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Hello everyone,
I wen’t to a conference this week and received some great advice from a man by the name of Jim Howard who helped start morgan james publishing house. First he talked about morgan james which seeks to mesh the best from self publishing and traditional publishing into one system that allows the author to be in control and still receive all the benefits of a large publishing house. I plan to try to publish through them.
The main lesson I learned from him though is that I need to go into publishing with a solid marketing platform and start working on it now. By a marketing platform he means a list of all the ways you know you can get the word out about your book when it is published. A good publisher like his can get you into all the major bookstores of america, but they can’t do much to actually make customers buy it. That has a lot to do with how you can contribute. You may be able to advertise in a magazine you subscribe to, get a friend to advertise on a podcast, speak at a live event, set up a booth, or send out emails. The one he specifically mentioned was emails. He suggested you start collecting all the emails you can of people who are likely to want to read your novel when it comes out. Personally, I plan to do this by creating a writing blog with some public material but with the emphasis being on weekly or biweekly emails of poems, short stories, or serial novels readers can subscribe to. When I publish my book, I can notify everyone who has already subscribed and would thus already be interested.
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Neat— great ideas. I’ll have to admit advertising is the only thing about publishing that scares me. Let me know when you create your blog.
Oh, another thing I learned was how to become a best selling author. All you have to do is have your book pre-published in an ebook format on Amazon. Then get all the friends you can enlist to direct as many people as possible to your book within an hour’s time frame or so. Sell it discounted to increase your sales. All you have to do to become an amazon best seller is hit top sales in one of their hundreds of book categories and sub categories for a fraction of time. If you focus your sales on that fraction of time, you have good chances of making it. If you do, take a screen shot (because you may not stay there very long), and you are a best seller. Not very impressive, I know, but it is better than not being a best seller in any list, and you don’t have to explain to anyone why that label isn’t as impressive as it sounds. It still shows something.
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This is very interesting stuff.
Platform building is something I’ve wanted to research more fully. Advertising is something I’m also playing around with. The problem, as far as I see it, is that advertisers and people advertising try to mimic previous marketing techniques, and it doesn’t work the second time. Your marketing campaign really has to have a unique edge to it to get up above the curve. Cause there are SO many books and SO many people publishing and SO many people advertising their work.
But you also have to play for the long term, and that’s tough. Advertising in general is a bear.
This is a very important topic. Even if you write the best book in history, It can be a flunk if it is not well advertised. To figure out how we should approach marketing for the most success, I’ll just head over and start a new thread. Look for,”Marketing and platform: what’s the best approach?”
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