Marketing Your Work

Writers’ Marketing Mistakes (2) – Telling yourself that marketing can wait

27/05/2010 By Margaret Adams 2 Comments

Marketing takes up time.

Marketing can be expensive. Writers have lots of other things (better things) they could be doing with their time. Marketing can wait.

Does that sound like you?

It’s very easy to make a case that marketing is a secondary activity and that it can wait. I know that in the early days of running my own business I was very good at telling myself I had so much to do that I couldn’t possibly find the time to market myself or my business.

At that time I didn’t like the idea of marketing at all. I thought of marketing as cold calling. Of course, I would have done anything rather than cold-call anyone, so I always found lots and lots of reasons why I couldn’t do any marketing. I just didn’t have the time.

I was wrong then and lots of people who write are making that same mistake today. As a result they are damaging their chances of building their business and their writing careers.

For every one who is tempted to say that marketing can wait here are three reasons why it can’t.

Marketing can’t wait because if you’re not marketing your business who else is?

Most writers are trying to do everything themselves. That’s the source of some of their problems.

If you’re not promoting yourself, if you’re not getting your name known, if you’re not building up awareness of you and what you do, then no one else will be doing that for you. (Not unless you have commissioned a publicist to do this for you, of course.)

The fact is that in every industry people buy from those they know, like and trust. If you’re putting the marketing to one side, you’ll be falling at the first hurdle. People won’t know about you, so nothing else can happen. You’ll just remain on the sidelines in your chosen niche.

That’s not a place you want to be, so don’t ignore your marketing responsibilities.

Marketing can’t wait because you need to show that you value what you do

If you don’t let the world know what you do and how well you do it, then people will think that you don’t value what you do.

If you don’t put your hand up and say you do things well, then other people will get the work and the assignments that you could do.

You can’t afford to stand back and wait to be approached. You have to let people know how good you are and that you are ready and very keen to take on jobs that customers need doing. You can’t afford to wait for people to recognise your talents. You need to help them.

Practise making statements such as:

“I have written a series of excellent blog posts for …”
“My articles on ………….. have been quoted in …………… because ……………”
“There was lots of positive feedback about my series of interviews with …..”

You need to blow your trumpet in order to show that you know you are up to the job. That’s one task that can’t wait.

Marketing can’t wait because marketing is really about building long-term relationships with people.

Every one in business needs to build relationships with potential customers, with potential business partners, with potential advocates (people who promote them), with complementary businesses, with alliance marketing partners and so on.

Relationships matter so you need to spend time building them both on line and off line.

Use Twitter and Linked In.
Get out to the small business networking groups.
Find ways of meeting more people.

Get to know them and make sure they get to know:

who you are
what you do
who you help.

Along the way try to establish also how you can help them – without selling to them. Doing this really is a basic marketing activity. It’s also fun.

Marketing for the future

Far from putting marketing to one side and letting your marketing activities wait, they need to come at the top of your list of activities.

You may be a writer, but you’re also in business.

As a businessperson you know that nothing happens until something is sold, so that means you’re in marketing – and in sales, too. It’s a big mistake to convince yourself otherwise.

Your book isn’t selling – What can you do about it?

21/05/2010 By Margaret Adams Leave a Comment

If your book isn’t selling, it’s too late to start asking the questions about if this is the right book for a particular audience, or if you should have addressed the subject in a different way. You can’t go back to the drawing board and rethink the subject.

The book is already in print. This means you’ve achieved one of your goals.

Congratulations.

However, you won’t build your reputation and your standing, if your book doesn’t sell. You won’t build your credibility and you won’t enhance your chances of getting any more book publishing contracts, if your book doesn’t sell.

If you received an advance for your book and it doesn’t look as if you’ll ever earn as much in royalties as you’ve already received, then it’s time to take action.

There are lots of things you can do to try to enhance sales, but three is always a good number to work with. Thinking of three strategies will give you a chance to try out more than one approach. However, you can still monitor your success, if you stick to three.

Your book isn’t selling – so send out three press/media releases

Before you start writing think about the topics you will hook your statements onto. Find a piece of news and link what you want to say to that news.

For example, I helped a training provider recently to get into the local newspaper. We didn’t focus on the company’s achievements, which was gaining a training award called the Training Quality Standard. That wasn’t very interesting. What was interesting was the celebrity who presented the award to the managing director and what he said about her success and her business.

You need to do the same as this training company. Accept that you’re not really newsworthy, nor is your book. However, if you can link yourself and your book to something that is in the news, or newsworthy, then you’re more likely to get noticed. Your book is also more likely to be noticed.

So three press releases or media releases are needed. They should go to three different types of publication. Try:

local papers
regional papers
trade publications.

With these types of publication you can almost certainly make a direct approach with some chance of success. Give this strategy a try.

