Essay Online

So how long is too long to market a book? According to some studies (both formal and informal) marketing (and seeing the results in the form of book sales) can take anywhere from six months to two years, it all depends on what you want to get out of it.

Ideally though, you should plan to market your book ongoing — if, that is, being an author is a career choice and not a hobby. If it’s a hobby then don’t put any more time into it than you have to, or you might not choose to market it at all. For some, having the finished book is sufficient. But generally authors don’t write and publish a book just to see it “done;” they publish it to further dreams of seeing their careers flourish. If that’s the case then your marketing plan should last as long as your career does and hopefully, that’s a really long time.

But how long should you stick to marketing one book before moving onto the next? The answer depends on a lot of things. Topic, for one, will often drive the wheels of a campaign and it’s often said that the best way to market your first book is with your second and third and forth and well, you get the idea. But now comes the most challenging question: if you’re extending a marketing campaign beyond what you originally had on your marketing outline, what on earth will you do to promote it?

If your book is new and your promotional wheels are just hitting full steam the answer to how you might promote your book should be easy. But if it’s a year down the road and you feel you’ve done everything you can do to market your book you might be asking yourself: what’s next? This is a great time to assess what you’ve done, what’s worked and what hasn’t. It’s often in our nature to stare at a closed door begging for it to open, but if the doors you’re knocking on still aren’t opening, then perhaps it’s time to move on to marketing items better suited to your book.

By this I mean that when you go through and evaluate all you’ve done, it might be easy to say, “You know, I spent a lot of time on this and it’s still not doing anything for me, I’ll think I’ll invest more time on it and see what happens.” This might seem like a good idea. Certainly the folks at Oprah might not want to hear from you the first 20 times you pitched but on 21, you could strike gold. The likelihood is, however, that you’re just barking up the wrong tree and need to move onto greener pastures.

For example, let’s say you’ve done some speaking engagements in the past year and every time you do them you get tons of new sign-ups for your newsletter, you sell lots of books and best of all, you get asked back! So why don’t you do more of them? Well, probably because the rest of your book marketing is taking up so much time that you’re unable to devote as much time to this as you can. Now you’re in a perfect position. Why? Because you can dump the stuff that’s not working so well and focus on the things that are working well, like your speaking engagements. The same is true for media, if you get a lot of it when you’re pitching it, then why not pitch more?

For many of us, deciding what to do and when to do it can be confusing, but after you’ve spent months doing everything you’ve ever read or heard about, the obvious successes start to clarify themselves and then, what you need to do becomes crystal clear.

If you’ve only got one book to promote, here are a few tips that might help extend the life of a campaign and give you more ways to market:

* Creating spin-off products: special reports, eBooks and audio product are a all a great way to get some additional mileage out of your book. Creating products that lead to a product line can help leverage more sales. Often when consumers buy one product in a line, they’ll buy all of them.

* Speaking events: speaking on your book’s topic can really lengthen a campaign. By setting up speaking engagements you’re getting the message out there on your book, selling books to the audience and keeping the wheels on your campaign turning.

* Gather your evergreens: an “evergreen” is a topic that’s consistently viable from year to year. This means that if you have a news peg on the topic of Labor Day, you can trot this pitch out year after year and the media will love it. Understanding and building these evergreens into your campaign will greatly help extend your marketing campaign.

* Updating your book: with the exception of fiction, most books could stand a refresher every so often. For some books it’s yearly, while others can wait a bit longer. The updated version is a great way to capture additional promotion. I update my books yearly and provided that I’ve added new content (and not just changed a few URL’s) I will re-promote each of these as they come out — just like I would a new title.

So you’re published! Congratulations! Now if you’re like most authors you may be asking yourself, now what? There are so many ways to market yourself, so many in fact it’s sometimes tough to know which one you should chose. Now without getting into all your choices, let’s look at some basic things you can do to surround yourself with enough education and experts so you never have to wonder: I’m published, now what?

1) Find some good books to bury yourself in.

2) There are a lot of marketing choices and if you’re not sure which one to chose here’s a tip: if it seems to good to be true it probably is. Stay away from hype because hype rarely pays off. Ask for references, talk to other authors.

3) You can find a lot of information online if you’re willing to do some research. Whether you’re looking for promotional ideas or people to help you promote your book you should definitely Google them first and see what you can find.

4) Find someone you trust to talk you through the process. Whether you hire someone or met someone in your writing group, find someone you can bounce ideas off of who knows the industry and understands current book marketing trends.

5) Don’t live in a vacuum. Get out and meet other published authors. Go to writers conferences, check out your local PMA listings (Publisher’s Marketing Association) and consider joining them on a national level. Also SPAN (Small Press Association of North America) is another fantastic organization to join. Both of these places offer a monthly newsletter with tips, articles, and advice columns.

