PR & Marketing for Authors – Just Do It

Even before you finished your first manuscript, you’d have heard that doing your own marketing is essential if you want to get ahead as an author.

Straight after you sold your first manuscript, I’m sure you learned from experience that marketing is the biggest time suck in the world, and joy-of-joys, now you have to add marketing to the long list of essentials you have to squeeze into your eight hours a day.

If you want to quit the day job, then it’s not just essential, it’s critical.

You’ll also learn very quickly that marketing can be horribly expensive if you go about it the wrong way.

There’s ways to incorporate marketing into your day-job structured world so that both the time and money you invest in it are controlled, and you get maximum return for your investments (ROI). And the key is having a system.

If you’ve never given marketing much thought beyond having a website, or <gulp> don’t even have a website, then start doing some research. When? Well, that’s where the system gets put into place.

Finding time.

Out of your eight hours a day, and your two weekend days away from the day job, you need to schedule not just writing time, but formal marketing hours. Yes, it’ll cut into your writing time a little, but you need to market, so the novel production must slow a little in order to build the readership you need to sell those novels.

I spend nearly all day on Saturdays catching up on marketing tasks, and I spent a hour each evening answering emails and cruising blogs and forums (which is part of my marketing plan). I also sometimes take a week off writing altogether, and spend all my writing time on marketing, just to get a surge of effort out there.

Your own schedule can be different, and should be set up to suit your life and where you are in your career. But you must formalize your marketing efforts in some way if you want to gain control of them.

Once you have earmarked time to devote to marketing, then you have to decide what you will do, out of the myriad marketing activities you might do. As an anchored author, the vast majority of your marketing efforts will be on-line. Off-line methods just don’t have a great enough ROI to pay for the huge amounts of time they can take, and many of them require your time and attention during work hours, which makes them almost impossible to execute effectively.

The millions of things you might do to market yourself and your work can be totally overwhelming. But it can be broken down very simply.

A Simple System.

1. Pick something to do that you think will bring your book to the attention of appropriate readers. Anything will do. Pick the most fun one, or the one that sounds effective. Stick a pin in a list on the wall. Just pick one. It doesn’t matter which. Anywhere is a great place to start.
2. Do it.
3. Keep records on how effective it is – use website and blog traffic stats, sales numbers, Amazon rankings, whatever feedback you can get that gives you a measure of effectiveness. Keeping records is key to making your marketing pay off.
4. Keep up the effort for as long as it takes to get meaningful feedback. Shifts on Amazon rankings are updated in real time (minute by minute), but a drive to build links to your website might not show positive results for a few weeks, or more.
5. If the method pays off – if it increases your readership, sales, subscriptions to your blog, whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve, then keep doing it. If your royalties increase by more than you spent on the process, keep doing it. Set it up so the process is as automated as you can manage it (conserving time), set reminders to yourself to update the process and review the results on a regular basis, then move on to the next marketing idea you have.
6. If the method doesn’t pay off, stop doing it, and switch to something else.

Eventually, you’ll have a portfolio of marketing activities that provide good ROI, and take up all the time you can spare for marketing. You can either:

1. increase your marketing time and add more activities, or
2. you can dump the least successful activity for a while, and try something new, to see if it does better than the one you’ve temporarily hibernated.

The second way is actually a good method for increasing the overall effectiveness of your marketing in the long term, because if the new method is a better producer than the old one, you’ve increased your effectiveness immediately. If you keep trading off the least effective method and testing new ones, you’re always improving your ROI.

One of the constants in your marketing efforts will be to learn more about marketing and promotion, and to stay on top of new trends. This isn’t a difficult task – there’s so much free information on marketing out there, that you’ll quickly be inundated with information and ideas.

Don’t worry about which method is best – everyone will be touting the latest, newest marketing fad as “the best”. Try one that seems to make sense to you and would work with your current circumstances. By keeping good records, you’ll quickly know if it really does work or not, or if it’s worth the time you need to invest to do it.

And there you go, a simple, sustainable system that keeps everything under control.

Marketing is also like writing, by the way; it may seem like you’re getting nowhere fast, but an hour or so, each and every day, has huge impact over time. As an anchored author, incremental progress is your single most powerful strategy for success.

Do you have any marketing tips to share?

First appeared on Anchored Authors on June 17, 2008

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission.