Where do I Start?”
Goal: learn everything you can about publishing & writing (in whatever genre you are aiming for)
Essential activities: web research, social media research, finding, following & friend-ing the top 50 online sites, magazines, reviewers, and authors in your target genre. Read one or more of the following: Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future by Jason Epstein, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, and The Business of Writing for Children by Aaron Shepard.
P2: Building an author “platform” – “Here’s Who I Am & What I Do”
Goal: Create a unified web presence & systematically build a following & community
Essential activities: Setting up Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, accounts as well as a personal website. Create brand materials, bios, designs and a consistent personality in all of these places. Make it a goal to interact with each of these platforms on a regular basis. Follow & study the following social media gurus: @Steveology, @danzarrella, @BBorowicz. Read my previous article for more guidance on this idea: Topsy-Turvy: A new roadmap for book marketing.
P3: Pre-publication engagement – “It’s Coming – Get Excited!”
Goal: Build a traditional pre-publication book-marketing plan
Essential activities: Accelerate your efforts to build your social media following as above. Concentrate on building a following, but DO NOT promote your book continuously. Read What To Do Before Your Book Launch by M.J. Rose and Randy Susan Meyers. Do everything it says.
P4: Post-publication marketing & publicity – “It’s Here and it’s Hot!”
Goal: Sell books
Essential Activities: Switch your online social media focus from building a following to traditional book promotion. Run online contests. Submit to bloggers for review. Do readings at local libraries & bookstores. Read any and all to prepare: How to Market a Book by Joanna Penn, How to Promote Your Children’s Book by Katie Davis, The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity by Lissa Warren, Red Hot Internet Publicity: The Insider’s Guide to Marketing Online by Penny C. Sansevieri
P5: Ongoing or backlist marketing – “Opening Doors & Creating Opportunities”
Goal: Everyday marketing that leads to income opportunities through more sales, events, speaking engagements, or new projects
Essential Activities: Daily online engagement with your audience, creating reader’s group materials or educational kits for books, outreach to libraries, schools, and non-profits likely to appreciate your work, periodic traditional marketing outreach on older titles to find new audiences. “Re-launch” or “birthday” events for your projects. Applying to speak at regional associations, groups, or tradeshows on your area of expertise—sell your books onsite. Write new stories in the world of your fiction & post to reading communities like WattPad or release as short stories on Byliner or Kindle. Hustle, hustle, hustle.
Each of these phases deserves a separate article of its own. I have grossly over-simplified here—there are many wonderful books on each aspect of these activities. However, the key takeaway of this should be that each phase requires a specific developmental strategy, and they are progressive. You can’t market a book if you haven’t done your work to build a necessary community online or locally. And, you don’t build your website AFTER the book is out.
At Writer Cube we are working hard to help authors navigate this new and tricky environment, and we do our best to empower authors, because you CAN do it. It’s not easy, and it requires consistent work, but if you are willing to do the research and put in the time, every author can improve their online marketing & find new readers.
What are some of the things you’ve done to market yourself or your book? Did some of these activities work particularly well? Are there other activities you feel weren’t as effective or didn’t work out as well as you’d hoped?
Many thanks to today’s guest.
You can read more WU guest posts by visiting this link.
Thank you for taking the time and listing these steps. Even so, the task ahead seems rather daunting. However, not that I have began the process, as anything that I have begun, I always intend to go all the way.
Still it makes my head swim :)
I always knew that marketing is the flip side of the coin, and now that preparing to face this ugly monster :)
Have the best day
Peace and love
Binder
I read a lot of book marketing blogs and last year I launched my debut novel. Even though my book was traditionally published, I spent thousands of my personal money in promotion. I was very active on social media, wrote blogs, and developed a fair reader following. But, the most frustrating aspect was the lack of sales data to tell which of these activities were most effective and worth duplicating. No other industry buys marketing and can’t see if it sold anything until a statement comes a year later, and even then the numbers are so diluted, you can’t really assign them to a particular campaign or ad or social media platform. An author would need to be able to perform an activity and then have immediate access to and evaluate the data. Traditional pub houses seem very reluctant to share sales information, and I get their reasons. But the model doesn’t work.
“DO NOT promote your book continuously.”
This negative tip might be the most important of the advice given here. I unfollow authors who retweet their own books every few minutes.