6) Do some online networking via publishing and book marketing forums, here are a few for you to get started with:

Pub-forum &ndash .pub-forum.net

Publish-L &ndash .publish-l.com

Smallpub-civil finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/smallpub-civil

Ind-E-Pubs &ndash covers ebooks .ind-e-pubs.com

POD publishers finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/pod_publishers

7) Subscribe to some great publishing newsletters, there’s a lot of information out there and a lot of it is packed in some of the best newsletters you’ll ever read:

Dan Poynter’s Parapublishing Tips: .parapublishing.com

Readers and Writers .writersreaders.com/

John Kremer: .bookmarket.com

Brian Jud: .bookmarketing.com

Book Marketing Expert: .amarketingexpert.com

Get your book reviewed: maybe this sounds like a no-brainer but you’d be amazed how many authors forget this step but it’s important and here’s why: people like what other people like. What someone else says about your book is a thousand times more effective than anything you could say. Do reviews sell books? Well, yes I believe they do and here’s why: if your book is up on Amazon or some other online portal and no one’s talking about it a potential new reader might not be motivated to buy. Readers rarely buy “naked” books.

9) Outline a few goals and hit the promotional “road”: keep it simple and keep it realistic. Long, complicated, and involved marketing plans are not only tough to stick to, they’re probably gonna cost you a bundle.

You know? When you publish a book and send it out into the world, it’s like giving birth to a baby. Everyone checks out your baby. Is it breath-taking? Does it have ten toes and ten fingers? Is it pink and sweet or does it look like an extra from “Alien?” We writers are baring our souls, our deepest thoughts, and our feelings lay open like a cavernous wound. We can’t hide anymore. They know us inside and out. Now they see our baby, and they get to pick it to pieces, bit by bit, until the only thing left is a fuzzy blanket.

Oh, hell, we know that and go right on writing, don’t we? It’s in our DNA. We can’t help ourselves, we’re masochists.

When I started this whole book-writing process, I had full intentions of finding an agent and/or a traditional publisher; they’d do all the work while I sat back and listened to “Ca-ching, Ca-ching.” However my journey to that end has been long and stress-filled and I ended up doing just the opposite…I’d kept a daily journal while living in Thailand in the 90s. When I returned to the States, I copied my journal onto a floppy and had it printed, spiral-bound, and mailed it out to friends and family so they could read about all my trials and tribs while abroad. One of the friends who read it insisted that I make a book out of it.

“You know,” she said, “like the book ‘A Year in Provence.’” I immediately ran out and bought the book and was amazed at the problems that the author had endured in a short year. I just knew that if his book sold, then mine would also, however, life got in the way of living and I put it aside.

I joined some creative writing classes a few years later, and with encouragement from my peers I began the long road of putting the journal into book form. In 2003, when I finally thought I’d finished it, I entered it into the Southern California Writers Conference in San Diego. While there, I read chapters from my story in the Read and Critique groups and the attendees laughed in all the right places and even clapped, (I’d hoped it wasn’t because they were happy I’d finished). At the end of the conference I was notified that I’d won the Best Nonfiction award for my story and an agent asked for my manuscript. Wow! That just doesn’t happen unless they love it! I knew I was ready for the Pulitzer.

Then I began to panic. What if it isn’t perfect? I had talked to a “book doctor” at the conference who advised me that my story “…needed some conflict. Who really cares about a housewife who’s having a good time in Thailand? Give them a reason to turn the page.” Okay, that’s what I’ll do. There certainly was plenty of conflict in my life in Thailand, but I’d left it out; it was painful to relive and I wanted it to be a humorous book. I emailed the agent and told her I wasn’t ready. Take your time, she’d said. It’s not time sensitive.

So began the journey of “weaving” the conflict into my story. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It was three years before I felt it was good enough to be a real book. But, those three years were not only spent rewriting. I took online writing classes and signed up at the local college for creative writing classes, I attended a critique group every week, putting my chapters up to their scrutiny as they tore it apart and helped put it back together. The rest of the time I was editing my life away. But as Stephen King says in his book On Writing: edit, edit and edit. And when you think it’s perfect, edit some more. My husband had a name for my constant editing: “Paralysis by analysis.”

When I felt I had everything in place, I looked for professional editing. I first paid the book doctor $500 to tell me that it needed help. He didn’t give me any, just told me it needed it. I found a line-editor in Canada, who did a great job, and then I hired a freelance editor; total for both $600; quite inexpensive in today’s editing market.

During those three years, I also did a lot of reading on the publishing world; agents, print-on-demand (PODs) and off-set printing companies. I attended conferences specifically on “How to get published.” The more I heard and read, the more I thought: From all the conferences I’d attended, the agent panels were the most disillusioning. I learned that agents don’t want you if you’ve not been published, and publishers don’t want you if you’ve not been published, or don’t have an agent, who doesn’t want you either. Who needs ‘em?

