Book Marketing. In Plain English.

by Hank Quense, @hanque99

A book marketing overview written in plain English not marketing doublespeak

A large part of the difficulty faced by new authors in trying to sell their book is the confusion caused by the bewildering terms used to describe marketing. The literature is written in doublespeak and technobabble. In this article, I’ll translate this stuff into English.

To begin, no one buys a book they never heard of. If you want to sell books, you have to tell people about the book. That’s called marketing.

However, this isn’t as simple as it may appear. Promoting your book to the general population is a huge waste of money because only a small sliver of this population will have an interest in your book. This sliver may be on the order of a half to one percent but that still represents a large number of potential book buyers.

So the marketing questions comes down to: How do you identify that sliver? and: How do I reach the people in the sliver? If, for instance, you wrote a romance novel, then your sliver is romance readers and you have to find where those readers are likely to be on the internet so you can launch ads and posts to tell them about your book. Naturally, you don’t want to post romance book ads on a site devoted to guns because most gun owners don’t belong to your romance sliver.

Let’s switch topics and talk about the modern day book sales process. In today’s world, you reach book buyers through the internet via posts in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. and by ads or promotions. In all cases these posts, ads, promotions, whatever contain a link. If someone sees the post, ad or promotion on a webpage it’s called an impression. If that someone is interested, they will click on the link and will be transferred to the book’s landing page (think Amazon here). This is called a click through. The landing page is where the sales magic takes place. Or not.

This sales process is depicted in the graphic.

It follows that your book’s landing page is the most important piece of marketing content you own. Almost all of your marketing activities will be aimed at getting people to visit that landing page via click throughs. However, visitors may still be skeptical because they never heard of the author (you!). That’s where your author platform comes in by providing your credentials as an author and a person. The author platform, in effect, surrounds and works with the landing page to convince the reader to buy the book. The landing page covers the book; the platform deals with the author.

To summarize, the fundamental book marketing plan consists of the following steps:

Identify your sliver of the population.

Find out how to reach that sliver.

Create a unique and attention-grabbing landing page.

Develop your author platform.

Launch your marketing campaigns.

Once the first four steps of the plan are completed, your marketing efforts (step 5) will have much higher chances of succeeding.

If you need help in developing this five step fundamental plan, contact Hank Quense at strangeworlds (at) hankquense (dot) com

If you’re looking for help with fiction writing, self-publishing or book marketing, check out the resources on https://writersarc.com

This link will display all my courses on Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/hank-quense-2/

My website Writers & Authors Resource Center provides material relating to fiction writing, self-publishing and book marketing.

Image by Steve DiMatteo from Pixabay