Agreed about unfollowing those who only tweet and retweet (or facebook or …) about their book(s)
Kristen, thanks for sharing this sound and thorough process that will benefit any first-time author looking to build a following and gain a market for his/her work. The links and resources are extremely helpful as well. I wish I had read this piece before I self-pubbed my first novel. I believe many new authors (myself included) vastly under-estimate the amount of time and effort that must go into building awareness and brand. Thanks for this really helpful advice. I will bookmark this post. Thanks, again.
Daunting is an understatement indeed. And what Kellie said is SO true. If only there was a way to tell which task you perform to market you and and your book is THE best and most profitable.
Thank you for this post.
Patti
Thank you for the helpful and very clear-cut summation, Kristen. I’m intrigued by what Kellie said about not being able to trace the results of different marketing efforts. As a small-business accountant by day, I’ve spent a good deal of time figuring out where clients come from, and the results are often surprising. For example, statistical data analysis for one contractor proved that most of their income was coming not from referrals from previous clients, as they had previously suspected, but from the former clients themselves, who were happy with the work that was done and signed up for new projects a couple of years down the line. The company was then able to make an informed decision to focus its marketing efforts on these former clients, which invariably prompted calls for new work. But the idea of operating in a vacuum, without data to rely on… There’s an opportunity here for some savvy programmer to derive a system for solving this problem.
Kristen-
I like your emphasis on self-education, and your clear breakdown on the phases of promotion. So many authors simply muddle through, mistiming and doing too little.
Many if not most Writer Unboxed community members are fiction writers. As an agent, I know what kind of unit sales is takes for print publishers to consider a novel to worthwhile to publish, never mind be successful.
There’s an even greater number of unit sales required for an audience to become self-sustaining; i.e., a community of fans who return for future books–and grow from there.
The thing is, depending on one’s goals those numbers are far greater than the sum of most authors’–especially new authors’–contacts in social media. The amplification of reviews, book blogs, book clubs and so on is helpful but how many of those can a new author expect to get? And out of all those eyeballs how many connect to fingertips hitting “purchase” in the Kindle bookstore? Not all, not by a long shot.
So here’s my question: How are fiction writers supposed to reach and influence (to the point of purchase) all those readers who are not (yet) Facebook friends, Twitter followers, readers of book blogs, members of book clubs or anything else? A certain number of readers must by definition be people who will “discover” your novel without any of that.
How does that discovery work and what can fiction authors do to reach readers whom they have no means to reach?
Don – Yes, that’s a good question. The “tribe” theory that Seth Godin was teaching over the past couple of years had us hoping if we started a fair sized group via social media, then those would tell their friends and the word would spread from there…..providing you’ve written the kind of stand-out novel that sparks that kind of word-of-mouth marketing. Sadly, even if all that lines up, the effort can get stalled if a publisher doesn’t keep books on the shelves, and do big enough print runs. I had an abysmal experience where I was out marketing my heart out (on my own dime) only to discover the publisher made an error when entering the release date, causing books to get held in the warehouse and not shipped for the first two weeks. Killed a lot of sales in brick and mortar stores during that critical window of time.
Have you found anything that works beyond social marketing efforts?
How do fiction authors reach readers whom they have no means to reach? The answer many don’t want to hear is: build a great story, and people will come. That’s how novels sold, before we even had an Internet. Having new places to buy books, electronically now, is no different than opening a new bookstore was in the good old days. It still has to be a novel people love and can’t wait to tell their friends about, or it’s going to remain unsold on the e-shelf. And the only way to write a great novel is to invest the time—time you’re not go to have, tweeting your life away. Put in terms I saw stamped in iron three decades ago: “The steam that blows the whistle cannot be used to drive the train.”
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Thanks for all the great advice. I’ve marked this for future reference. I don’t have a book to sell yet so don’t have personal experience. But I just joined Twitter and plan to follow you and the people you recommend following.
Insightful article, clear timeline–thanks, Kellie. Don M. brought up some thoughtful points for debut novelists–the basis for a follow-up, perhaps?
I just finished the book you mentioned, What To Do Before Your Book Launch by M.J. Rose and Randy Susan Meyers. It’s a must-read, with a good marketing plan checklist.
Thanks!
Jan
I have only gotten through the first two phases so far. Perhaps you could say I am still in them…
I wrote a book, plan on writing some ebooks, and am working on my autobiography/memoirs. Sigh. There is so much to do, whether you self-publish or traditionally publish. I’m still learning the ropes, but have been blogging for eight months now, and I’m on several social media sites. There just is not enough time in each week to do it all; I’m not sure how others do it!
There. I’ve added my two cents worth.
WOW!!! Just bookmarked this.
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