Guest Post: Marketing Your Writing
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010Part 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: (more…)
Is there a place for product placement in books? With advertisers’ ever-increasing fears about the demise of the thirty-second TV spot, product placement has become a more and more popular way of promoting consumer goods, whether we’re aware of it or not. Books have mostly remained an untapped resource for advertisers, but readers 
Public relations, or PR, plays an integral role in the success of any author trying to increase book sales and visibility in the marketplace. No longer the ugly stepsister to advertising, PR has changed its image and is on the rise. For the budget-conscious author, PR is usually the most cost-effective solution for maximum market penetration. Use the tools below to keep your money in your pocket and your book on the shelf: 