Writing a book requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. Sadly, it could all go to waste without a proper promotion. If you do want your book to succeed, you need to start selling it before it’s even finished – and you need a marketing plan to do it properly.
A marketing plan is important for every business. You probably hear it all the time – but hearing doesn’t mean believing, right? So why do you need a marketing plan in the first place?
The importance of marketing plan for a business
According to Coschedule, 81% of marketers that set goals actually achieve them. Sounds great, doesn’t it? What’s even better is that even if you aren’t a marketer you can do that too – and succeed as well.
This is what a marketing plan is about: identifying your goals and achieving them. You might be a writer, not a marketing specialist, and that’s okay. You can still learn how to create great book marketing plans and how to achieve your goals with the help of them.
Interested in learning more? Well, then let’s start!
Who will buy your book?
You might want to answer «everyone», but you know that’s not true. Also, you might have a clear and detailed vision of your target audience already, and that’s great. This just means you can move on to the next step right now. But if you don’t know the exact answer yet, ask yourself the following questions:
- – Which groups will be interested in my book?
- – What is their average age, gender, income?
- – Will this book seem appealing to people all over the world or will it be relevant to people of my country only?
You can move on, asking similar questions and narrowing it down as much as you can. In the end, your goal is to come up with a picture that is as specific as possible.
What do you want to achieve and how will you measure the success of your book?
The important thing is to answer this question really honestly. What do you actually want? Maybe you aren’t satisfied until your book becomes a bestseller – or maybe it would be enough for you if your friends will like it.
Maybe it will take some time for you before you’ll be able to answer that question – and that’s okay. Your goal here is not to decide quickly but to have a clear picture of your goals. And once you have it, you’ll be able to start pursuing them with the help of your marketing plan.
How are you going to achieve your goals?
Once you have a goal in mind, you need to build a plan that will support it and will help you to achieve it. This isn’t possible unless you’ll come up with clear steps you need to take to achieve this goal.
To do that, answer the following questions:
- – How many book copies do I want to sell?
- – How much time should it take?
- – What am I going to do to achieve that? What my promotion would look like?
- – Where am I going to promote my book?
Remember that first step when you had to identify your target audience? After you have a clear vision of your audience, it will be easier for you to find out the most effective ways to promote. Maybe your audience spends a lot of time on Facebook or on any other social media.
Maybe they don’t spend much time on social media but visit online book forums instead. Maybe they go to book conventions.
After you do so, you might end with the following draft:
Goal: Sell 5,000 copies of my book in two months.
How am I going to achieve it?
1) By launching a Facebook campaign.
2) By writing guest posts for a couple of book blogs my audience reads/By posting on forums my audience visits.
3) By contacting two book bloggers (A and B) and sending them my book to get a review.
Of course, this is only an example. Your goals (and your actions) could be bigger than that. Maybe you’ll be able to conduct a radio interview or visit a TV show. We’ll discuss that more during the next step.
Which resources do you have?
It never hurts to emphasize that the more specific the goals are, the more achievable they become. Therefore, you need to do your best to identify the resources that you have and to build your marketing plan in accordance with them.
First of all, find out how much time you have. Maybe you’re still writing and have at least half a year left before the book release. Maybe you didn’t realize the importance of promotion until it’s only a month left before the publication. These two situations require totally different approaches and strategies.
Second, think of how much you can invest in promotion. Maybe you can create ads on your own or maybe it would be better for you to pay someone to do that. Maybe you can send sample books to bloggers and book reviewers or maybe you can only send eBooks instead.
It’s very important to plan according to the resources available to you, otherwise, you might risk investing more time or money than you can afford. That’s why you might want to return to the previous step of your plan and adjust it according to the resources you actually have.
Do you need a brand?
You might want to write – and to write only – and that’s okay. However, you might also want to use your own reputation for promotion (the current one and the potential ones). In that case, you need to think about how you can promote yourself, which image you want to create, and how you can achieve that.
There are plenty of ways to promote yourself. Most of them are centered around social media or blogs and are quite easy to master. You can write guest posts, start your own blog, do your best to make your social media account interesting or even create a YouTube channel. You could tie this to your book, to books in general, and to completely different things as well – as it could work either way. Evaluate your time, find out what would work best for you and what you can afford doing – and do that. Or skip this step completely if you don’t want to turn yourself into a brand. After all, a mystery that surrounds an author could work great for them as well.
And once you’ve created your marketing plan, don’t forget to come up with the ways to measure its effectiveness. No matter how hard you try, there’s still a chance that your plan might not turn to be flawless – and that’s okay. A lot of plans, even the ones written by experienced marketers, need to be adjusted.
However, you won’t be able to adjust yours on time if you won’t measure its effectiveness. So come up with some interim deadlines that would allow you to understand whether everything goes as planned or not.
Did you ever try writing your own book promotion marketing plan? Do you think it’s useful for authors? Please share your thoughts and experience in the comments below.
About the Author:
Jake Lester is an experienced essay writer that is fond of sharing his mind about various spheres of life. The most recurring themes he covers are education, writing and marketing. He has his own writing style and this is why he is appreciated by readers.
