When To Start Book Marketing - Book Marketing Tips for Non-Fiction Authors

If there was an email template of what gets sent to me the most, it would say my book is on Amazon and now I need your help to market the book. Now we are working on ways to help authors who write the book, publish it and then try to market the book. But I gotta tell you, that's not setting yourself up for optimal book marketing success. If you want to know when you need to start your book marketing and what you should do, then this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad multi award winning author and founder of a fabulous self publishing services company, Book Launchers. Let me start with the bad news. It is very hard to get a book to sell a lot after you've published it and posted it on Amazon. In traditional publishing, they Give a book 3 months post launch before they write it off and move on to other projects because the bulk of their book sales come in that three month post post launch window. Now words I did not use. Impossible, never gonna happen, or can't. It is possible to get a book to sell after it's been out for a bit. And it usually takes things like cover redesign, some content improvements, better keywords, and some serious heavy lifting to get that giant boulder up the mountain so that it can gain enough momentum to start rolling down the other side a lot easier. You can do it, but it is much more effective and efficient to be starting your marketing before you write and layering in marketing throughout the entire process when you're writing, editing and designing your book. What does that mean, layering in marketing? Well, we're talking nonfiction here. So first we're getting clear on your author brand, who your audience is, and we're beginning to build your own network in that space. Because those are fundamental steps that you should start today to no matter where you are in your author journey. Then when you're gonna write your superbook, make sure you're really clear on who the audience is and why they need your book. What are you offering them that they're not getting elsewhere? What problem are you solving, even just a little bit different? And how is their life better after they read your book? Now watch out for the trap that so many authors fall into, which is thinking their book is going to be motivational, inspirational, or creating hope for their reader, which means the reader is almost everyone. It might be true that your book is going to create motivation, inspire, or give hope to the reader, but those things are not marketing hooks. Let's take the example of hope. Hope is generic, but if we get clear on our audience we could say the book is going to give hope for the single person looking for long lasting love, or it's hope for the cancer diagnosis that you can still live a long and meaningful life. Or it's hope for the person who lost a loved one that there is light in all of the darkness that they feel. You have to get into the details and connect with a specific reader. If you can't do that, you have to spend more time figuring out who your reader is and what you're going to do that's just a little different to make their life better after they read your book. For example, maybe you screwed up big time, a dui or you've alienated your family or you've lost a bunch of money or you did something else really big. Well, in that case, you you might want to read Chris Patrick's book Disasters to Dreams, A gritty guide to finding success in the face of failure. It's all about how sometimes life isn't what you want, it's what you need. And you have to do the dirty work to dig through defeat to find all the good things on the other side. But you have to know your reader intimately. What are those dreams? What are those screw ups? And why aren't things going right? And how does your story and advice and strategies fix that? Just check out this book. The audience is super clear the Expecting A Guide to Parental Leave Planning for Self Employed Business Owners the audience is very specific and the promise is also very clear. You can plan your parental leave and you should with this book and have the time you need to be with your baby even if you own and operate your own business. I remember when I had my son I joked that moms with jobs and maternity leave don't know what a gift that that is because I was building book launchers at 4am When I was up feeding Jackson. Speaking of Jackson, look who just popped in. So I was literally building book launchers at 4am When I was up feeding him. And then I would do a bunch of the work that had to get done to build the business and work on our US Visa application. I have no idea how I did it. Literally. There are months that I have almost no memories from. But now we have a big kid and a great business. So knowing your reader and the promise you have for them is fundamental to have in place before you write or at least while you're writing. It's hard to put that into the book after it's published. And while you're at it, why not do a little market Research. There are two ways to do some market research. Well, there's lots of ways to do market research, but there's two ways that are my favorite. First is to hit up publisher Rocket. If you need a copy of this fantastic software, go to book launchers.com for it's an affiliate link and I am proud to share it with everyone because we use it every single day and I can't tell you enough times that it's fantastic and they honestly keep making it better and better and never charge you for upgrades. I'm working on a new book on book marketing, so let's see what happens when I search that. Okay, so these are solid results. I'm happy with some of these monthly sales numbers. Now, if I wanted to get more specific, I might add new nonfiction. Now you have to look to make sure the results make sense because some don't like this one. But now looking at these results, I see the top one is a great fit, but it's not selling that much. I'd want to go and look at the category the book is in and see what else is there and come back to Rocket to get sales estimates to make sure I've got a good market for this book. Now, this doesn't make me feel confident, but I know there's a market for this book because you all comment and write me daily and ask me book marketing questions constantly. I'm in the trenches enough that I'm certain that I'll be able to sell the book, use it in partnerships with different companies and organizations, and ultimately use the book to further expand the Book Launcher's brand. So I'm going to write the book regardless of what I see in this research. But if you're not in the trenches as much as I am in your industry, you should do more research and start to find different angles if you're seeing this kind of sales results. The other thing I would do before you start writing is check books on Amazon that are like the book you're thinking of writing. So let's check out Joanna Penn's book on book marketing. I love Joanna Penn of the Creative Pen. Her book is different, but it's targeted at the same or similar audience I'd be targeting. So let me check this out. Well, she has 333 reviews, so that's awesome. And her ranks here are decent. I don't love the categories that she's in right now. They're not a great fit, but, you know, so it's not perfect to do this research and you have to Use your judgment. But what I am looking for are books that I know are similar targeting to the same audience. I want to see activity like a lot of reviews, like 100 plus reviews, rankings in different categories that place it in the top 20 or top 50 at the highest. And really, I also want to spend time reading the reviews to extract the things that are missing from these books and highlight those missing pieces in my new book. So if somebody says this book was great but I would have liked it to go into detail on this, or they say this book was really informative but the chapter on this strategy was missing or was light, maybe those are opportunities for my book. So you do that research and now you're positioned to write a book that's a little different and has things that your competitors haven't written about. That's all book marketing work that we've done and you haven't started writing yet. There's also keyword research that you'll do to brainstorm your title subtitle and the work that will go into your description and the art and science of a great cover. That's all book marketing too. But that all comes after you have a clear author brand, a well defined audience, a hook for your book, and you know your goals for writing the book and reaching that audience. Book marketing begins the moment you decide to become an author. And it doesn't stop until you stop wanting to sell books. If that sounds like a lot, well, it's more fun when you do it with a team of people that support you. Like your very own team of cheerleaders. That's what we do at Book Launchers, except we don't just cheer you on, we do a lot of the work with you. If you want to chat with me about getting our help, head over to booklaunchers.com for apply and you'll also want to see this latest video from the channel. And you'll probably also want to see what makes a great title and subtitle because that's something you ideally want to get right before you publish. That video is right here. Whatever you decide, I'm excited to spend some more time with you. So I'll see you on the next video.