Self Publishing and You- Part 3: Promotion

#3 Promotion-  Whether you're traditionally published or indie, you’re planning to go nowhere without a marketing plan.  This is a business after all.  Not everyone is business minded.  In fact, many creatives are very intimidated by the idea of mixing business with art, especially when it comes to promoting themselves.  If you could take the intimidation factor out and simplify things a bit, how would that affect your outlook on the business aspects of what we do?

When you’re promoting your work you need to ask, are you like the paper boy you see in 1940’s movies and cartoons screaming out the day’s headlines to passersby, or are you building relationships and connecting with people who will be more likely to care about what you have to say?  What do you think you’re doing?  How do you feel when every post and tweet is telling you to go do this or that without ever having any kind of connection to the writer, artist, salesman, whatever?
So let’s try to simplify things.

First, start with a target in mind. For my YA military sci-fi series, my end goal is animation.  I want to see my story become an animated series.  So I work backward and now ask, what do I need to do to get there?  Well I feel that I have to have success with my books first, then use that success to springboard into graphic novels which will allow me to reach a totally different audience.  I'm thinking mainly of COMICON at this point.  Then, leverage that success into the animation arena which my graphic novel fans and a portion of my book fans will want to see but will open up an even wider audience depending on the distribution of the animated product.

So I have my target.  How do I get there?

Now I have to decide where I need to place myself in order to achieve these staged goals.  I'm still discovering how to do this but I'm using the social networks to put my feelers out there and to meet like minded people.  The idea being to develop relationships and share knowledge, then eventually share networks and audiences.  Also, you can get reviews from this source as well as network with artists who might be willing to trade cover design work for free promotion.

How hard is it to reach out to people that like the same things you do?  If you’re genuinely interested in the work of your peers, they will be willing to listen to you talk about your products.  

Believe it or not, I used to be shy. VERY shy.  I changed a lot as a young adult after reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.  This is an old but great book.  Carnegie says that most people want to talk about themselves.  If you want new people you meet to like you, ask them to talk about themselves.  If you show a real interest in what they do, where they’re from, what they like and dislike, you’ve made a friend.  Connect with people.  Don’t just throw your advertisements at them.   They won’t care otherwise.

What you’re doing is creating a marketing network even if you aren’t actively marketing your work.  You’re creating a brand for yourself as a writer and, possibly even as a personality.  

When do you start networking?  I'm building my social and promotional network before I even have a finished product.  I'm working ahead while writing because I don't want to put my novel on Amazon and THEN start promoting it.  I want to have a community and a fan base to hype the launch of my book to.  I'll set a date and start a buzz, build a ground swell, create value in the work by offering teasers and excerpts to a network of people who, hopefully know a little about me and like me.  Anyone that has spent any time around me online knows I’m a freakin’ nut.  I use humor, usually rude, juvenile, bathroom humor, to break down walls and it works, for me.

I’ve already had people begging for my work with a social network of just under 1000 people online.  I hope to top 10,000 before I’ve got something substantial to bring to the market.  To keep those people happy and hopefully build on that anticipation, I offer excerpts, teasers and even free short stories.  I’m proving to my handful of readers that I can in fact write and that I have something to say.

One final thought on word of mouth.  If you’ve studied marketing at all (and we all really should), you’ve heard of word of mouth advertising and should know that it is considered the most powerful form of advertising.  It can start with a handful of people, say 10 who talk to 10 other people and act as a sounding board for the merits or flaws of your work.  Yes, flaws.  If you suck enough to piss someone off, its word of mouth that will be the nail in your coffin which is why editing is so important (see last post Producing a Flawless Product).

But lets says it all good.  You’re great.  Your work is great and you’ve got 10 people talking to 10 people about you and so on.  This is how a phenomena starts.  But lets change that number.  Instead of starting with 10, lets start with 10,000.  Okay that’s huge so lets be less cheeky and say out of a network of 10,000, 10% are that impressed with you.  So 1000 x 10.  Now its 10,000 again.  Number are fun.  Next week its 100,000, then a 1,000,000.  You’ve not gone viral.  Math geeks will call that exponential growth.  I call it freakin’ smurf!

Any marketing plan will need to be constantly reviewed, tweaked and reworked.  I think of it as Research by Doing.  Trial and error.  Expected results vs Actual results.

So is all of this gonna work?  I don’t know.  Is any of it gonna work?  I still can’t say that I know because I’m smack in the middle of this, but its my plan and I’m gonna work it.  I do have a plan though.  It’s going to happen different ways for all of us.  Do you have a plan?

Stay Tuned for Part 4 Covers!

Listening to- Alice in Chains - Shame In You