Online Community for Authors

You will maximize your efforts if you know the best target audience to focus on.

In our "Promote Your Book" section, we discuss in detail what a target audience is and how you can use the Internet to help you select the best target audience for your book. Once you've registered, you can read the articles. Go to "Promote Your Book" then click on "Planning" and then find the articles on researching your target audience.

You may think that creating a promotional plan for the purpose of marketing a self published book is boring stuff.  I hope not because every expert in the publishing (and business) field will start off by helping you create a good plan. Here’s something I learned running my own company:

The mark of a successful entrepreneur is someone willing to do the things they most dislike doing.

What does this mean? Here’s what my experience taught me:

I like marketing and selling, but when we started ZDocs, I found myself doing a lot of accounting. As the owner of ZDocs, I should not have been doing so much accounting. We had a bookkeeper on staff, but she was also our primary customer service person and that role was more important to the company than the bookkeeping role was at the time. As we couldn’t afford more staff, I had to step in and just do it. Once the business grew and cash flow improved, I started delegating as much of the accounting work as possible.

Now, many people, I should say, many authors love to create and to write. But do they — do you — like to sell? Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, but the point is that it doesn’t matter. Even if a mainstream publisher picks you up, you are going to be required to go to book signings and do interviews with the media. You may hate doing these things, but if you want to be successful, you will need to do them.

When you find yourself doing something you really don’t like doing, think to yourself that the thing you hate doing most may be the one thing that will make you successful.  And when you can afford to have someone better than you do that thing, then delegate as fast as possible. The key point here is finding someone better than you.

Your book will have a much better chance succeeding if you work from a good plan. The good news is that a promotional plan is not all that difficult or boring. In addition, as a member of Authors On The Net, you will have access to tools that help simplify creating your plan  My experience both with business owners and with authors is that if the planning process is time consuming or difficult, they simply won’t do it. The underlying problem, however, is if the business owner or author does not see real value in creating a plan, he or she will not spend time planning. My intention is to both show the real value in planning and to give authors tools to help simplify the planning process.

Your marketing plan should have started before you wrote your first paragraph, but unfortunately, many authors I work with skip this step.  It is common for professional writers to not write their book until they have identified who will want to read their book. Often, these writers will send off query letters to publishers before they write their book and they won't write the book until they have sold the idea first. These writers know they must have the right product for the market they are chasing.

I am passionate about the future of self-publishing. But for self-publishing authors to be successful, they need to make a product that a certain number of people have a demand for. You do not need to sell to a million people, but you do need a market large enough to justify spending so much of your time, energy and, of course, money.

Becoming a marketing guru is vital to your success as an author and in today’s Internet-enabled world you have some incredible tools at your disposal to reach your target audience. But to reach this target audience, you need to know who they are, what they want and how to present your product to them.