Marketing 101: While You're Writing Your Book ...

... You should be marketing. In addition to building your key contact lists, do the following:

Give Presentations Related to Your Work: This is one of the best things you can to prepare for publication. In doing so, you are:

• promoting your work;
• promoting yourself and adding to your credibility;
• delivering your core messages;
• developing your skill;
• creating a structure for selling your book. 

In fact, in most cases, presentations—lectures, workshops, seminars—are the venue where you will sell the most books. In religious publishing, this is called the “hem of the garment” dynamic. If someone goes to your seminar, they not only hear what you have to say, they meet you. This creates a very strong pull for them, assuming they like what they’ve heard, to walk away with something that reinforces their experience. The model is exactly the same as the one for musicians. Where do most musicians sell most of their CDs? At their concerts, of course. 

Talk about it: Tell people you’re writing this book. Tell them its title and when you think it will be done. Tell them about it in your conversations, in your blogging, on your website, in whatever way you can. Some would-be authors worry about someone stealing their idea. If you have a plan and are sticking to it, this eventuality is not worth worrying about. If you let people know what you’re up to, you will build your key contact and potential customer list. 

Write related material: If you have a blog or a website, put pieces of your book on line. Many people use blogs to actually write their book. If you can write short articles for newsletters or magazines, do so. Be sure to put information about your forthcoming book in your biographical information. 

Contact potential strategic partners: Anytime during the publishing process, you can be talking to other potential “strategic partners.” These can be people or entities interested in publishing your book, co-publishing it with you (that is, buying a large amount off the top), doing their own edition, helping distribute it in some way, or helping you promote it.

 

Marketing 101: Build Your Key Contact List

One of the fundamentals:  If your book proposal were to be accepted by a traditional publisher, you would be asked to submit a key-contact database along with or before finishing your book. As your own publisher, you should certainly do the same. You should start doing this now, even if you haven't started writing your book. A good key contact list has four categories. 

Category One: Contacts Who Will Get a Complimentary Copy of Your Book Automatically. Almost every author gives away some free copies, but you need to keep it limited to your immediate family, direct contributors to the book, and people who have been instrumental in helping you get your book off the ground. At The Publishing Pro, LLC, we recommend that this be a short list of no more than twenty-five contacts. Of course, your list can be longer. But be careful! And remember this list is for people who will get a complimentary copy—automatically. 

Category Two: Contacts Who Will Get A Complimentary Copy of Your Book On Request. You will have some contacts, many I hope, who should get a complimentary copy of your book. Likely candidates include book reviewers; editors of newspapers, magazines, and newsletters that might run an excerpt of your book or interview you; radio and TV personalities who might want to interview you; instructors who might want to adopt your book for their classes; people in your field of expertise whose word might inspire many to buy your book; and so on. In general, you should ask such people to request a copy of your book rather than sending them one automatically. For three reasons: First, sending books automatically wastes money. While some complimentary copies hit their mark and are appreciated, many go astray. They are lost in the mail, trapped on an assistant’s desk, or just ignored as advertising clutter. Or maybe they just don’t want your book. Why send them one? Second, if someone requests a copy of a book, they really want it. That means you have hit your target—and you know it. And if they really want it—and have taken the trouble to ask for it—they are more likely to do something with it than if they got it automatically.Third, if someone asks for a book and you send it to him, you have a built-in reason to follow up. You can call him, ask if he received the book, maybe find out if he plans to do something with it, and give him a chance to talk to the author. You. There is no telling what can come of that. All this while being perceived as someone helpful rather than pushy. When your book is published, you will send this list of contacts a press release along with a review copy request form. The more reasonable contacts you have in this category, the better. If you find that you can’t afford to snail-mail press releases to the entire list when the time comes, you can always send your press releases to part of the list initially and to another part of the list when you can afford it. (Or you can try an email mailing, which is the norm anymore.) In the meantime, you can keep building your list of contacts.   

Category Three: Contacts Who Should Know about Your Book but Who Should Not Be Offered a Complimentary Copy. As you build your database of key contacts, you might have some who might be interested in knowing about your book but who should not be offered a complimentary copy. I expect this would be a smaller category for most authors—only because I would offer most media contacts the chance to ask for a complimentary book. However, there will be some. These contacts will receive a press release only.