Your book isn’t selling – so write three targeted feature articles

Let’s assume, for the moment, you’re a romantic novelist writing hospital-based stories and your heroine is a nurse.

Look for journals, both on-line and off line that nurses read. Look for blogs and forums for nurses. Learn about the publications and the interests of the readers. That means be patient. Don’t immediately send off a proposal.

Find a subject that interests the readership and offer to write a piece about that but make links to your book in your feature.

Choose three publications. Consider print publications, on-line publications, blogs, websites.

Don’t just limit your efforts to promote your book to a single occasion. Think about ways in which you could write for these publications more than once. Build a relationship with the readership.

Your book isn’t selling – so do three new things to sell your book

Successful marketing is all about innovation. Use tried and tested ways that work, but keep experimenting with new ways of promoting your book, too.

If you haven’t done any guest blogging, find a blog that serves your audience, and make a proposal to the blog owner.

Remember that he or she has a niche, a subject and an audience.

You’re looking to connect with the audience, so consider how you can help the blog owner. Write something complementary to what you’ve seen in the blog. Write a reaction to something that has been written. Continue a long running theme etc.

Step onto the blog’s territory to find your subject.

In other words, fit in.

Now think of something else to try.

If you haven’t done any podcasting, try that. If you’ve never worked with video, try that. Choose a subject that will interest your readership and give it a try.

Do something in person, too.

Speaking is a great way to build an audience and interest in what you do. Actively seek out a speaking opportunity, or two, or three.

Selling your book – the real situation

When you first thought about your book, did you believe your work on your book would be finished when it was published?

If you did, now’s the time to think again.

The truth is you’d probably reached the half way point in terms of your input at the time of publication. Now you need to work on the second part of the project, which is making sure your book sells.

If your book isn’t selling now, you can do a lot to make sure it sells more copies in the future.

to achieve your goals, keep trying new ways of promotion.

Think in terms of using three promotional methods, three networking approaches, three feature writing strategies and so on. If your book isn’t selling now, you’ll be giving yourself three more chances to make sales each time you try something new, so keep going.

Are fiction writers in business, too?

Promoting yourself as a fiction writer and as a non-fiction writer . . .

Selling your books

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Getting published, Marketing your work, Monetize your writing

Writers’ Marketing Mistakes (1) – Not doing any marketing

17/05/2010 By Margaret Adams 3 Comments

Today I’m starting a series of posts about the marketing mistakes that writers make. Writers make marketing mistakes, just like every one in business.

These mistakes can severely impair their chances of success. Probably the biggest mistake is to deny that marketing is in the writer’s job description.

Are you tempted to say any of the following?

If you are, then you know you’re making one of the most common marketing mistakes.

Marketing – it’s not my job!

Whose job is it then?

You have books to sell and a personal brand to build. Your publisher – if you have one – is interested in making money from your books, just as you are.

However, your publisher can hedge his bets. He has lots of titles from which he can make money. You don’t have as many.

Therefore, you need to market your book so that your publisher will succeed with your books.

This will make publishing more of your work a good bet. It will also mean that when decisions are being made about where to put additional marketing resource, your books will be on the list.

Success breeds success. You need to make sure you succeed.

You will have taken a huge step forward once you accept that you’re in marketing, and in sales, too, for that matter.

Marketing – I don’t know where to begin.

Unless you come from a sales and marketing background then you’re in the same boat as a lot of other people.

We all have to start marketing somewhere.

We all have to start learning and experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t.

In the case of most small businesses, and I include writers in this category, the biggest problem is usually not using enough marketing strategies often enough.

If you’re using five approaches to marketing yourself and your work, increase the list to ten in the next month.

If you’re not really doing any marketing, then now’s the time to begin.

Make a list of ways you could promote your work and get started.

Marketing – it’s difficult.

Everything’s difficult when you’re an outsider making a start on something new.

The best way to overcome the difficulties is to have clear idea of what you would like to achieve.

For example: You want to get your book(s) mentioned in ten relevant blogs in the next six weeks.

Then think about which blogs and where you could look to get some publicity.

Also, do yourself a favour and look for writers who are marketing themselves successfully. What are they doing? Could you do that?

Is it worth getting in touch with them and so on? Learn from other people’s successes.

That way you’ll make progress quickly and avoid some of the types of mistakes that can set you back.

Marketing – it takes up a lot of time.

It does.

Most small business people, including writers, would rather spend their time on other aspects of running their business. Trainers would rather be delivering training. Writers would rather be writing their features or their novels.

However, nothing happens until something is sold, so marketing is a necessary part of business – and writing – success.

Every one in business is a marketer and a sales person.

As soon as you accept that and you start to become comfortable with that fact, you’ll definitely make progress.

