Effective Strategies for Book Marketing

Book marketing is kind of a weird subject. How do you take this thing that you've put your heart and your soul into and then you put it out into the world and start trying to convince them to actually buy it and read it? I'm facing down this issue right now. My next book, The Shithead, is coming out September 19th and I've started this process of book marketing. This very strange and terrible process of book marketing. Now there's all kinds of advice out there about book marketing and And I am uniquely positioned to actually talk about this. Now, normally this is where I say I'm the CEO of StoryGrid, where we help writers build the skills, write a book, and leave a legacy. And that is what we do here at StoryGrid. But something you probably don't know about me is I am one of the top book marketers in the world. I've been a book marketing consultant for over 14 years. I've launched dozens of books to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other bestseller lists. At one point, I had... five clients on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. I'm the author of the perennial bestselling book about book marketing titled Your First 1000 Copies, and I'm still a very highly sought after consultant, and my fee to run a book launch starts at $60,000. So this is what I do. This is what I'm very good at, very well known for. And so when we talk about book marketing, it's a subject that I have some experience on. Now in this video, I'm going to share with you the one strategy that is the overarching strategy that every author should take when it comes to their book marketing. So whether you're a first-time author with no platform at all, or you're a top best-selling author, this is the same strategy you have to have for your book. The second thing I'm going to tell you is the mindset you have to have in order to have a successful book launch and book marketing campaign. That if you don't have this mindset, you're dead in the water. nothing's going to work. It's going to doom your book to failure from the very beginning. Now, the first thing you need to know is that most books that sell for a really long time start out small. They do not come out with a bang. In fact, one of the things I hate the most about the book industry and book marketing in general is the New York Times bestseller list and all of the other bestseller lists because they focused on a single week of sales. There are so many books that are New York Times bestselling books and other bestselling books. And they maybe sold 10,000 copies, 15,000 copies when they first came out. And then they literally never sold another thousand copies for the rest of the life of the book. I also know books that have sold literally millions of copies and they've never hit any of the bestseller list because they didn't sell a ton of copies in a single week. And so these bestseller lists are very, very skewed towards books that happen to sell a lot in one week, but may not necessarily ever sell for a long period of time. And a lot of these books that you see come out with a bang and have like a huge first week, they fall off a cliff and they never actually sell a lot of copies of the book. And I love working on books and I aspire to write books that don't just sell the first week that they come out because I convinced a bunch of people to buy a copy, but continue to sell year after year after year. In fact, quick story here about this. I once was behind the scenes on a book launch where the author actually hired people on Craigslist in cities all over the country to go in and buy every copy of his book off the shelf in all of the Barnes and Noble and other bookstores that it was in. And sure enough, that helped put him on the New York Times bestseller list for the first week. And I went back and checked. a year after the book had come out and it literally had not sold another 500 copies after that first week it was out. It's so easy to game the system that first week, especially if you're rich and have a lot of money or happen to be a somewhat famous person. But when you think about a book that's actually successful, books tend to take a long time to find an audience. There is a long lag time for many, many popular books. In fact, many bestseller books that have lasted decades and decades and decades. They took a long time to find an audience. The book The War of Art, the first year that it came out, only sold about 9,000 copies. But then the year after that, it sold more copies. Then the year after that, it sold more copies. And then now, here we are, decades in the future, and the book still sells and sells and sells. So books tend to have a long lag time as far as finding an audience, and they're also just harder to consume. So I can watch a movie in two hours. I can listen to a new album for my favorite musician in about an hour. But books take a long time to consume. And so because of that, they just often take a long time to find their audience and start selling. And so what I tell people is when your book comes out, you shouldn't worry so much about the first week or even the first month. The real launch window. is the first two years. And so when you're coming out with a book, don't worry about whether or not the book does amazing when it first comes out. We're focused on, we're going to be promoting this book for two years. I'm gonna get into what that looks in just a minute. The other thing you have to understand is that books are very quietly selling lots and lots of copies. So there are thousands of books that are selling thousands of copies a month and you've never heard of them. This is what's amazing about books, what people don't understand about the book industry and how they move through our culture is that lots and lots of people buy lots and lots of books that you've never heard of. And so don't worry about your book becoming some international bestseller to make it successful. You can quietly find your own audience over a long period of time, and often that's the best way to do it. Okay, so let's get into this one overarching strategy I promised to share that every author should apply to their book if they want it to be successful. So I was talking to an author this week and her book came out last year and we were just kind of riffing. We were having a call about something else and just, of course, started talking about our books being out. And she was telling me about how her first book was traditionally published and it went pretty well. But because her audience wasn't huge, she couldn't find a good traditional publisher for her new book. So she ended up just self-publishing it. And she said to me a big part of why she decided just to go ahead and self-publish the book instead of keep banging on the doors of traditional publishing is she wanted to just focus on finding people that she knew would love her book and then share it with them first. Now, there are a ton of tactics that can go into book marketing. If you go on Google right now and just start searching around for book marketing tactics and book marketing ideas, you'll find lists of like literally a hundred different things you can do. Now, most of the tactics out there are just kind of bullshit. A few of them are pretty good. I know this because I've been doing this for so long. But the guiding principle for all good book marketing is you finding the person that you think will like your book and then just trying to get them to read it and give it a shot. Now, inside of StoryGrid, we have this idea of Sam, the single audience member, the person you're writing this book for. And this is a really important. part of writing your book is making sure you have one person you're writing the book for. It makes everything about writing your book so much easier. I talk a lot about this in other videos on this channel, so I'm not going to go deep into that right now. But this idea of you're writing the book for one person. So when it comes time to market your book, you should be looking for that one person. Who