Your "Work" Is Not Your "Book."

Marketing Tip: If you come to us with a book project, part of our spiel will be that "your work is not your book." Once you "get" this, you will have an easier time thinking about your marketing task ahead. Here's why. To be successful, you must first have a clear idea about what your "work" is. Your "work" is a term that combines your purpose, your message, and your goals into one word. Let's say your "work" is to save the endangered bumpkin. Your coffee-table book, The Bumpkins of Burma: The Last of a Breed, supports your "work" (saving bumpkins), as does your bumpkin blog, your bumpkin website, your articles about bumpkins, your public-relations efforts, your workshops on bumpkin-saving, and the bumpkin-watching tours that you lead twice a year. You realize that your "marketing" is aimed at promoting your message--save the bumpkin--and you never miss an opportunity to use these various channels to promote your message. When you do this, you notice that there is a certain synergy in your efforts. For example, you find that Bumpkins of Burma not only gives you the chance to promote your blog, your website, your workshops, and your tours but seems to be generating more interest in you as a presenter and in your projects. Moreover, you find that you have something to sell every time you appear somewhere, even when you appear for free, and suddenly you start to like this idea of synergy. Surprisingly, this principle works for fiction authors, too. In other words, the "work" of a poet or novelist is the poem or novel, which can be delivered in person (through readings), on tape, in multi-media, online, and in a hundred other ways--as well as in a book. But the book intensifies the synergy. The Publishing Pro, LLC