Category Four: Contacts Who Should Buy the Book. Obviously, the more you have in this last category the better. Your professional contacts, business associates, even friends and most family members should go in this category—unless you can definitely justify putting them in one of the categories above. These contacts will get some kind of order vehicle—or maybe just a postcard or an email telling them a bit about the book and how to order it. If you have a clear production date, you might consider offering people on this list the opportunity to order a pre-publication copy of your book at a discount and with your autograph. You might even be able to pay for your printing this way. However, we don’t recommend that you accept payment unless you know you will have your book printed within a short period of time.—ThePublishingPro

 

Marketing 101: Define the Scope of Your Project

Easier than ever: In this exercise, you will do go through the process that smart publishers use to determine the scope of their book projects: that is, your book’s specifications, your expected sales, your initial press run, and your selling price. All this before you sit down to write your book. Except for some production research you’ll have to do, it’s actually a fairly easy process, even easier if you’re taking advantage of new technologies like print-on-demand and digital publishing (ebooks).  

Editorial Input: Deciding Whether the Project Fits Your Focus. In every publishing house, the first stop is with someone performing the function of “acquisition editor.” This is the person who looks at a proposal and determines that its substance—and perhaps its timing—is a good fit for the house. If you are self-publishing, you are also functioning as the acquisition editor and will decide whether you are doing a particular book or not. The acquisition editor may rewrite the proposal and add some embellishments, including some ideas about how long the book should be and what format it should be in.

Sales Input: Deciding How Many Books You Will Sell (or otherwise distribute) in One Year. The next stop for a proposal in a traditional publishing house is the marketing department. After looking at the proposal, the marketing director might communicate with the editor to get some alignment on the right format for the book. After that, the main task is to estimate the sales and other unpaid distribution for the year. Nowadays, smart publishers aim to keep their inventory low, only what they can move in a year. With print-on-demand and digital publishing so available, you have no reason to have too many books in inventory. I suggest that you order books for yourself to sell in lots of twenty-five, unless there is some reason to believe you will sell more than that in a month. Calculate your unit sales in three major categories: 1) books you will give away (to family and friends, contributors, key contacts, etc. 2) books sold indirectly (through bookstores, Amazon, other resellers, etc. 3) books sold directly by you at presentations, websites, exhibits, etc. Be conservative, and be especially careful about overestimating what will happen with indirect sales. Unless you are very familiar with the business of capturing indirect sales, focus on direct sales; that is, those sales you will make yourself. 

Production Input: Deciding What Your Book Will Cost to Print. The next stop for a proposal is the production department, which takes the ideas of the editor and marketing director about format, along with the marketing department’s estimate of first-year sales, to determine the unit cost of the first press run. At least that’s the way it used to be in traditional publishing houses, still is for publishers who haven’t migrated to print-on-demand and ebooks.The occasional author-publisher has production specifications that can’t be met by printing-on-demand or ebooks. If you can use print-on-demand services or ebook technology, please do so. You’ll thank me later. As far as ebooks go, you have no printing costs. That’s a bit too simple, because you will be paying an outfit—like Amazon—to produce and distribute the ebook for you. And they will take their share. Some say more than their share. In the case of print-on-demand books, you can find out your cost in seconds—at least with CreateSpace, my recommended print-on-demand company. All you do is go to https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/ and select the Buying Copies tab in the middle of the page. Then you go to the “Member Order Calculator” in the middle of the page, select your “interior type” (eg. Black and white), “trim size” (e.g. 5.5”x8.5”), “pages” (e.g. 160), and quantity (e.g. 160) and “quantity” (any will do). Then select “calculate” and you will see your total cost and per book cost. (Note: CreateSpace does not reduce the unit cost for larger quantities unless you have a coupon.) It’s as simple as that. 

Business Input: Deciding What to Charge for Your Book. The next step falls on the business department, which takes the production department’s unit estimate and multiplies it by a number that will give them their targeted profit. Figuring out what to include in production costs and what multiple to use can get pretty complicated. As an author-publisher, you can keep it simple. All you need to do is take the unit printing cost that you got from the CreateSpace “Member Order Calculator” and multiply it by four or five. If you take my recommendation, you will set your “retail price” at about five times the cost of printing one book. Things you should know: 1) CreateSpace will let you select a much lower price. Resist the urge. 2) Retail price is the price CreateSpace uses to calculate your share of sales revenue. In other words, if you set your retail price at $20.00 but Amazon decides to sell your book at $18.00 (this is common), it will calculate your share (royalty) based on $20.00. 3) Just because you set the retail price at $20.00 doesn’t mean you have to sell the book to your customers for $20.00. 

