作者：Maggie Lynch
出版社：Windtree Press
格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT
Secrets to Effective Author Marketing: It’s More Than “Buy My Book”试读：
Secrets to Effective Author MarketingIt’s More Than “Buy My Book”Maggie LynchCopyright © 2017 by Maggie McVay LynchAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.Windtree PressHillsboro, Oregonhttp://windtreepress.comCover Design by Christy Keerinshttps://coveredbyclkeerins.com/Secrets To Effective Author Marketing: It’s More Than “Buy My Book” / Maggie McVay Lynch. -- 1st ed.eBook ISBN 978-19449738-3-4Print ISBN 978-19449738-2-7United States of AmericaCreated with Vellum To all those authors who have mentored me over the past decade through workshops, emails, blogs Facebook postings, face-to-face discussions over lunches or coffee, and even harried self-doubting phone calls.A special shout out to the following authors who have been willing to continuously engage and share their knowledge, not only with me but with thousands of other authors around the world. These authors believe in giving back to the greater community of writers through books, workshops, and often free advice in blogs, short videos, and conference presentations.Dean Wesley SmithKristine Kathryn RuschJoanna PennMark DawsonM. L. BuchmanKristin PainterApril AasheimJessa SladeDianna LoveMary BuckhamRoxanne St. ClairePaty Jager1The Truth About MarketingI don’t know about you, but it seems that I am constantly in search of the ONE big marketing secret that will make a sudden difference in my fortunes. I am convinced that there is a secret cabal of successful authors who have found “the magic” button to push that makes them millionaires. They are keeping the location of that button secret, and only divulge it to a select few.Does this sound like you? Always looking for the ONE thing that will work. Unfortunately, with 20 books under my belt—five traditional and the rest indie—and more than a decade of self-publishing and marketing, I know there is no one secret. There is no easy way to just do a few things and be certain that it will catapult you to success. Anyone who tells you differently is lying!In fact, when you get a bunch of successful authors in one room (I define this as those making over 100K per year), they will share some secrets and other authors in the room will say: “That never worked for me. Or that doesn’t work anymore. What works is…” It is darn frustrating!The truth is that it is a combination of techniques that need to be applied consistently, and that need to be changed based on the changing publishing landscape. For example, what worked in 2011 does not necessarily work today. Even what worked last year in 2016 may not work today. There are a few things, like having a sizable and active mailing list of true fans, that stand the test of time. But everything else? Sadly, not so much.Even worse, some techniques that work for one genre (e.g., romance) may not work at all for another genre (e.g., science fiction). And what works for fiction has little relationship to what works for nonfiction. When many authors realize these facts, they tend to either throw up their hands and say: “I guess I should never count on making money at writing, then.” What follows that statement is the mindset that writing will be their hobby, and soon after they simply stop writing.For those writers who don’t give up, they tend to begrudgingly try to learn what types of marketing will work for them. However, they quickly realize the learning curve is significant and it takes a lot of time. Then they are faced with the dilemma of writing versus marketing, versus paying someone to do all or some of the marketing. That was me in 2011—the begrudging writer who didn’t want to spend the time and energy learning this “marketing stuff.”Before you give up on this book, let me say that it IS doable, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Also, marketing works best when there is a backlist of books to help spread the costs and assure a better return on investment (ROI) of your time and money. So, if you are just getting out your first or second book, you will want to throttle back on your marketing efforts and concentrate on getting more books out first. Not that you should do no marketing, but don’t go all out and spend thousands of dollars on your first book launch (or your second) and lots of time engaging your readers to the point you are not writing the next book.Of course, if you are independently wealthy and willing to spend money without much return on your investment, then definitely go for it. Experiment. See what works for you and what doesn’t.Money does afford you a quicker start up. However, it does not make up for a lousy book over the long term. You may see a quick return, but once people start reading the book and don’t find it interesting or entertaining or helpful (depending on the genre), bad word of mouth will kill any additional success on that book and on others that may follow it.I will share a lot of ideas on marketing and what has worked for me in this book. I will tell you why it works or doesn’t work as best as I can. However, just like that group of very successful authors in one room, not