Becoming an author requires you to develop many skills – planning, research and writing for starters. But when the last full stop of the final draft has been put in place, your career as a marketer is now going to be centre stage.
There are five key areas that an author needs to address in order to have a successful book.
Build your tribe
You can do this right from the point you start thinking about your book. The longer you have to do this, the bigger the audience you’ll have when your book is published.
To keep your tribe or community engaged you’ll need a plan to keep delivering useful content to them from the time they sign up to your list. That might be newsletters, podcasts, free webinars, as long as it’s around the same subject as your book.
Launch
Nobody will know your book has been published if you don’t shout about it. You’ll need a campaign to start running 6-8 weeks prior to publication date.
This usually includes an email campaign and social media posts – not just one or two, but 2-3 emails a week and daily social posts. Plus any media coverage you can get or opportunities to do short presentations to groups where your target readers hang out. And any other activities you can think of that might gain some visibility.
Marketing
Email marketing and social posts about your book shouldn’t stop at the point when it’s launched. This is an ongoing process to keep the sales coming in.
There are many tools you can use for marketing, you won’t want to use all of them, but you do need to take an inventory of what’s there and decide what will work best for you.
Promotion
If you don’t have a PR agency working for you, or a really good literary agent who is a good promoter, this is going to be on your to-do list too.
Thought-leader articles in the right publications, local radio features, TV sofas, live book readings, exhibitions, fairs and festivals, featuring in the press where there are hot topics that your book content is related to, presentations featuring your book content, podcast guest spots or video interviews are all part of your promotion campaign.
Leverage
With a book in your hand you have the potential to repurpose the content in plenty of ways. You could create an accompanying workbook, a course – either in a classroom or digital, a seminar, a webinar (or series), a keynote speech. Make that content work for you – and you’ll be creating a sales platform for the book at the same time.
Before you start doing any of the above – invest some time in planning and scheduling, so it doesn’t become overwhelming.
