Determining Your Path to Sales

This is Part 1 of a weeklong series on marketing your novel. Today we will discuss marketing strategy.

As you write your novel, you should be thinking concurrently about marketing. The first step in this quest is determining a marketing strategy. Whether you are self-publishing, or publishing through a
more traditional channel with an agent and a publisher, your position as a mid-list author or as a first-timer means more of these duties will fall upon you. Your marketing strategy is your roadmap to how you will reach readers and drive sales of your novel.

Developing a strategy means asking yourself some honest questions about your novel.

What genre is your novel—mainstream fiction, paranormal, romance, steampunk? This is a question you should have answered a long time ago.

Where do the readers of your genre hang out? Blogs are the first venue you need to locate. In fact, you should have been following these for some time now. What about influential book stores?

Are there conventions and gatherings of your fans? The narrower the market, the more likely you are going to find these events. If your novel appeals to trekkies, you should be going to Star Trek conventions. Find out about these.

Who are the influentials in your genre—book reviewers, spokespeople, bloggers? Does anyone do video podcasts? Interviews?  These are out there.

Are there opportunities for special interest groups for your novel? My novel, Rules for Giving, is mainstream fiction, but it also addresses homeless issues (homeless advocates might be a market), and there is a very strong lesbian character. These are subgroups who might take an interest in my novel.

How can these people be reached? Do your potential readers frequent specific blogs, online radio shows, coffee shops?

The goal is to determine your position in the marketplace, where your readers are, and how are you can reach them.

Once you have answered these questions, and many more, you should address budget. How much money are you willing to spend in marketing? If you have no money, that’s okay. There are things you can do yourself. The only expenditure is sweat equity.

Even with a minimal marketing budget, there will be some costs. If you choose to develop a blog, there are many free blogging platforms out there. Others are available starting at less than ten dollars a month. Don’t forget social media. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are all available at no charge (LinkedIn has a premium program for five or six dollars a month).

 Armed with this information, you can put together a marketing strategy for your novel. Let’s say your novel is in the vampire genre. You can start a blog appealing to that market. Truth is, you should already have your blog up and running well before you publish. Developing a following takes time. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com has been up for about fifteen months. It has taken me that long to get to the point where I am averaging better than eighty hits a day.

It is also important not to place all your marketing efforts into one venue. Your strategy should use several different pathways for reaching your customer. These energies will often merge in ways you had not intended. Some years ago I worked on the marketing for a regional bank in my area. The strategy included a very large budget for outdoor billboards, as well as some television and radio advertising. The year-end audit of the advertising found that outdoor was the #1 generator of awareness. Radio also got high numbers. Television?  Not so much. The audit could not tell us why this was so, but my suspicion was that Southern California commuters spend as much as two hours a day on the freeways, looking at the client’s billboards and listening to the radio commercial. The result—we cancelled television and put that money into more outdoor and radio.

Some of your marketing efforts might have the same synergy.   

There are many other tactics you can use as part of your strategy. We will visit them each day for the rest of this week.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Photo by MichaelMaggs (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Comments

[JaneVBlanchard]

Excellent article...looking forward to the rest of this series. I agree that marketing and writing must go hand-in-hand. Prior to releasing my first book, I started to comment on blogs, went on a prerelease speaking tour, created a book trailer. All these efforts paid off...in the first two months following the release, I sold more than 200 books. Not bad for a newbie, especially considering that most books only ever sell about 100 copies.

There are a lot of blogs with advice about marketing and targeting audiences. Sift through to see what is a right fix for you. But please, return to this one—it has a lot of valuable and pragmatic advice.

[Akfa Dreamland]

It's great post, and I will be back for more. Thank you for your effort :)

[Farsana Ashiq]

Excellent article. Thank you for sharing such informative article. For all the readers, this article can become a guiding factor in making their outdoor media advertising more effective and organised. Please do keep sharing such valuable insights through articles. Hats off !