everything that works for me will work for you. Marketing is hard work. It takes testing, analyzing, evaluating, and testing again. It takes a concerted effort to stay on top of what has change or may change in the future and then testing, analyzing, and evaluating to see if the new stuff works for you.Sorry! No big EASY button to push.But I will provide you a solid foundation in: the concepts, the technology: the why, how, and when things work; and the means to analyze whatever comes in the future. If you can get that down, you can move forward on your own without many problems.The Big OverviewLet’s start with an overview of indie marketing—what works and what doesn’t. This is the quick and dirty 14-15 pages to give you the scope of the book. Don’t worry, I’ll get into the details for those things that DO work. So buckle up.Depending on your pre-conceived notions and what you’ve read before, you may be ready to fight me on some of these that don’t work. Remember, the overriding secret to marketing is anything can work given enough effort, time, and money. What I’m sharing with you is what I’ve found works for me and most people I know. But you aren’t me, so you will need to test and see if it works for you—what you might need to do is to tweak a process or an ad to make it work for your specific market.When I write my books, I am an emotional person. I become best friends with my characters and I tell their stories. The wonderful thing about that approach is that I tend to write emotional books. The awful thing about that approach is that, when it comes to marketing, I don’t want to let those characters down by not getting their story out there to thousands of readers. When I finish a book, I truly believe that every person who enjoys the genre I write in needs to read this book. Not because all those buyers will make me lots of money (not that I turn down sales), but because I learned something in the process. With every book I learn something about myself, about communication in life, about making tough choices. That makes me believe that a reader might find something beyond a good story that speaks to their life too.The problem is that marketing cannot be an emotional journey for the author. To be good at marketing, you have to be analytical. You have to be the person who can look at your book and honestly decide if your baby is ugly. If it is ugly—defined as not an easy sell because it doesn’t meet the genre criteria—then you have to convince the world that your baby has a special value they can’t live without.Far too many authors think that book marketing is about selling your book. It’s not. In fact, the more you try to sell your book, the more you turn off potential readers. Book marketing is about convincing your potential readers of the VALUE of your book. That value is not the story, not the price, not the genre. That value is the EXPERIENCE of reading your book. You need to understand what experience your readers want to have and capitalize on that.For example, romance readers expect a focus on the romantic relationship. Whether sexy or sweet, whether contemporary or paranormal, the reader wants the EXPERIENCE of falling in love, overcoming obstacles together, and true love winning in the end. To market a romance you need to sell the falling-in-love experience.In a science fiction novel readers want to EXPERIENCE something new, something that causes them to think of the world in a different way, and if there are some cool gadgets that make sense based on an extrapolation of today’s science all the better. Whether social SF or space opera, a part of what you are selling is that sense-of-wonder experience or the learning-something-cool experience.Every fiction genre has an experience attached to it. This experience is more than the genre tropes. It is a need to feel something: love, fear, hate, admiration, misery, rage, lust, surprise, terror, zeal and many others. If you can make a list of the experiences (emotions) your reader feels when reading your book(s) then you are most of the way to understanding what VALUE you have to sell.Even nonfiction delivers an experience. Yes, nonfiction tends to be written to teach the reader something. However, great nonfiction also delivers an emotional journey as well. For example, the history of WWII has been written about in hundreds of books. The ones that provide an experience, are the ones that bring the war to the level of its impact on individual lives. When talking about the blitz in Britain one can provide a lot of facts: how many bombs were dropped, how many people died, the years of the war, the politics. But what readers remember are the true examples of a single person or family experience. Sharing the true account of someone who was in a home during the bombing—the sounds, the smells, the fear, the grief—makes the war real and memorable. Or the account of a family who chose to send their children from the city to live with strangers in the country, not knowing how they would fare or if they would see each other again.If you can sell the value of your book as an experience then you have set a good foundation for marketing. Once you have that value identified, you need to