So here’s one marketing mistake that it’s very easy to overcome.

See also:

Promote Yourself

Entrepreneurship for writers

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Marketing Mistakes, Marketing your work, Your Writing Career

Planning your bestseller – what comes first?

12/05/2010 By Margaret Adams 1 Comment

Are you ready to start planning your bestseller?

You’ve got a great idea.

Your idea for your bestseller is buzzing around in your head. You’ve got a wonderful idea for your book. Best seller, fast seller, prize winner, money maker. You’re thinking about them all.

Well, it’s worth pausing and thinking about the process that leads from inspiration, and a fantastic book idea, to money in the bank, recognition and success as a writer.

Or rather, it’s worth thinking about the very first step in the planning process and a very important question.

Has my book got the potential to become a bestseller?

It’s a good question, but it’s not a question about the quality of that book you haven’t written yet.

There’s no point in continuing to work on your idea if there isn’t a market for your book. You want to write a bestseller, so that means you want thousands of people to buy your book.

As you think about your answer you need to be able to create pictures of real people who will buy. In marketing terms this is called customer profiling. It’s very important because you will shape your book to fit your understanding of the requirements of the audience you define.

This makes your first supplementary question easy.

What are the key characteristics of my audience?

If you want to sell lots of books, and make money from your writing, then you need to find the right audience for your work.

First of all, there must be enough people in your target group for you to be able to make sales.

Assume you’ll only ever sell to one per cent of the market in your own country. Assume you’ll sell even less in the global marketplace.

Do the sums? Is there the potential for a bestseller here?

Pass this test and you’re ready to move on to your next supplementary question.

Which of the problems or issues facing my audience will my book address?

You must work out why your book is needed.
You must work out why your target audience will want to buy a book on this subject.
You must work out why your book is better than anything else on the market.

If you know the answers, now’s the time to look at little more broadly.

Does my potential audience buy books?

Note I don’t talk about reading books. A lot of books are bought and never read. From the point of view of an author looking for a bestseller, think about the sales first.

These days it’s important to ask if the people in your target audience actually buy books. There may be more and more books around, but lots of books don’t make any money.

What’s more, people who do buy books are buying them in a variety of formats. E-books are making a lot of progress. Print publishers are losing market share to the e-book world.

You need to be sure that the audience you are targeting not only buys books, but buys books in the format your book will be presented in.

This leads you to your next question.

Does my audience have the money to buy my books?

This is a fairly obvious question to ask, but it’s often forgotten. There’s no point in producing something for people who don’t have the money to buy – at least if your aim is to write a bestseller.

If you write for a market that doesn’t have much money, you’ll be forever discounting and bundling offers – or your publisher will. Either way, you won’t be making a great deal from your writing.

When you’ve worked through these issues there’s another important question to ask yourself.

Do I still want to write a book for this audience?

Now that you’ve considered quite a few of the business and marketing issues surrounding your idea for your book, do you still want to write that bestseller?

Are you still interested in writing for this audience?

If you are, then it’s time to make a start on the real planning.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Getting published, Making money from your writing, Marketing your work, Monetize your writing

Are you ready to tell the world how good you are at what you do?

29/04/2010 By Margaret Adams Leave a Comment

It’s a fact that most people don’t like the idea of promoting themselves.

They don’t like the idea of telling the world how good they are at something. What’s more, if someone tells them that they are good at what they do, many people feel uncomfortable about accepting praise.

If you’re in business, you need to adopt a different approach to promoting yourself.

If you don’t say you do a good job, why should anyone else?
If you don’t say your work is excellent, why should anyone else?
If you don’t write that press release to let the world know about your personal success and your vision and your passions . . . will anyone else?

Most writers don’t go in for self-promotion.

They are somehow embarrassed at the prospect of doing so. Many writers prefer to stay in the shadows and to let their works speak for them.

They don’t like to think about promoting themselves and they assume their publishers will promote their books.

Well, publishers have limited funds to promote books and authors. There are also lots of projects they could promote and lots of authors in their lists. If you leave promotion of your works to your publisher, you’ll only get a limited amount of support.

Therefore, it makes sense for you to take the lead in promoting yourself.

You know best what image you want to present to the world. You know how you wish to project yourself into your marketplace. You know why people should read your works and how they will benefit as a result of doing so – or if you don’t, it’s time you did.

Here are two questions to help you to be more confident that you are on the right track when you start promoting yourself.

How do I add value to my readers’ lives through my work? (Yes, this question applies to fiction writers as well as to every one else.)
If a journalist asked me to define my aims as a writer in a single sentence, what would I say?

Try these questions out for yourself now. Leave your answers in the comments box, if you’d like to share your responses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Business Building, Marketing your work, Your Writing Career