Julie Broad ("Julie the Book Broad"), founder of Book Launchers and bestselling author, walks authors through common book-marketing mistakes to avoid. She defines differences between marketing, promotion, and advertising; emphasizes treating authorship as a business; warns against shortcut-seeking ("easy button"), spamming groups, asking non-ideal friends/family for reviews, and trying to do everything at once. The video gives practical guidance: focus on audience-building, set clear goals for marketing activities, invest strategically (including paid ads for specific objectives), and layer efforts rather than multitask everything.
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Book marketing is a lot of work. Getting your book into the hands of readers and making a profit in your author business is full of things you need to do. Build an email list, get interviewed on podcasts, do author swaps, run Amazon ads. The list of things to do is really long, so you might be looking for a list of things you can stop doing. If you want to know what not to do when it comes to book marketing, then this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad, multi award winning overall number one Amazon Best selling author and the founder of Book Launchers, a fabulous professional self publishing service. One of the fundamental reasons I started Book Launchers shortly after I self published my second book, the New Brand you'd was because I realized how much effort needs to go into marketing a book and how much of it has to happen before you even start writing your book. Too many authors write good books but struggle to sell them. Some authors write mediocre books, believing in some great marketing from a company designed to take your money and sell your dream, but they deliver the opposite. Ultimately, I knew there were a lot of authors like me that didn't have the time to make their book great on their own and they needed the support to make it great and most importantly, market it. And we know all the things that go into making a book successful and the ones that don't. So today I'm going to reduce your to do list by giving you a to don't listen. And if you're doing any of these things, stop. All right, number one, stop asking friends and family to buy your book and write reviews for your book if they aren't your ideal reader, you're hurting yourself. Yes, you need reviews, but you also need to teach the Amazon algorithm who your ideal reader is. If you have a bunch of people who would normally buy gardening books, buying your book on software strategy. Amazon might be showing your software strategy book to the gardening community for a long time. Number two, stop confusing marketing, promotion and advertising and the outcome you can expect from each marketing is the strategy and getting the word out through things like podcast interviews, speaking opportunities, your newsletter Other people's newsletter promotion is when you discount your price or run some other promotion like I do with my book. If you visit self publishandsucceed.com, you'll see my book promotion. I'm not discounting the price, but I'm offering incentives to get your copy of Self Publish and succeed. Advertising is when you pay money for promotions and listings. These are all different things and they each have different goals. When people mix them up, they're often seeking the wrong outcome from what they're doing. Marketing doesn't sell books at first. Marketing is part of getting your book in front of the same person seven times so they finally buy it. Marketing is building your brand, which builds your business and your author. Brand marketing is valuable. It's essential in the long run, but it yields minimal results in the short run. We do a ton of book marketing for our authors at Book Launchers and the authors who understand the long term payoff of book marketing are the ones that win in the short run and the long one. Long one are the ones that win in the short run and the long run. The ones who think book marketing equals hundreds of book sales right away, they give up way faster than they should. Book promotion is something that should yield sales of your book. In some cases you might be running a 99 cent deal or maybe you're selling a bunch of books packaged together. I've done promotions at live events where it was buy my book and get another book free. That's a promotion and the goal is book sales. Advertising Paid advertising has different goals. To me, there's only three reasons authors should pay for advertising. One is to get an email address of their ideal reader, 2 to sell books, or 3 to get the book into the hands of a reviewer who will write a review. All three of those things are essential and well worth paying for. Know your goal so so you can approach each activity with the right expectation and get the results you want. Number three Stop spamming groups online, looking for reviews or trying to sell your book. Thankfully, I don't see this on the YouTube channel very often, nor in most of the groups I'm a part of online, but I know it happens. My buddy Dale Roberts posted this in his Self Publishing Books Facebook group, asking members to stop promoting your books in the group. You need to add value to the groups you're in. I'm in a couple of Facebook groups where posting one of my YouTube videos is value add. To answer a question rarely, but it does happen. Sharing a link to my book is a value add to support someone, but most of the time I'm sharing recommendations, referrals, or cheering people on. I'm not posting about anything of my own. Add value to the lives of others in everything you do and your book will find its audience spam groups and you'll lose your network and not sell books. Number four Stop treating your book like a hobby, even if it's a side gig. Being an author is running a business. You have to invest in that success of your book. You will have expenses, you will have revenue, you'll have things that you can write off for tax purposes, you'll have things you need to buy. And you have business decisions to make around your book. It's not a hobby, It's a business. In a future video, I'm going to talk about a bunch of business considerations you need to know about when you become an author. So make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turn those notifications on so you get that video. Plus, if you're not part of our launch letter, you should hit pause and head to booklaunchers.com where forward/seven steps links right here to get on that list because we also do these awesome monthly training sessions just for launch letter subscribers. Regardless, your book is not a hobby. It's a business, even if it's a small business. So let's start thinking about it as a business and investing money where it makes sense, protecting your assets and planning for your success. Number five Stop Looking for that Easy Button those overnight bestsellers you see, they spent a decade building an audience. There are not a lot of things that produce immediate results in publishing or pretty much anything. Authors with big bank balances try to buy wins. And sure, $100,000 can buy you a bestseller list, but that list is bought and you better have a big way to capitalize on saying you're a New York Times bestseller because you're gonna need it to make up an ROI on that big purchase there. Okay, Besides the very few flush authors who will buy their way to success, the vast majority of authors have to do it the hard way. One reader at a time, one review at a time. I guess that was like three One reader at a time, one review at a time. And selling one book at a time looking for the easy button sets you up to be prey to the predatorial publishers out there. The flashy companies that are really good at marketing but not good at sustainable long term results. I can't tell you how many times someone has chosen not to work with book launchers and contacted me a year or two later and said they fell prey to some flashy marketing and feel we would have gotten them a much better book. We even had one client leave partway through the process and come back after realizing that process seemed slow when he was in it, but it actually was based on a sound approach to setting the author up for success, not a client churning revolving door, which is what he experienced when he left us. Some people have to see the other side to know what they had to begin with. Regardless, there isn't an easy button. It's a long term game and if you haven't built the audience, you're going to be building it after your book comes out. The book will help you do that, but you're not going to be selling 10,000 books on launch without an audience to back you up. So you need to do something every day and you'll find success in the long term. And number six, Stop trying to do all the things you can't. Learn to be a social media Maven, dance on TikTok and stand out on Instagram while building an email list and growing a speaking business and building a course and selling your services and doing all those things at once. Tackle one thing at a time. You don't need to be an expert at all things all at once. Layer things on. Find the things that you like and that are getting results and double down on them. You don't need to do everything. There are other things that you should stop doing. Like stop assuming someone will say no before you even ask them. Stop trying to do everything yourself. You need help. Book marketing is a team sport, even if it's recruiting your son or your daughter to help you. And for goodness sakes, stop trying to sell your book to everyone. Everyone is not your market. You get the picture, right? What else should you stop doing? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet hashtag noboringbooksswag like these fabulous t shirts. Now, if you're still in the writing phase, this video on what you need to stop doing as an author is a must watch. And this video right here is on some of those predatory publishing practices you need to watch out for. Either way, I'd really be delighted to spend some more time with you. So click on over. I'm waiting for you.
