The Big Bad Book Blog

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Continuing where Part II left off:

1.    Build Your Brand – Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.
2.    Make Connections – Marketing is all about making connections. It’s not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.
3.    Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Build Relationships

How many of your good friends would say no if you asked them to read your writing? Probably not many. Even if you write science fiction novels and your friend isn’t a science fiction fan, they’ll still probably read it. To be a successful marketer you must not only make connections but you must also make friends. Although you might make a “miracle connection” with a magazine publisher or a book-reviewer, connections with these people mean nothing until they come to trust you and see you as a friend.

Not only must you must turn strangers into friends but you have to make sure your friends stay your friends. Many millions of marketing dollars are not spent on promoting new brands, but keeping people loyal to old brands. The reason for this is because it costs less to keep a customer than to make a new one. If you have loyal and devoted readers, it’s very important that they stay devoted. Your loyal readers are the most important marketing tool you have as they’re the most likely to talk about and recommend your work. It’s important to keep these readers happy because you want to keep them talking and keep them recommending. In the end, word-of-mouth advertising will always reign supreme.

For the purposes of marketing your writing, there are three levels of relationship. They are the unfamiliar, the acquainted, and the fans. It’s our job to turn the unfamiliar into the acquainted and the acquainted into our fans. Continue reading Guest Post: Marketing Your Writing (Part III)

Calling all indie authors and publishers–including small and mid-size independent publishers, university presses, e-book publishers, and self-published authors. Enter the Next Generation Indie Book Awards now to have your book considered for cash prizes of $1,500, awards, exposure, and recognition as one of the top independently published books of the year! The deadline is March 10, 2010, so get your submissions in today!

The top 60 books will be reviewed by New York literary agent Marilyn Allen or her co-agents for possible representation in areas such as distribution, foreign rights, and film rights. Ms. Allen has served as Senior Vice President of HarperCollins, directed sales and marketing teams for Simon & Schuster and Penguin Books, and worked with authors such as Stephen King, Ken Follett, and Barbara Kingsolver.

Visit www.IndieBookAwards.com for more information or to enter.

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Continuing where Part I left off:

1.    Build Your Brand – Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.
2.    Make Connections – Marketing is all about making connections. It’s not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.
3.    Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Make Connections

Only a few people that you know, if any, are members of your target audience. Most people that you know, however, are certain to know people who are members of your target audience. That’s why it’s important to make connections.

Not all connections are to be treated equally, of course. Making a single connection with one person could be worth making connections with 20 others. You could, for example, make a connection with the editor of a popular magazine with thousands of readers. You may know a college professor who’s willing to pass your name on to students that might benefit from reading your work. You may run into a talented web designer who’s so impressed with your writing that he or she offers to revamp your website for free. You might establish a connection with someone who runs a book of the month club with 50 readers, and each of those readers may have five friends each who are interested in what you’re writing. A wealthy philanthropist might come across your website, be impressed by your work, and give you a $10,000 donation. All of these connections could be a phone call, an email or a mouse click away.

Making connections like those listed above are not a matter of luck, but a matter of persistence. It’s quite possible you could make 100 connections before running into someone that could really help you out. What the skilled marketer must do then is see beyond any single person and do their best to get in touch with all the people they know and all the people that those people know. If you continue to do this, It’s only a matter of time before you make that “miracle” connection.

So how should you make these connections? Believe it or not, you already have a lot of connection building tools in your arsenal. In order to be a master marketer, you must become familiar with them all. You may, for example, be the most terrible cold caller in the world, but if you’re persistent, and improve your skills in that area, it may become your best connection maker.

Here’s a list of some connection making tools:

• You
• Your writing
• Your website
• RSS feeds and directories
• Internet bulletin boards and forums
• Emails
• Newsletters
• Affiliate programs
• Link building programs (link exchanges, blogrolls)
• Online contests
• Your own e-zine
• Other peoples e-zines
• Webinars
• Live seminars
• Advertisements (from Craigslist to Google Ads to print media)
• Writers conferences
• Interviews (both being interviewed and interviewing others)
• Speaking or reading stories at events
• Business cards
• E-books
• Podcasts
• Vlogging
• Snail mail
• Asking for referrals
• The phone
• Print media
• Social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Linked In)
• Slogans
• Memes
• Word-of-Mouth
• Alternative web navigation tools (delicious.com, Stumbleupon)
• Other websites and blogs
• Elevator pitch
• Personal PR

As you can see, the amount of options you have to build connections with your audience are almost endless. As it’d be a Herculean task to master all of these at once. It’d be best to focus on one at a time until you get the hang of each. Try as many as you can, especially the ones that scare you, as those can be indications of where you can grow.