Publishers don’t want you if you don’t have a “platform!” A what? To my dismay I learned that I needed to have my own buying public. There was no publisher that was going to run out and sell my book for me, pay for my cross-country book signings and hotel rooms, unless of course I was a King or a Grisham or a Joyce Carol Oates. Then of course, there’s the eighteen month wait for the book to appear on the shelves after the publisher accepts it (if the publisher doesn’t decide to pull the plug at the last minute), and don’t forget the two years that it takes the agent to shop around for a publisher who might decide to pull the plug at the last minute. Who has that long? I don’t even buy green bananas anymore.

Wow! I remember my table mates and I frowning as we listened to the dire answers of this panel of agents and publishers. So how do we get published? Well, we have two options so it seemed: 1) have an agent living next door who loves your home cooked brownies or has a crush on your husband, or 2) know a publisher whose kid mows your lawn or has a crush on you. Not living in New York was going to be a definite drawback. Should I move? Okay, how about a POD? I was fortunate to have a friend who is a small press publisher of railroad books. He offered to put my manuscript into a Quark Express PDF file (which is the format printers prefer). He did an incredible job putting it together for me. He felt that if I had the print setup taken care of, I could approach a POD and save some money.

I signed up for the POD classes at the conferences I attended, where they explained everything I needed to know about their business ─ except how they kept most of the author’s money while they got big and rich and the author got $3.09 per book. Okay, well, $3.09 a book is not that bad. Maybe I could make it. But, wait, I had to pay them to print my book, and then pay them to buy my book back from them; too many “thems” going on here. Something didn’t compute. Maybe I should chuck the book and go into the POD business.

Well, I succumbed. I bought a book called The Fine Print of Self Publishing by Mark Levine, an attorney, then sat down to do some homework. After going over all the PODs he listed with a fine-tooth calculator, I realized that I could pay as much as $30,000 to one such POD group, but hey, my books would be free. How generous of them. Or, I could choose a POD group charging as low as $299, but I’d still have to buy my own books back at about $8.00 each.

I finally settled on a firm I’ll call “Dewey Cheatem & Howe” (name changed to protect the guilty), and thought I’d finally get on with this damn book printing. They sent me a sample of their work that was done beautifully. I signed on the dotted line, waited three more weeks and then my author’s copy was delivered. And there it sat. On my desk. Opened to the first page, which I couldn’t read. I started bawling. Where is my baby? The font was so garbled that it was illegible. There was a space after every capital letter and the other letters were so piled on each other you couldn’t make out the words.

When I’d used all the Kleenex in my desk drawer, I called them. Of course, no one was on the other end, save for the automated voice of their mailboxes. But at least I got rid of my postpartum anger. I cried and said very imperiously, “HOLD THE PRESSES! I will not accept this book. I will call Visa (of course they already had my money) and stop payment and …” I felt like an inner tube impaled on a sharp rock. Then I called my friend, the publisher. “Of course you can do this on your own. You have the file, just find a good printing company.”

I inquired around and found out that I could get my book printed overseas at half the cost of stateside. I began to get phone numbers and surfed websites. There were some good deals to be made overseas; however, the problem was I needed a broker. So after the broker took his cut, and the shipping charges were added, a stateside printer looked better. Plus, the thought of having a problem and not being able to connect at once with your printer was worrisome.

I searched the Internet and found many websites where you could input the details of your book, number of pages, size of book, print run, etc., and within a week I got a bid from ten printing companies. After picking one printer (not the cheapest), I felt we had a fit. I spoke to the owner, who offered to throw in a hundred free books, which might have had something to do with my decision. He checked out my website while we were speaking, loved the site and the look of my book and of course, he had me. He also offered storage and order fulfillment. Now, all I had to do was put our house on the market and clear out our 401K.

I know what you’re thinking. Sure, maybe she has it, but not everyone can come up with that much money. Yes, you can if you want to. We took an equity line on our home and as the money comes rolling in, I’ll be making payments on the equity line. We authors must be optimists. Really! If you don’t believe in your book, who will?

I ran off my own bookmarks and saved a few hundred dollars. I used the cover of the book, wrote a short synopsis on the back, and had 500 printed. I have handed out those bookmarks on airplanes and in airports; Seattle, Palm Desert, San Diego, Portugal, New York, Australia, New England… well maybe not personally, but I’ve given them to people who live in those places and they were happy to have them and said they’d pass them on. I’ve handed them out in restaurants to women sitting around me; two of them bought my book right on the spot. My friends call me “A self-promoting slut.”

I have to leave you now, as that’s where I am in this wonderful world of the written word, where the writing was easy… now comes the hard part ─ marketing!