make sure that, when your readers try your book, that they do get the experience you promised. And the only way to know that is to engage with them. To have your readers tell you what they experienced and if it met their expectations.Primary Ways to Engage ReadersI could tell you about all the usual stuff—get on as many social media platforms as possible, join book groups, blog a lot, ask questions of your readers, send them lots of FREE stuff. All these tactics are ways to engage with readers, but let’s face it everyone is doing it. It’s hard to stand out in the crowd. And the readers who engage with you on social media tend to already be your fans, friends, and family. So, the question is how do you get them there in the first place?The trick is to approach your engagement from the perspective of the reluctant reader—like a teacher might try to engage a student who doesn’t want to read. I like this approach because, as an author who will be new to a lot of people, I know those new readers are reluctant to try my books. Here are some interesting ways to take the techniques and use them in your social media and blogging life.Help the reluctant reader realize that reading books can be a refreshing and rewarding alternative to TV, movies, shopping, or hanging out with friends. Have discussions about the differences between the book and the movie versions of a story. More than 70% of movies are adapted from books. It’s a great way to get noticed to talk about a movie and then compare it to a book. Share how a recent shopping trip reminded you of a scene in a book. Connect incidents in real life with stories in your genre. It can be your book or someone else’s book in these conversations. In fact, a little of both is good. Remember: You are not “selling.” You are engaging. You are being the cool, well-informed reader who happens to also be an author.Help the potential fan discover, or remember, the pleasures of reading. Talk about where you like to read, when you like to read, why you like to read. Share pictures of great reading nooks. Pinterest has lots of these kinds of pictures. Share your own special place where you read. Libraries have been running a campaign called READ where they have a picture of a celebrity reading a book. Find those and post them from time to time. Whenever you finish a book you’ve read, talk about it. What did you like? In other words, just be a READER and chat about the joys of reading.Encourage reading beyond your own books. One of the things that makes potential fans run away from a new author is when the only books you talk about are your own. That is seen as sell, sell, sell. Steer your fans toward good books by other authors. Consider even doing some type of introduction with another author who writes books similar to yours.One of the things I do with my Launch Team is celebrate their birthday by gifting them a book by their favorite author (and it can’t be me). I’m not gifting them MY book, but someone else’s book. If it is someone I know and also like, I share what I love about the author’s book too. If it is someone I don’t know, I ask what it is about that author’s books that make them a “go to” author for that person. This not only let’s them know it isn’t all about me, but it also gives me information about who they are reading and why. I often learn about authors in my own genre who may have books similar to mine—similar themes, similar character traits. After all, I can’t possibly know all the books and authors in my genre.I like finding those new authors, because it opens up my network and often we will find opportunities to help each other in the future. Though I may not see the similarities between my books and a fan’s favorite author, the fact my super fans are reading both my books and this other author’s books means I should pay attention.If you enjoy reading aloud, consider putting out videos or podcasts with you reading from your own books and other author’s books you like. Always be sure to tag the other author so they know you are giving them free promo with your fans. It will help to build a good reputation for you being someone who is willing to share, not just out for yourself.The key to engaging readers is to be involved in the same things they are involved in. To go where they go and enter discussions. For example, most bloggers talk as much about movies and TV shows today as they do about books. You need to do the same.I know some of you may be saying: “I don’t have time to read other authors or watch movies or even TV.” I certainly feel that way myself. But I also know I need to make time. If I don’t make time to read and share my love of reading, then readers won’t feel that I have a good sense of what they like in a book. It is work, but it helps me to understand what is important and how I can deliver the experience they are looking for.Marketing versus Public RelationsWhen looking at selling a product—a book—many authors get caught up in whether they should be looking at Public Relations (PR) or Marketing. When I started down the marketing path, I thought of PR as fluff, something I couldn’t measure for ROI, and that it costs way too much money and takes too much time. Whereas, marketing