Publisher’s Input: Deciding to Publish. The last stop (at least initially) for a proposal is the publisher’s desk. He or she looks at the proposal, reviews the sales estimate, checks the unit costs, eyeballs the suggested price, and decides whether the project makes sense—editorially and financially. Often this is not a perfectly neat process. For example, the publisher might like the project for editorial reasons but think that the retail price is too high to be viable. In that case, she might send the project back to the team to make some adjustments. In the case of you, the author-publisher, the entire process happens in your head and it should be relatively easy for you to either decide that your project is a go, that it doesn’t make sense, or that it needs to be revised in some way before you can go forward.

So what has happened so far? You have defined the scope of your project—its focus, its cost, its expected sales, and its retail price—before you sit down to write. That's the smart play.—The Publishing Pro

Marketing 101: Write Your Own Book Proposal

Best practice: Before beginning to write any book, you should write a formal proposal that you can either 1) send to a traditional publisher or 2) use yourself as a primary planning document for your own self-published book.  Here are the basic elements: 

• Write a short description of your target reader. Instead of using generalities, describe a specific person, or couple, or family. Depending on your book, relevant details might include your target reader’s appearance, age, gender, marital status, family size, income, needs, desires, and values. If you can picture an actual person in your mind, more’s the better. (Note: if your book’s buyers will be different from your book’s readers—the case for children’s books, for example—you might have to split this exercise in two.)
• Write a short summary of your content. What are you doing with your book? Are you sharing your story? Are you instructing your reader? Are you persuading your reader to do something? Are you inspiring your reader? Are you entertaining your reader? Once you decide your general approach, you can get more specific. For example, this book is teaching author-publishers how to market their books. Another example: I have a client who is sharing her story of growing up with a schizophrenic mother. 
• Decide how you will change your core reader's life. This is a powerful concept. The change you promise may be modest—maybe your murder mystery will reduce the boredom of a sunbather by a hotel pool in Cancun. That's okay, but the more significant the change you can promise, the more likely you are to find readers, and the higher price your book can command. If you can’t promise to change someone’s life, why would anyone bother to buy your book? This is true even for fiction.
• Decide on a working title and subtitle. Generally, the title and subtitle should suggest what your book has to say and to whom. Be descriptive rather than poetic How to Make a Million Dollars Selling Widgets is a stronger title than Widgets Gone Wild. If you must be clever and creative with your title, your subtitle definitely will need to the do the descriptive job. As in: Widgets Gone Wild: How I Became a Billionaire Selling Widgets.  It's a "working title," meaning the intent is to help you sell the concept to a prospective publisher and/or help you write the book. The final title and subtitle could be different. 
• Write Your Table of Contents. Again, your Table of Contents should be descriptive. The purpose is to clarify (for yourself, if you’re self-publishing, and ultimately for your readers) where you are taking your readers and what you will do for them. Your Table of Contents is an extremely powerful marketing device, one that may determine whether someone buys your book or not. Writing a good one—it’s basically an outline—also will make it easier for you to finish writing your manuscript. And it will definitely help you stay on track.

That’s it. Now you’ve got a proposal that defines your book from the ground up.—The Publishing Pro.

Marketing 101: Get Perspective

It’s a kick to publish a book. Because of that, it’s easy to lose perspective. Here’s the truth. Your book is not your work. Your work has to do with your mission or your purpose. Your book is a tool, something intended to further your work. Depending on the nature of your project, your book might be one of the following:

• a commodity (a product that you sell for a profit)
• a promotional item (a marketing device that you give away or sell at a loss in hopes of generating new business; it might be a catalog or an education book or a pamphlet.)
• a manual (an internal publication designed to improve your operation in some way or an external publication designed to help your customers use your product or service)
• a workshop tool (a workbook or guide intended to be used by facilitators or participants in a class, a seminar, or a workshop; it might be sold outright or bundled into the cost of the workshop.)

 As you can see from the above, books generally are tools that help you accomplish your work. They should never be confused with the work itself. This does not denigrate your book project all. The right book will do some or all of the following:

• add to your credibility
• increase your revenue
• get you more presentation bookings
• find you more prospects and/or clients
• make your business run more smoothly
• increase customer satisfaction with you, your products, and your services
• brand your business

Your book is one powerful tool. Nevertheless, your book is not your work. This leads to the secret of powerful book marketing: If you promote your work, you will promote your book.—The Publishing Pro