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.
From the Unfamiliar to the Acquainted
No matter how good your writing might be, it’s very unlikely that you’ll get it published in the New Yorker when people are unfamiliar with your work. Even if you have somehow managed to get the email address of one of the editors, if your name is unknown to him or her your message will likely go straight to the trash unopened.
The key to getting out of the stranger zone is to break people’s preoccupation. When people are unfamiliar with you, they’re always thinking about something or someone else. When people go into bookstores to browse, they’ll often be looking for books from their favorite authors or about some particular subject that interests them. None of them will be looking for your book unless they’ve heard about you from somewhere. Sometimes if you have an attractive cover or an intriguing title you might break someone’s preoccupation and make them want to leaf through the book and read the blurb on the back. Even if the book seemed interesting there’s a high chance that the reader won’t buy it, as he or she is not familiar enough with you or your brand. What the reader has done however, is to become acquainted with you.
Now that they’re acquainted with you, they’re much more likely to click on a website link with your name on it, or even read one of your short stories or essays. The more they expose themselves to your brand, and the more that your brand resonates with them as a reader, it’s only a matter of time before they put your writing on their “to read list.” The more the reader sees, hears or reads about you the higher your book goes toward the top of that list.
Breaking the unfamiliarity barrier in publishing is also important. In order for more and more publishers to become acquainted with your work you have to get published more. This sounds like a Catch-22 but it really isn’t. What you must do is endeavor to get published in less popular magazines and work your way up. If you publish 10 articles or stories in second tier magazines, you’re much more likely to be noticed by a first tier magazine like the New Yorker.
Another way to break people’s preoccupation and establish acquaintance is to give out free stuff. “Free” is one of the most magical words in the English language. Just by saying the words “It’s free,” you’re bound to make people turn their heads and listen to what you have to say. One of the big benefits I get from writing free high-value articles is increased web traffic. The higher my traffic, the more people know me and my brand. The more people know me, the easier it becomes for me to sell and market my writing.
Creating free content on the web is certainly not the only way to give out free stuff. You could send free copies of your books to editors who might review it in their magazine. You could write guest articles on popular blogs without charge. If you write a science fiction book, you could hand out free copies of it at a comic book convention. Giving away free stuff in a targeted manner can be very effective in raising awareness of you and your writing.
From the Acquainted to the Fan
In the end your job is to get your writing to the top of people’s reading lists and keep it at the top. You must expand your fanbase. Fans are the people who can’t wait until your next book comes out. When you have a fan you don’t have to sell your writing any more–people simply buy. Fans have come to know and love your writing and won’t hesitate to read whatever you’re coming out with next.
In order to turn those who are acquainted with your work into fans it’s essential that you follow these two rules:
- Sharpen your best tools – One of the most valuable questions you can ever ask is: “How did you hear about me?” If someone out of the blue sends you an email from Nowhereville USA saying how much they liked your work, ask them how they found out about you. Whatever the source was, be sure to leverage it. If it happened to have been through a radio interview you better make sure you do more radio interviews. If it was through your website you better do what you can to improve and add more content to your site. Send small gifts (a free copy of your novel perhaps) to both the person who wrote you the letter and whoever referred your work to the person that wrote the letter. If you do this, you can be sure these people will be talking about you for a long time.
- Repeat exposure - Whoever said familiarity breeds contempt didn’t know what they were talking about. In reality, familiarity breeds trust and goodwill. Because of this it’s better to write five guest blog articles on one site than one article each on five different sites. If one of your marketing channels have proven to work, don’t let up just because you’re seeing results. Become a fixture. The more your name appears in the same places, the more curious people will be about it. Eventually, this curiosity will translate into a wider readership. Be sure to saturate your niches with more and more of your work. The niche might be super-small, but if you gain the respect and trust from the people in that niche, your reputation is bound to spill over into larger interest groups.
Keep the Fans Happy
It doesn’t matter if your fanbase is a hundred people or a million people. Your fans are the greatest word-of-mouth asset that you have, and you have to keep them reading.
In essence, you want to be as nice as you possibly can to your best readers. You want to create a dialogue with them. To keep in touch with them. You must leverage the goodwill that your readers have for you and turn it into more goodwill. Stay in touch with your readers. Write them, email them. Let them participate in free seminars or webinars. Give them a chance to ask questions about you and your work. Ask them about what they like most in your writing. When they tell you whatever that is, make sure you have more of it in what you write next.
Your most loyal readers have have given you their trust, and it’s important that you return their trust with behavior that makes yourself worthy of it. Do what you can to give back. If someone subscribes to your e-zine, reciprocate by sending them a short story that won’t be published for a week. If someone buys your book, include a password protected weblink to the first top secret chapter of your next book. Not only are you giving them free stuff, which increases goodwill, but you’re also giving readers a sense that they’re “a part of your posse,” and that you trust them as a friend.
More, More and More
Although marketing your writing is essential if you want to have a wide readership, the best marketing in the world won’t help if you have a poor product. It’s important that you spend the bulk of your time producing quality writing.
Quantity, however, is also important. The more products any business introduces into the market, the bigger chance that one of them is going to be a hit. Although it certainly helps to write what you think will sell, the nature of people’s tastes and preferences are so unpredictable that we often won’t have any idea which one of our stories will take off. It’s very common among writers to be surprised about the success of one of their stories or essays that they felt was a weaker example of their work.
More writing means more chances for exposure, more chances that people will like what you’re writing about and more chances that you’ll have a hit. Simply having more: more quality, more often, can be the best marketing strategy.
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.
Tags: author fans, author publicity, author relationships, connect with fans, kenji krosland, marketing your writing, writer fans, writing website
Great resources! However, how do you fully utilize all this information, research and marketing material. Very little, if any, of it is available at the retail point of sale, reviewers blog posts or fan websites and ‘pulling’ readers to multiple sources is a guaranteed way to loose a customer, fan and brand.
What about a book marketing platform that can aggregate the external Internet marketing material (Twitter, YouTube, blog posts, etc), combine it with internal marketing material (i.e., chapter samples, author bio, news/appearance updates, etc.), organize it and push it to all distribution points (retail pos, blog postings, fan websites, viral distributions, etc.). This provides readers with the information they want, where they want it and when they want it (permission marketing). Also, purchase options allow for instant sales wherever the book is featured (i.e., blog post, fan website, author’s website, etc.). Book marketing platforms engage customer, increase interaction with the product, sell books and strengthen brand loyalty.