Market Planning for Our Book

"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else."

Sam Walton, Walmart

Do I Need a Marketing Plan?

Marketing plans typically outline a target audience, goals, timelines, the message to the audience, possibly a creative treatment, and the detailed plans and budgets for each tactic in the campaign.  Even as a small company or independent author, it is very helpful to think through these things.  There are a myriad of choices and you need to select only the best things to work on…the ones with the most potential at the least cost (i.e. money or time investment)…you cannot do it all!  No one can.  Picking the first thing that comes to mind is probably risky.  Come up with a bunch of potential ideas; quickly weigh the pros and cons of results and costs, then keep moving the ball forward!

Who’s Our Audience?

Of course, it’s really important to understand your audience, their behavior, and what influences them.  For authors, this means that we have to understand book reviewers.  These are a very influential and passionate segment…we love them because they are typically more passionate about books than anyone on the planet!  Once we know who they are, we need to figure out how to help them accomplish their goals and line our goals up with theirs.

Creating the List of Reviewers

Typing “book reviews” in Google brings up 97,000,000 results and checking adwords shows 368,000  global monthly searches and 201,000 in the US.  So, every month (according to Google), a bunch of searches are done…and adding all related keywords and sub-searches would likely show that there are millions of searches on this topic per month.  It’s our job as marketers to try and hone this list down.  Every marketer has limited time, resources, and budget…one key is finding the optimal way to reach your audience.  Clearly, we cannot address 97 million websites or pretend we can be a top search result for all of these.  We may only have 5 days to spend trying to reach reviewers, and it’s probably better to spend a day getting the best , most targeted, most relevant list possible than 5 days on a random list.

What We are Doing

For our book, we are going to hone our list down by relevance and reach, then balance this list with the cost it takes us to engage with them.  For example, reaching the NY Times might be very difficult and take a lot of energy or money…but reaching the top 10 psychology book reviewers might not be.  Then again, getting on the NY Times review list would probably reach a ton of people and sell a lot of books.  There is always a balance, always trade-offs, and always a time to just do the work and quit thinking about it.

Generating a list of relevant book reviewers is one of my goals for this week.  I’ll probably group and catgegorize the list a few different ways.  Depending on how search savvy and comprehensive you are, this could take you an hour or a day.  Once I get a template that I like, I’ll eventually publish it…please let me know what questions, comments, or thoughts you have on this or if you’d like to collaborate!