Where to Start With Your Book Marketing
EPISODE SIXTY SEVEN
One of the biggest questions I get about marketing a book is where do I even start? I can be difficult to figure out what to do, how to do it, and what to focus your limited time on. In this episode we will talk about:
the first two steps to start marketing your book
knowing your unique strategy
get your marketing foundation set
Links
TRANSCRIPT:
Jenn Hanson-dePaula: Hello, and welcome to the Book Marketing Simplified Podcast. I'm Jenn Hanson-dePaula.
Marcus dePaula: I'm Marcus dePaula. Jenn, you get a lot of questions from authors. What is one of the most common questions you've been seeing lately?
Jenn: By and far, where do I even start? Not even just in regards to marketing, it's in regards to getting started publishing their book and everything that's involved with it. When it comes to marketing, I think that there are so many opinions. There are so many ideas. There's so many different ways that you can go that it just feels like you're in the middle of a forest wandering around not even knowing where to begin. This is by and far the number one question that I get. I understand it can be very confusing, especially if you don't know the right questions to ask or where to go for even trusted information or guidance. It can be overwhelming.
Marcus: Obviously, people are coming to you for trusted information, which is a great place to start. What do you tell authors is a good place to start with their book marketing?
Jenn: There are two essential steps. They aren't sexy. They aren't the fun part of marketing your book, but they are essential to starting off your marketing journey. The first one is knowing exactly who it is that you want to reach. We call this your ideal reader. This is not something that is just isolated to book publishing. This is every single business, every single creative, every single enterprise that you would ever look at has an ideal, they call it ideal customer, an ideal avatar.
There are many different names for it. When it comes to your book, you have to remember that even though this is a creative endeavor, you have to look at your book as a little mini business. You as an author, having someone that you are specifically talking to and trying to connect with and reach is going to make your marketing easier. It's going to make your marketing much more powerful and effective, and it's going to help you not be so scattered and overwhelmed with your marketing because you're going to be talking to one single person.
Marcus: That makes sense. What's the second thing?
Jenn: The second thing is you have to have goals. I used to be the queen of rolling your eyes when someone would tell me you have to have goals. It really does make a lot of sense to have goals because if you are just winging it and not really having anything to aim at, you can't measure your progress. You can't say, okay, I am growing, I am selling more, or I am making progress towards X, Y, and Z. Having just a few goals, like it could be I want to sell X amount of books per month, or I want to sell, for example, 1,000 books over the next three months.
From there, you can work backwards and say, in order to sell 1,000 books over the next three months, I know I have to sell 333 books per month. I have to sell 33 books per week. I have to sell 3 books a day. It's something that you can break down and go, "Okay, three books a day. I can do that. How can I go after that aggressively? Where can I put myself out there to sell three books a day?" It just gives you something to aim at. That gives you those parameters and that structure.
When we get shiny object syndrome, when we see, oh, someone's doing this over there, or someone has this new promotion or something like that, we can ask ourselves, is this going to help me reach my goal, or is it going to distract me? That is a way, having goals, to really help with being distracted and trying a bunch of new things that are just going to distract you and not help you actually progress.
Marcus: It's having a clear vision of the direction you're heading in with every single thing you do intentionally online as a part of your book marketing process. Then I heard you say that it helps to have a timeframe for each of these goals, not just have some arbitrary goal out there, but saying, I want to reach this goal by X date.
Jenn: Yes. Because that is going to help you measure it rather than like what you said just floating around aimlessly, you can actually give yourself some parameters to work within.
Marcus: All right. Those are the first two steps to setting out on your book marketing journey. What is the next thing that authors should be looking at for their book marketing?
Jenn: The second thing that I would highly recommend is to get a unique strategy set up for you and your book. When we see a successful author on Instagram or TikTok and we think, oh, they have a process set out and we just basically mimic whatever they do, it is not going to be as effective as their processes because you have unique views, you have a unique voice and personality.
Marcus: And unique readers.
Jenn: Exactly. You need to create your own strategy. One of the best ways to do that is to start with, okay, where do I want to connect with people? Let's say you want to connect on TikTok, then you need to think about, okay, once they see this video, where do I want them to go next? Do I want them to go read a blog post that I wrote? Do I want them to listen to a podcast that I was on?
Maybe sign up for my newsletter or let them know that my book is available and sending them to a sales page. You have to know where you want to send them. This is called warming up your audience. It's really leading them exactly where you want them to go. Having that strategy in place that's unique to you, that's unique to your readers, that is going to help your marketing be more effective and it's going to lead your readers with intention about where you want them to go.
Marcus: It doesn't hurt to see what other authors are doing just to see what your options are.
Jenn: Absolutely.
Marcus: You always have to look at it through the lens of is this going to, A, help me reach my goal that we established in the first step of this? B, is it going to help me reach my specific ideal reader in a way that fits my personal brand, my personal identity as an author that is different from these other authors?