are those people that you know will love your book? Those are the people you're trying to share your story with. your book with. So with my book, The Shithead, I'm literally going back through everybody I've met, all the contacts I've had, all the friends I have, everybody I know in my life, and I'm going through and I'm reaching out to them and I'm asking them if they'd like to read a copy of my new book. And I'm making sure that I'm asking people that I know will love my book. The deeper that you get into this whole book publishing, book marketing world, you realize pretty quickly it's often easier to get somebody to buy a copy of your book than actually read it. Like just think about it yourself. Let's say that you hate fantasy and you have no interest in reading fantasy books. And then I bring a 450 page fantasy novel to you. And I say, you have two choices. You can either buy this book for me for $30, or you can read it for free. And if you don't like fantasy books, you'll say, I'll give you the $30 so I don't have to read it. And so getting somebody to actually commit the time and effort and attention to read your book is often harder than getting them to buy a copy of the book. And again, understand books take a long time to find an audience. The only way you can truly sell a million copies of a book, there are no direct marketing ways to do that. It all comes down to word of mouth. It comes down to people actually reading your book and then telling other people to buy a copy. So the one strategy that encapsulates all the good book marketing advice and tactics that you're ever going to hear is you're trying to find people that you know will love your book and then trying to get them to read a copy. I promise you if they read a copy and they tell other people, you'll start selling lots and lots of copies of your book. This is what I've seen work over and over and over. And so this is what I'm doing for my book, The Shithead. I'm trying to identify people that I think will like the book and then I'm trying to get them. to read the book. Now again, this encapsulates all good book marketing tactics. Whether you have a huge email list of fans that you know love your writing, well, you already know they love your writing, so you're just trying to get them to get a copy of your book and read it. So this applies to getting interviewed on podcasts, or buying advertising, or speaking at conferences, or social media. All you're trying to do is find people that you think will like your book, and try to get them to give your book a try. And the thing I want you to see, especially if you're starting out and you haven't done a lot of this, is just do it one person at a time. Even me, somebody that's been doing this for a very long time, does have an email list. I'm starting by just getting some people that I know, one at a time, that I think will love my book, and I'm just sending them a copy so they'll give it a read. So that's the one strategy that encapsulates... all book marketing advice you'll hear that actually works is you're just trying to find people that you think will actually like your book and try to convince them to give it a try. Now, I also promised there was a mindset that you had to have. And this came from a time when I was speaking at a workshop and I'd been doing book marketing for a long time at this point. And whenever I did workshops or talks or anything, people would ask me questions and it had been years. Since somebody had asked me a question that actually stumped me because I'd been doing it for so long and I was an expert. But in this particular talk, somebody raised their hand and they asked me the question. They said, looking back over all of the authors you've worked with, all the books you've worked with, all the campaigns you've run. Is there one through line, one thread through all of them that all of the successful authors, they did this one thing and it had the biggest impact towards their success. Now this stumped me. in real time. I actually had to say, you know what, I can't think of anything and had to move on, but it stuck with me. It stuck in my head for weeks. I was thinking like, what is it? What's that one thing, right? I've worked with authors that didn't have big email list or didn't have big social media followings or didn't have big influencer connections to help promote their book. And yet their book found success. So what is the through line? And then it hit me and it was something I wasn't expecting to think of. All of the authors that found success. Whether they were first-time authors or well-established authors or indie authors or traditionally published authors, none of that mattered. What it came down to is the author actually believed it was a good thing for somebody to spend their time and money on their book and read it. That the reader would be better off after having done that than before. You have to actually believe that your book is good and that people should read it. Otherwise, no. No tactics, no strategy, nothing is actually going to help you. Because when it comes time to asking people to read your book and then tell you what they think and leave a review and all of those things, you'll pull back and you won't actually do it. So I tell people, whether your thing is meditation or prayer or journaling or whatever it takes, you've got to get to the point with your book that you actually believe it's great and that people should read it and their life would be better off if they did read it. In fact, a couple months ago, I was talking to a guy and he's been around StoryGrid for a long time and been following us for a long time. And we were on a Zoom call and he looked at me and he kind of paused. He goes, Tim, is the shithead good? And I looked at him and I was like, yeah, it's really good. And he's like, OK, man, I can't wait to read it. So now when I'm in this space where I'm actually reaching out to people, old friends, old contacts, current friends and current contacts, and I'm asking them if. If I send them a copy of my book, will they read it? I know that it's good for them to read it. I'm reaching out to people that I really, truly think will like my book, and I actually believe their life will be better. They will be a better person at the end of reading my book than at the beginning. If you don't believe this about your book, you might as well not even publish it. Your book's going to be dead in the water before it even comes out. If you are not sure that people should read your book, you got to rethink this. You got to figure out why you're doing what you're doing, why you're publishing the book in the first place, if you don't think it's ready for people to actually read it. So those are the two big things. The big strategy is find people that you think will love your book and invite them to read a copy. And the big mindset is actually believing that if people read your book, it is good for them and it's easy for you to ask them to read a copy of your book. Now, if you're not sure about that with your book, That's why we're here with StoryGrid is to help you write a book you can truly be proud of. And the first place you have to start is by writing great scenes. And so I've got a great gift for you. If you go to StoryGrid.com slash checklist, I'm going to give you our 13 point checklist on how to write great scenes. This is what we use in all of our workshops and all our training to make sure that our students are leveling up their scene writing. So I want to give you that right now. Go to StoryGrid.com slash checklist. Also, if this video was helpful to you at all, make sure you subscribe to the channel, click like to make sure you don't miss any future videos that we come out with. Also, go to StoryGrid.com, check out all the free resources we have there. Make sure you sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything that we're doing in the StoryGrid universe. But as always, thanks for being a writer. Thanks for being a part of our community here at StoryGrid, and I'll see you next time.