is direct, measurable, and can get results. The reality is that you need both. AND you need to understand how they work together in order to take advantage of both of them.My misunderstanding was that my knowledge of PR started and stopped with newspaper articles, media kits, and pushing events. When, in fact, PR is how one sells an EXPERIENCE vs a product (your book). That experience is critical to sell first. Then the book (product) is marketed as proof that you can deliver that experience as promised.In short, Public Relations (PR) is the larger picture—the brand as a whole and growing that brand, building a reputation and engagement with that brand. Marketing refers to a specific product within the brand or a set of products. To put this in the perspective of authors, PR is the author brand where as Marketing is about a specific book or series of books.Public RelationsAccording to the Public Relations Society of America, PR is defined as “a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” When you think of a company like Apple, you get a certain feeling about the company. For example, I believe that Apple’s brand is one of clean design, good user interfaces, and a nod to being on the leading edge of technology. That’s PR. That’s what the company has spent years trying to get people to think whenever they think of Apple. It does not refer to a specific product (e.g., the iPhone or the Mac computer or the Apple watch). Instead, it builds an expectation in the public for something good, worthwhile, well-designed, and hip.As an author, YOU are your company, your brand. Even if you are traditionally published, you do NOT want your brand to be your publisher (e.g., Harper Collins or Penguin Random House) If you let your publisher build your brand and you leave, or they are no longer interested in your books, you have to start over. Much safer for the brand to revolve around YOU.You want to build an expectation that when someone reads one of your books or comes to your blog or interacts with any content that you produce, that they will have a specific kind of experience. For example, if you think of Stephen King, you most likely think of horror. You most likely think of a particular kind of horror—one that is based on manipulating your mind to think one way so that you are surprised during the story. Stephen King has written more than 100 books. Not all of them are horror. However, I would guess that all of them do depend on manipulating your mind to think against the grain, whether fiction or non-fiction.What kind of experience does your reader get when she encounters YOUR work? That experience is your brand. You need to communicate that brand all the time, in every piece of content you write, and in everything you do. If you are a single genre writer, and always plan to be, you can associate your brand with a genre. Romance writers tend to create a brand that is about finding love, hanging on to love, relationships, etc. They differentiate themselves by subgenres (contemporary, historical, suspense, paranormal, SF) and then even further by themes—dark or light, sexy or sweet, inspirational or rebel—and other aspects. Most genres have these type of breakdowns to help define your brand within a genre.On the other hand, there are also a substantial number of authors who write in more than one genre, and also do both fiction and nonfiction. This is where my writing falls. It is more difficult to determine your author brand in that situation but you can still do it.If you use different pseudonyms for each of your different genre books, some authors still choose to do a genre-based brand and they maintain a different brand for each name. I started off that way—three websites, three Facebook profiles, three Twitter profiles, etc. By about book eight I was pulling my hair out keeping track of all of that. I then combined all of those names and profiles into one website, one Twitter profile, one Facebook profile and looked for a brand that could speak to all those different sides of my writing life.Most writers have core stories no matter what genre they write in. My core story is one of finding identity/purpose and then following it however difficult that may be. I’m also very interested in the concept of heroes—not the big Batman or Superman type hero, but the everyday hero. What actions/decisions do we make to become a hero and why is it so hard to make those decisions?Whether I am writing a romance, a suspense novel, SF or Fantasy, all of my characters are engaged in these two things: finding purpose and becoming a hero. Even my nonfiction has those elements. The book you are reading now is designed to help you decide who you are as a writer and how you can make difficult decisions to be more successful.What is your core story? What is your brand?Your brand or core story doesn’t have to be serious or deeply philosophical. It just has to be true to you and your writing. It might be something as simple as “Love is the answer,” or “Be careful where you step” or “Entertainment and Escape.”Once you know this, then it is up to you to capitalize on that through your website look and feel, your social media look and feel,试读结束[说明：试读内容隐藏了图片]