The Reluctant Marketer: Four Simple Steps

Remember the day your book was published? Excitement, pride, accolades!

Remember the day after? The cold realization: to get any books sold, I’ll have to sell them myself.

I was lucky - I discovered a great passion for the psychology of selling. But many writers, after a quick flurry of book-signings and conventions and listgroup camaraderie that reinforces their identity of being a “published author,” realize that they must also become a "reluctant marketer."

You market because you have to. Even if you sort of like doing it, it takes away from your real writing. Marketing involves a confusing conglomeration of tools and techniques as well as an enormous amount of networking and studying and testing and skill-building.

How do you gain traction on selling your literary or nonfictional baby, while keeping from getting overwhelmed? Take these simple steps.

1. Conceptualize your customer.

2. Decide on the point of purchase.

3. Pick a partner that brings your customer to the point of purchase.

4. Do (only) your share of the work.

Step 1 involves knowing the person who is going to buy your book. Demographics, psychometrics, buying patterns, and blah blah blah. You can get multiple PhD’s in this truly fascinating area of study. For our purposes, let’s say that the customers for your book can be divided into those that have a rabid interest in your book’s content, and those that don’t.

Members of the former category are easier to sell to, and will buy your book for a higher price. I’d suggest starting with them. The other category is important too, but by working through the simplest scenario you’ll learn some important basics more quickly. Spend some time thinking about what “rabid interest” means in terms of your book and its readership. We’ll touch on that more in the next article.

Step 2 is to decide the actual point of purchase of your opus. Is it within a retail bookstore? Through an online retailer? Via catalog sales? From your publisher’s e-commerce site? From your e-commerce site?

We’re going to pick the last one. Why? Because your customer is rabid, remember? He’s an active cybernet surfer, and he wants – no, needs – your book’s content now. Even if you relax the rabidity quotient, getting sales through your own site is still a no-brainer if you have an e-book; perhaps not so much if you have a printed book. But even if your book is non-virtual, you should still try to sell it yourself. The education will be well worth it.

Step 3 is to pick a partner that brings your buyer to the point of purchase. What does this mean? Think about the points of purchase in Step 2. To get a bookstore purchase (whether e-tailer or retailer), you need a marketer. To get a purchase at a well-trafficked location (an unadvertised book signing, the county fair, setting up a desk at a grocery store) your partner is the venue representative. To get a TV appearance requires an agent.

Since our intention is to sell via your very own e-commerce site, your partner is a person who knows how to get eyeballs to your landing page, and fingers to your Buy button. These are commonly known as affiliate marketers. They are SEO pros, and they get paid when they sell.

For Step 4, I’d like you to visualize yourself as a “reluctant affiliate.” You’ve already done the major work in Step 1. Why's that? It’s because knowing what makes your customer rabid means knowing how they think and what motivates them, knowing where they hang out in cyber-land and what words hold magic for them. If you know that, it leads nicely to capturing what keywords they’ll type into google, what combination of 30 characters in an ad will seize their attention, and what style and content on your landing page will win their hastily beating hearts. Remember, they’re rabid. They want to buy.

Step 4 was to carry out your share of the work. As reluctant affiliate, your share means two things: 1) hire many, many affiliates (it’s frightfully easy) and 2) mirror everything an affiliate marketer does in order to bring in your own sales. This is an invaluable exercise. You will be able to apply EVERYTHING from this learning opportunity to your other categories of customer, to your other points of purchase, and to your other marketing partnerships.

Please consider taking these four steps. The next few articles will expound on them in more detail.

Here's a link to some 99 cent books on Affiliate Marketing that you can download to your Kindle.