Jenn: Exactly. If they are at a completely different phase of their career, they are going to have a completely different set of circumstances surrounding that. Understanding that we're all at different steps within the process, if they've been doing this for years, they're going to be at a different place. Understanding that is going to be key.
Marcus: All right. We've established who our ideal reader is. We have a clear vision of our goals with a timeframe. We've come up with a strategy, this is a lot, and it takes time to get all this stuff. What happens once we have that strategy with those other pieces in mind?
Jenn: This is where we have a solid marketing foundation to build on. The solid marketing foundation is really following a funnel. It's like you said, knowing our goals and our ideal readers, how we attract the right people, how we connect with them with our content, the posts that we share, the blogs that we share, the podcasts, all that good stuff. It's connecting them to our newsletter, getting them signed up through an incentive, and then from there selling. This is your basic structure.
This is the foundation that is going to consistently be running and that you're going to be consistently doing. That is a foundation. Then when you have an opportunity, let's say to do some book promotions, like through a book bub or a fussy librarian, you are going to have this foundation that you can add these promotions on top of where it's just going to enhance what you are doing. Because when you go into some of these promotions, especially when you don't know who your ideal reader is, when you don't have specific goals, once you have them, like let's say they sign up on a book bub promotion, what do you do then?
Doing those promotions consistently isn't going to be sustainable and it's very expensive. When you can establish that foundation, when you can have that funnel and you can have that strategy in place, you know that you're always going to have a system going within your marketing, but you can add book promotions, you can do different ads, you can do other things that will enhance it from time to time as your budget allows.
Marcus: It's hard not to feel overwhelmed at how much is involved with this. We have seen firsthand that the authors that take the time to do all of this stuff are playing a long game that is a sustainable career instead of just trying to focus on one product and what hopefully is a whole library of books that we want readers to buy. Skipping those steps that you've laid out to go right from writing a book to trying to sell it immediately, it usually doesn't work.
Jenn: That is what contributes to the burnout.
Marcus: Yes, because it's frustrating.
Jenn: It really is. When you have all of these plates that you're trying to keep spinning, you're going to drop one. When you have this foundation, rather than trying to figure out, okay, what am I going to do next month? What am I going to do here and there and everywhere to sell this book? You are going to have foundation that you know is going to be humming along where you can say, okay, I have X amount of dollars in my budget.
Maybe I could try running some ads, or maybe I could try this book promotion. It's going to help your marketing be sustainable and more solid where you know okay, this is going to work. This is going to help me move forward towards my goals.
[music]
Marcus: Ultimately, while what we've laid out here may seem overwhelming to people that are just starting out their own book marketing, you've laid it out in a way where it's just do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. While we do want to think about big picture, and this is something I struggle with, we don't want to think of, oh, I have all these things to do. Just focus, start with the goals, start with your ideal reader, and then just do the next thing that follows, the next thing that follows.
Then by the time you look around, you have all this stuff built up, like you said, the foundation, and it's easy just to step in and try something new, try the next thing and the next thing. All of this hopefully spins up this flywheel of marketing that's easy and sustainable for you instead of feeling like every time you finish a book, you have to, all right, now it's time to market it again. This is an ongoing process.
Jenn: Exactly. Because I wanted to make this a simplified process, I decided to create something.
Marcus: What did you create for us, Jenn?
Jenn: I created what I'm calling the Book Marketing Starter Kit. This is really everything that we talked about in today's episode, and it's laid out step by step. You get a complete ideal reader profile, which is something that I've only ever really provided for clients, and that's in the author circle. This is the first time that I'm really making it a part of a product, which I'm really excited about because it was really a game changer. It also walks you through how to set up your goals.
You get those two not very sexy tasks laid out for you. Then I walk you through exactly how to set up your funnel step by step. I have a timeline and tasks for each of the marketing phases that you go through within marketing your book. I also have over 100 marketing ideas. You are never going to run out of ideas. You're never going to wonder, oh, what should I do? Everything is really within the starter kit. You can build that foundation, so you can set yourself up for success, and you aren't going to be wandering around trying to figure out what to do.
Marcus: This is a downloadable PDF that you can print off and write all this stuff out, get it out of your brain on a piece of paper.
Jenn: You can also just keep it digital and have it be there on your iPad or on your computer. It's really very versatile.
Marcus: We'll put a link to this new Book Marketing Starter Kit in the episode notes for the podcast. You can also just head to mixthismedia.com, check it out.
Jenn: What I really like about this is that it's not a course. It's not something where you have to sit through hours of videos. It's information that's written up. It's like a really great reference guide that you come back to over and over again. It's very clearly laid out. It's not going to take hours and hours and hours to complete. It is all very succinct. I did not include a bunch of images, so it's not going to eat up your ink if you're a print-off person. It's just really clear and easy to follow. I'm really excited for you all to try it.
Marcus: Head to our website to check that out. As always, we love hearing your questions. Continue to hit Jenn up on all of the social medias via email, on our web forms, or in the comments section for the podcast.
Jenn: Absolutely. We love hearing from you.
Marcus: We'll see you next time.
Jenn: Bye-bye.