This very strange and terrible process of book marketing. Now there's all kinds of advice out there about book marketing and And I am uniquely positioned to actually talk about this. Now, normally this is where I say I'm the CEO of StoryGrid, where we help writers build the skills, write a book, and leave a legacy. And that is what we do here at StoryGrid. But something you probably don't know about me is I am one of the top book marketers in the world.

I've been a book marketing consultant for over 14 years. I've launched dozens of books to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other bestseller lists. At one point, I had... five clients on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time.

I'm the author of the perennial bestselling book about book marketing titled Your First 1000 Copies, and I'm still a very highly sought after consultant, and my fee to run a book launch starts at $60,000. So this is what I do. This is what I'm very good at, very well known for.

And so when we talk about book marketing, it's a subject that I have some experience on. Now in this video, I'm going to share with you the one strategy that is the overarching strategy that every author should take when it comes to their book marketing. So whether you're a first-time author with no platform at all, or you're a top best-selling author, this is the same strategy you have to have for your book. The second thing I'm going to tell you is the mindset you have to have in order to have a successful book launch and book marketing campaign.

That if you don't have this mindset, you're dead in the water. nothing's going to work. It's going to doom your book to failure from the very beginning. Now, the first thing you need to know is that most books that sell for a really long time start out small. They do not come out with a bang.

In fact, one of the things I hate the most about the book industry and book marketing in general is the New York Times bestseller list and all of the other bestseller lists because they focused on a single week of sales. There are so many books that are New York Times bestselling books and other bestselling books. And they maybe sold 10,000 copies, 15,000 copies when they first came out.

And then they literally never sold another thousand copies for the rest of the life of the book. I also know books that have sold literally millions of copies and they've never hit any of the bestseller list because they didn't sell a ton of copies in a single week. And so these bestseller lists are very, very skewed towards books that happen to sell a lot in one week, but may not necessarily ever sell for a long period of time.

And a lot of these books that you see come out with a bang and have like a huge first week, they fall off a cliff and they never actually sell a lot of copies of the book. And I love working on books and I aspire to write books that don't just sell the first week that they come out because I convinced a bunch of people to buy a copy, but continue to sell year after year after year. In fact, quick story here about this. I once was behind the scenes on a book launch where the author actually hired people on Craigslist in cities all over the country to go in and buy every copy of his book off the shelf in all of the Barnes and Noble and other bookstores that it was in.

