Writing a book? Ask yourself these three questions:
Question: What do you do once your book is written?
Answer: Get it published.
Question: What do you do once your book is published?
Answer: Sell it.
Question: How?
Answer: Create a step-by-step book marketing plan.
A friend of mine is an avid fan of Robert Middleton, Action Plan Marketing. His latest post she told me is about creating an action plan for marketing your business. Leaving things up to chance, Middleton says, “Is simply going around in circles with your marketing.”
Certainly, you may get some random moments of success. But, how about consistent moments? Moments that build up your book selling so that each month you sell more books than the month before?
That is done most effectively by creating a book-marketing plan. Not a “to do” list for today. Not scribbling down a few things you could do in the next week but a step-by-step, three-year book marketing plan.
“Three years? Are you kidding me?”
Not at all.
I’m talking about selling your book over the long haul, about working your plan until it pays off. Slow, steady steps that will create more publicity, attract more followers, and sell more books.
The best thing about a long-range book-marketing plan?
It overcomes the overwhelm factor. The what-to-do-next headache and … the I’m-so-discouraged-about-my-book-ever-selling-a-single-copy syndrome.
With a carefully laid out book marketing plan you know that it is going to take some time to put all the pieces together. It’s figured in. Creating a website. Doing social media. Going to conventions. It’s all broken down into bite-sized pieces that you can do.
If you are serious about selling more books than it makes sense to plan it out. Just as you wouldn’t think of building a house without a set of house plans you shouldn’t expect to sell a “ton of books” without a detailed set of blueprints for achieving it.
At Wheatmark, our work with authors does not stop once their books are published. In fact that is just the beginning. That is why we place an emphasis on educating our authors about book marketing.
