{"id":2883,"date":"2022-02-15T04:31:51","date_gmt":"2022-02-15T04:31:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksandpublishing.com.au\/independentpublishing\/?p=2883"},"modified":"2022-02-18T02:29:30","modified_gmt":"2022-02-18T02:29:30","slug":"from-the-asp-archive-an-introduction-to-promotion-and-marketing-your-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booksandpublishing.com.au\/independentpublishing\/articles\/2022\/02\/15\/2883\/from-the-asp-archive-an-introduction-to-promotion-and-marketing-your-book\/","title":{"rendered":"From the archive: An introduction to promotion and marketing your book"},"content":{"rendered":"

From 2018\u20142019,\u00a0the novelist Ellie Marney wrote a monthly advice column for <\/em>Australian Self Publisher. Below, we have reprinted the first instalment in the ‘Self-publishing essentials with Ellie Marney: promotion, marketing and all that jazz’ series, in which she writes about the importance of marketing, as well as showing you how to come up with a marketing plan.<\/em><\/p>\n

Writer, publisher, promoter<\/strong><\/p>\n

So you\u2019ve written a book, gone through the tricky process of prepping it for publication, and then released it out into the world. Congratulations! That is hard work, and you did it. But you want people to read your book, right? And maybe you\u2019d like to see some sales too, so you can recoup the costs of publishing. That\u2019s where promotion and marketing come in.<\/p>\n

Why market?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the part that most authors loathe. They\u2019d like to think that the beauty of their words and the originality of their story will draw readers like an enticing aroma, and sales will come tumbling in.<\/p>\n

The reality is \u2026 not like that. As of the time of writing this article, more than one million titles were\u00a0self-published<\/a>\u00a0last year in the US alone. There are now more than five million Kindle ebooks just on Amazon. That\u2019s a lot of books. The chances of people finding\u00a0your<\/em>\u00a0book in that sea of pages are almost infinitesimal, unless you do some work to put it in front of readers\u2019 eyeballs.<\/p>\n

Maybe you only wrote the book for friends and family\u2014that\u2019s fine, and you may have already achieved your aims if your friends and family have their copies. But if you wrote it for a wider audience, you need to market it. If you didn\u2019t want to attract readers for your book, you could have left it in a drawer and saved yourself the production costs.<\/p>\n

As a self-published author, you\u2019re not just the book\u2019s writer. You\u2019re its sales and public relations (PR) department too. And that\u2019s not such a bad thing. Remember this:\u00a0no one is as invested in selling your book as you are<\/em>. No sales representative knows your book so well or understands who it might appeal to\u2014or has a personal financial stake in making sure it sells. As a self-published author, you also have some unique advantages for marketing, which we\u2019ll discuss soon, but first \u2026<\/p>\n

Promoting vs marketing<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first thing to remember is that there\u2019s a difference between promotion and marketing. These terms are often lumped in together, but in reality they are different parts of the chain.<\/p>\n

\u2018Marketing\u2019 is an umbrella term that\u00a0includes<\/em>\u00a0promotion\u2014in fact, most business gurus talk about the \u20184Ps\u2019 of marketing: product, price, placement and promotion. A marketing plan looks at every aspect of a book as a saleable item, from its target audience and where it\u2019s sold, to the quality of the book itself, its sale price, and who it\u2019s advertised to. In a traditional publishing house, different teams of people\u2014sales, PR, advertising\u2014implement a coordinated strategy to market a book release. As an independent author, you\u2019re the whole shebang, although you can outsource some aspects of it if you have the money to invest.<\/p>\n

Promotion is one aspect of marketing, and it\u2019s split into two parts. There\u2019s\u00a0free promotion<\/em>, called publicity: that\u2019s the personal platform you create to give yourself and your books exposure to a wider audience. It mainly consists of things like your website, social media presence, newsletters and so on, but it also includes things like book reviews, your attendance at public events, and your networks and relationships (with readers, booksellers, distributors, librarians and so on) that facilitate getting your books into readers\u2019 hands. It is what people refer to when they talk about \u2018personal brand\u2019, and generally the only outgoing cost for this kind of promotion is your time and energy.<\/p>\n

Paid promotion<\/em>\u00a0is advertising, and that doesn\u2019t just mean billboards and posters on buses (although, sure, you can do that if you can afford it). Paid promotion is available in a lot of different places, at various price points, and can be very useful for self-publishing authors.<\/p>\n

Your marketing plan<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marketing your book is just like publishing it: you do it one step at a time. While it\u2019s tempting to dive right in, book marketing can be overwhelming and time-consuming (not to mention expensive, if you get into advertising). Before taking any major steps, you should sit down and work out a plan.<\/p>\n

In the next article, we\u2019ll talk about the basics of marketing and start putting together some strategies. Until then, check out some of these great books and articles you can read to help you along the way:<\/p>\n