Show Notes
Have you written a book or are you perhaps still writing one? How about dreaming of writing one?
Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, chick lit or murder mystery, business or history – you’ve got more of a challenge than just committing many thousands of words to a page. Even before you’re done writing, the challenging process of marketing and promoting that book must begin. But with all the books being published, including a plethora of self-published books, where do you start?
That’s what we tackle today with a professional in the PR and marketing industry who knows a thing or two about promoting books.
In This Episode We Talk About
- The difference between marketing and PR
- When you should be thinking about marketing and PR
- The most important thing you need to clarify before you start marketing and promoting your book
- What you should do about negative reviews
- How to pick a good PR person to help you promote your book
- The most important thing you can do to help promote your book that even a PR professional can’t do for you
- Where to start if you’re taking on promotion yourself plus some tips for getting the word out and building a super fan base
- Plus more about selling without being “icky”, the value of having a platform and what not to do on social media!
Links & Resources
- Find Meg at tandemliterary.com
- Check out one of Ralph’s favorite books and one recommended by Meg, In The Heart Of The Sea
Your Marketing Action Item
From Meg: Don’t be shy! Get out there and talk about your book. If you’re not comfortable doing that, find someone to help you. Your book won’t sell itself.
Where To Listen
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“Meg Walker and the Tale of 49 Shades”
Ralfaela Manerna wrote 49 Shades of Beige
It’s too bad she didn’t plan months in advance
A huge stockpile of copies sits in her garage
No fan base means she won’t stand a chance
Ralfaela thought her book would sell itself
Meg Walker would definitely say otherwise
Her 49 Shades of Beige may be dynamite
But her lack of sales is surely no surprise
If Ms.Manerna hired Meg prior to publication
Her 49 Shades would be flying off the shelf
Ralfaela didn’t have a gatekeeper mentality
She tried to handle everything all by herself
Marketing a book is a very strange animal
Meg Walker helps you rise above the din
She gets your book the attention it needs
Your book won’t land in the slush pile bin
Self publishers, see Meg first! 🙂
Your poetry always brightens my day! I don’t know about you but I would very much like to read Ms. Manerna’s manuscript 🙂
Yeah, I want to put my hands on Ms.Manerna’s manuscript, too. Sounds like a hot little read! Ralfaela has that reputation, y’know. 😉
As a self-publisher I have to say while I appreciate the sentiment of the episode there was a considerable amount of ignorance about the subject matter from a technical side displayed. To be fair to Meg she did admit that wasn’t her area.
Virtually no self-publishers have garages full of books any more. Print on demand costs are so close to print run costs that a self-publishers can print books when they are ordered – in fact on Createspace Amazon takes care of the whole process, so the books are printed, stored in Amazon’s warehouses and then delivered when ordered with no intervention from the author at all. If you want to get your book in a book store then there is a situation where you might end up with books in the garage but only if a book store has ordered your books and not sold them all, but that is not common any more.
There is no doubt that services like Meg’s can help self-publishers as the marketing area is where most struggle but on the technical side things are gradually getting simplified to the point where marketing becomes the only problem!
We asked Meg on our podcast to talk specifically about book promotion, not self-publishing. We asked the question about “a garage full of books” as a hypothetical and the point was well made – if your book is already published, it’s past the point where you should have been thinking about marketing it. Garages aside, marketing and promotion begins even before publication.
Sorry if I sounded snarky – was really trying to educate more than repudiate! I’ve only listened for a few shows and so far has been very good.
No worries, i didn’t mean to sound snarky either! There is a lot that goes into writing, publishing and marketing a book. It’s certainly no easy path in spite of idyllic visions of sitting on a porch with a typewriter. (no, nobody quite has those anymore either) Meg works with publishing houses as well as self-published authors so she has a lot of experience with both. And these days marketing is getting harder to some extent, because of the plethora of easily self-published books. That makes for a ton of competition. It takes a lot to stand out.
The competition is wicked online! My heart goes out to authors these days. They almost have to put on a clown nose or stand on the sidewalk wearing a sandwich board sign to stand out.
The money is in the marketing [of a book] and if authors don’t have that skill, they really need to hire someone who does.
Precisely. Most authors I know start talking about their books, blogging about their books — live and breathe their books! … long before they even write word one. And some self publishers DO have print copies made that sit around their homes in boxes.
That said – Print on Demand is not as cheap as having a print run. My children’s book is 350 pages. It costs £7 POD but after a 700 print run I have a unit price of £2.50 – big difference. It means the cost to parents is much easier gamble for parents who do not know my work.
Well if you want colour or specialist printing (like in children’s books) then the difference does stack up. However for most mainly text-based books the difference isn’t that great once you factor in the cost of storing the books etc. Selling a book is bad enough without having to be warehouse owner as well…
Thanks very much for the podcast – I wrote to you that email about the children’s book a while ago and it was brilliant to hear the advice. Thanks for airing it guys – great podcast as ever! Much appreciated.
Yes, I remember that email and I’m glad we finally had a chance to get Meg on to talk about promotion. I hope you got some tips out of it that you can use!