And sure enough, that helped put him on the New York Times bestseller list for the first week. And I went back and checked. a year after the book had come out and it literally had not sold another 500 copies after that first week it was out. It's so easy to game the system that first week, especially if you're rich and have a lot of money or happen to be a somewhat famous person. But when you think about a book that's actually successful, books tend to take a long time to find an audience.

There is a long lag time for many, many popular books. In fact, many bestseller books that have lasted decades and decades and decades. They took a long time to find an audience.

The book The War of Art, the first year that it came out, only sold about 9,000 copies. But then the year after that, it sold more copies. Then the year after that, it sold more copies.

And then now, here we are, decades in the future, and the book still sells and sells and sells. So books tend to have a long lag time as far as finding an audience, and they're also just harder to consume. So I can watch a movie in two hours.

I can listen to a new album for my favorite musician in about an hour. But books take a long time to consume. And so because of that, they just often take a long time to find their audience and start selling.

And so what I tell people is when your book comes out, you shouldn't worry so much about the first week or even the first month. The real launch window. is the first two years. And so when you're coming out with a book, don't worry about whether or not the book does amazing when it first comes out.

We're focused on, we're going to be promoting this book for two years. I'm gonna get into what that looks in just a minute. The other thing you have to understand is that books are very quietly selling lots and lots of copies.

So there are thousands of books that are selling thousands of copies a month and you've never heard of them. This is what's amazing about books, what people don't understand about the book industry and how they move through our culture is that lots and lots of people buy lots and lots of books that you've never heard of. And so don't worry about your book becoming some international bestseller to make it successful. You can quietly find your own audience over a long period of time, and often that's the best way to do it. Okay, so let's get into this one overarching strategy I promised to share that every author should apply to their book if they want it to be successful.

So I was talking to an author this week and her book came out last year and we were just kind of riffing. We were having a call about something else and just, of course, started talking about our books being out. And she was telling me about how her first book was traditionally published and it went pretty well. But because her audience wasn't huge, she couldn't find a good traditional publisher for her new book.

So she ended up just self-publishing it. And she said to me a big part of why she decided just to go ahead and self-publish the book instead of keep banging on the doors of traditional publishing is she wanted to just focus on finding people that she knew would love her book and then share it with them first. Now, there are a ton of tactics that can go into book marketing. If you go on Google right now and just start searching around for book marketing tactics and book marketing ideas, you'll find lists of like literally a hundred different things you can do.

Now, most of the tactics out there are just kind of bullshit. A few of them are pretty good. I know this because I've been doing this for so long. But the guiding principle for all good book marketing is you finding the person that you think will like your book and then just trying to get them to read it and give it a shot. Now, inside of StoryGrid, we have this idea of Sam, the single audience member, the person you're writing this book for.

And this is a really important. part of writing your book is making sure you have one person you're writing the book for. It makes everything about writing your book so much easier.

I talk a lot about this in other videos on this channel, so I'm not going to go deep into that right now. But this idea of you're writing the book for one person. So when it comes time to market your book, you should be looking for that one person. Who are those people that you know will love your book?

Those are the people you're trying to share your story with. your book with. So with my book, The Shithead, I'm literally going back through everybody I've met, all the contacts I've had, all the friends I have, everybody I know in my life, and I'm going through and I'm reaching out to them and I'm asking them if they'd like to read a copy of my new book. And I'm making sure that I'm asking people that I know will love my book. The deeper that you get into this whole book publishing, book marketing world, you realize pretty quickly it's often easier to get somebody to buy a copy of your book than actually read it.

Like just think about it yourself. Let's say that you hate fantasy and you have no interest in reading fantasy books. And then I bring a 450 page fantasy novel to you.

And I say, you have two choices. You can either buy this book for me for $30, or you can read it for free. And if you don't like fantasy books, you'll say, I'll give you the $30 so I don't have to read it.

And so getting somebody to actually commit the time and effort and attention to read your book is often harder than getting them to buy a copy of the book. And again, understand books take a long time to find an audience. The only way you can truly sell a million copies of a book, there are no direct marketing ways to do that.

It all comes down to word of mouth. It comes down to people actually reading your book and then telling other people to buy a copy. So the one strategy that encapsulates all the good book marketing advice and tactics that you're ever going to hear is you're trying to find people that you know will love your book and then trying to get them to read a copy.

I promise you if they read a copy and they tell other people, you'll start selling lots and lots of copies of your book. This is what I've seen work over and over and over. And so this is what I'm doing for my book, The Shithead.