For starters, choose some of these weapons and make a full frontal assault on your target audience. Don’t depend on any single tool for your marketing success. It’s important to take advantage of several tools at once. You must not, for example, rely on your website as the only way to make connections. Use your other connection making tools to leverage each other. Send letters to publishers and tack your website address in the letter. Make cold-calls or write emails to people who might be interested in your site and send them a link. The key to good marketing is repetition. The more people hear about you and your writing the more they’ll be curious about it. If you approach your audience using all the tools in your arsenal, chances are the right people will see your name enough times to want to know what you’re all about.

Kenji Crosland is a creative writing major who, scared of becoming a starving artist, became a corporate headhunter in Tokyo. Since then he’s regained his sanity, quit his job, and now blogs about creating an ideal career at unreadyandwilling.com. He is also developing a web application that just might change the internet. Follow him on Twitter: @KenjiCrosland.

If you don’t give your book a good name, it will get teased on the playground, and grow up to resent you because of it. A title is how people know and remember a book, much as they know and remember a person. At Greenleaf, work on a book’s cover design does not begin until the title is set. The title is the beginning, the introduction, the opening statement, and it sets the tone for the reader. So make it good.

But also make it useful. You have more leeway with a novel, but for non-fiction especially, the title must set a reader’s expectations. Momma’s Big Book of Classic Sewing Patterns does this pretty well, whereas Sew Be It is (arguably) wittier, but a reader would probably have to read the back of the book before knowing exactly how the book related to his or her favorite hobby. Warm Meals for “Chili” Days . . . and Nights! is both direct and (arguably) witty.

Pay attention to the interaction between title and subtitle. If your book has a punchy, one-word title, your subtitle needs to be long enough to provide clear explanation (Ka-BOOM!: 13 Strategies for Explosive Revenue Growth in the Mining Industry). Conversely, if you have a longer title, you don’t necessarily need a long subtitle (The Only Guide to Revenue Growth You’ll Ever Need: 13 Successful Strategies).

If you’re having difficulty deciding on a title, tell people about your book in your own words, and describe what you want your readers to come away with. Sometimes that will shake loose some important key words or phrases, and you can build from there. If all else fails . . . just go for it.

Part I of III: Build Your Brand

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Marketing your writing is essential if you want your work to be read by a wide audience.

For many, marketing is an alien word that may conjure up images of people in suits sitting at round tables analyzing market trends, consulting with focus groups, and pouring millions of dollars into nationwide ad campaigns. It’s big company stuff that individuals don’t have the time, money, or skills to get involved in.

Because of this image, many writers have considered the job of marketing their writing as something that publishing houses or literary agents should do for them. The reality is, however, that although the big publishing houses may do a great job in promoting the next bestseller, they’ll seldom take the risk to market the work of an unknown author. If you want to take advantage of the marketing might of the publishing houses, you must first learn how to market your writing on your own, to get your writing read by enough people that you get on a publisher’s radar, and make it worth their while to consider promoting what you’ve written.

The goals of marketing your writing are simple: you want to raise awareness of your writing, get more people to read it, and to keep them reading. If you’re persistent and committed to your marketing effort, it’s only a matter of time before that book offer arrives in your mailbox.

Self-marketing, unlike what a large corporation would have to go through, is much simpler than focus groups and market trend research, and can be broken down into these three steps:

1.         Build Your Brand – Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.

2.         Make Connections – Marketing is all about making connections. It’s not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.

3.         Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Build Your Brand

Just as Apple has Steve Jobs, and Virgin has Richard Branson. Your writing must have you.

Although you may have not consciously worked to build it, you already have a personal brand. A personal brand is all the thoughts and feelings that are associated with you and your work. A strong brand will capture people’s imagination and will make people remember you, your name, and your writing. A weak brand, however, can make it very difficult to promote yourself, no matter how much time and energy you spend on marketing efforts.

Stephen King has an incredibly strong personal brand. His name has become almost synonymous with horror, and just by picking up one of his books, without even reading word one, you can feel the uncanny weight of all his monstrous creations. Even if the book you read wasn’t one of his best, your reading experience would still be enhanced by its association with the Stephen King brand, with all the other books of his that you’ve enjoyed.

Michael Jordan has a strong personal brand, a brand which speaks athletic prowess and determination. When great athletes like him wear Nike merchandise, the power of the swoosh becomes amplified by association with their athletic talent. Because they wear Nike, you’re likely to associate their athletic skill with Nike merchandise, and you’ll probably even feel like a better athlete when you wear Nike because, on a real subconscious level, the athletic skill of these athletes have been transferred directly to you.

As you can see, a strong brand can have a powerful effect on how we view a product, movie, or book. If you can work to build your brand, to strengthen it and harness its power, it can be a tremendous asset to your marketing effort. So how can you work to start building an incredible brand? How can you make your readers tremble in anticipation even before opening your book?

As a writer, your personal brand has three elements: Continue reading Guest Post: Marketing Your Writing