Last year at RUBYCONF, I had the exquisite pleasure of meeting Derek (the narrator). This is such a great observation from a truly inspirational, bright, and compassionate leader.
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Know Your Industry
Inspiring People who Know their Industry"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit."- Aristotle
I get inspired by people regularly...particularly people with vision who can also execute. As an author, you are an entrprenuer, and it's important to find and surround yourself with people (virtually or phsyically) who inspire you to keep pushing forward. For me, Dave Williams is definitely one of those people who "knows his industry." One of his recent articles is a super example of knowing your industry. When you read his article on Facebook Advertising, you realize very quickly just how much Dave knows about Facebook and advertising. Heck, I feel like I need to read this article 20 times just to learn everything that is mentioned in here. If they haven't already, someone will probably write a 200 page book on the same information in the article...it's packed!
As Larry (my dad) and I have started the marketing planning work for marketing "the book," we have been doing a lot of research on what is going on in the publishing industry. We are reading 100s of pieces of information about the market, the industry players, how money flows, what innovative authors are doing, the profile of our target market, book reviewers, etc. There is a knowledge threshold you really need to clear to understand an industry and how to market yourself in that industry - know the book industry in addition to the industry of the market your book is going to go into (e.g. consumer entertainment, motivation, business, finance, psychology, etc.). Meeting a knowledge threshold is important...and it takes time...but really costs nothing...the cost is a commitment to learn...and some spare time. Musicians often fail in this area...they love music but they don't pay attention to business. Music may be their passion, but if they want to make a living at it, they better understand the business side...I am willing to bet that any musician who has more than one platinum hit over the course of a decade has really learned the biz. Authors...know the industry.
Because when you are making decisions about where to spend your time and energy, you are trying to optimize the ROI on your efforts (unless you are just writing as a non-profit). Whether you know it consciously or not, you are constantly processing inputs that direct your energy...you are in a feedback loop. And, the market is sending some feedback information to you. Seeing and understanding what is going on in the book industry will help influence and improve your decisions...and ultimately your ROI.
Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but I am just sharing what is going on in our journey of taking a book to market. As always, feedback, comments, criticism, etc. is welcomed and appreciated. As well, let me know what ideas or topics you might want to see me cover. Thank you for reading!
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
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!
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