I'm trying to identify people that I think will like the book and then I'm trying to get them. to read the book. Now again, this encapsulates all good book marketing tactics.

Whether you have a huge email list of fans that you know love your writing, well, you already know they love your writing, so you're just trying to get them to get a copy of your book and read it. So this applies to getting interviewed on podcasts, or buying advertising, or speaking at conferences, or social media. All you're trying to do is find people that you think will like your book, and try to get them to give your book a try.

And the thing I want you to see, especially if you're starting out and you haven't done a lot of this, is just do it one person at a time. Even me, somebody that's been doing this for a very long time, does have an email list. I'm starting by just getting some people that I know, one at a time, that I think will love my book, and I'm just sending them a copy so they'll give it a read. So that's the one strategy that encapsulates... all book marketing advice you'll hear that actually works is you're just trying to find people that you think will actually like your book and try to convince them to give it a try.

Now, I also promised there was a mindset that you had to have. And this came from a time when I was speaking at a workshop and I'd been doing book marketing for a long time at this point. And whenever I did workshops or talks or anything, people would ask me questions and it had been years. Since somebody had asked me a question that actually stumped me because I'd been doing it for so long and I was an expert. But in this particular talk, somebody raised their hand and they asked me the question.

They said, looking back over all of the authors you've worked with, all the books you've worked with, all the campaigns you've run. Is there one through line, one thread through all of them that all of the successful authors, they did this one thing and it had the biggest impact towards their success. Now this stumped me. in real time. I actually had to say, you know what, I can't think of anything and had to move on, but it stuck with me. It stuck in my head for weeks.

I was thinking like, what is it? What's that one thing, right? I've worked with authors that didn't have big email list or didn't have big social media followings or didn't have big influencer connections to help promote their book.

And yet their book found success. So what is the through line? And then it hit me and it was something I wasn't expecting to think of.

All of the authors that found success. Whether they were first-time authors or well-established authors or indie authors or traditionally published authors, none of that mattered. What it came down to is the author actually believed it was a good thing for somebody to spend their time and money on their book and read it. That the reader would be better off after having done that than before.

You have to actually believe that your book is good and that people should read it. Otherwise, no. No tactics, no strategy, nothing is actually going to help you.

Because when it comes time to asking people to read your book and then tell you what they think and leave a review and all of those things, you'll pull back and you won't actually do it. So I tell people, whether your thing is meditation or prayer or journaling or whatever it takes, you've got to get to the point with your book that you actually believe it's great and that people should read it and their life would be better off if they did read it. In fact, a couple months ago, I was talking to a guy and he's been around StoryGrid for a long time and been following us for a long time.

And we were on a Zoom call and he looked at me and he kind of paused. He goes, Tim, is the shithead good? And I looked at him and I was like, yeah, it's really good.

And he's like, OK, man, I can't wait to read it. So now when I'm in this space where I'm actually reaching out to people, old friends, old contacts, current friends and current contacts, and I'm asking them if. If I send them a copy of my book, will they read it?

I know that it's good for them to read it. I'm reaching out to people that I really, truly think will like my book, and I actually believe their life will be better. They will be a better person at the end of reading my book than at the beginning. If you don't believe this about your book, you might as well not even publish it.

Your book's going to be dead in the water before it even comes out. If you are not sure that people should read your book, you got to rethink this. You got to figure out why you're doing what you're doing, why you're publishing the book in the first place, if you don't think it's ready for people to actually read it.

So those are the two big things. The big strategy is find people that you think will love your book and invite them to read a copy. And the big mindset is actually believing that if people read your book, it is good for them and it's easy for you to ask them to read a copy of your book. Now, if you're not sure about that with your book, That's why we're here with StoryGrid is to help you write a book you can truly be proud of. And the first place you have to start is by writing great scenes.

And so I've got a great gift for you. If you go to StoryGrid.com slash checklist, I'm going to give you our 13 point checklist on how to write great scenes. This is what we use in all of our workshops and all our training to make sure that our students are leveling up their scene writing.

So I want to give you that right now. Go to StoryGrid.com slash checklist. Also, if this video was helpful to you at all, make sure you subscribe to the channel, click like to make sure you don't miss any future videos that we come out with.

Also, go to StoryGrid.com, check out all the free resources we have there. Make sure you sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything that we're doing in the StoryGrid universe. But as always, thanks for being a writer. Thanks for being a part of our community here at StoryGrid, and I'll see you next time.

Transcript for:Effective Strategies for Book Marketing

Transcript for:
Effective Strategies for Book Marketing