Hey there! Welcome to this blog with an overview of marketing and promotion.
As the title states, in this blog, I will be discussing what marketing and promotion is along with providing a list of the 5 Ps of marketing. You may be wondering why the title of this course includes both marketing and promotion since many people think the two are pretty much the same thing, but they aren’t exactly the same.
I love how Michael La Ronn explains marketing and promotion in a short YouTube blog he created for his Author Level Up YouTube channel. He says “marketing is tailoring your product to your target audience.” and “promotion is letting your audience know your book exists.” He further goes on to say “you can have marketing without promotion, but you can not have promotion without marketing.” You can watch it on your own if you would like it here. It is only about three minutes long and may be worth watching if you want to hear him talk more about marketing and promotion. So, essentially, the marketing is what you are doing as you create your product so that it is the best it can be for your intended audience and promotion is getting out there and letting those people know you have a book available for them. If you are at all familiar with marketing, you may have heard about the 5 Ps of marketing.
This includes people, your product, the price, place, which is where you will be selling your product, and promotion.
I will be explaining each of these in more depth throughout this course.
- Under people, I will talk about a target audience, reviewer information, and awards.
- For product, I will talk about book covers and interior considerations for your book. Obviously, if you have already published your book, you would already have your book cover and interior done, but those blogs may still be helpful in some way especially if watching the blog gives you ideas for how to improve your book.
- For price, I will be talking about some things to consider when choosing a price for your book along with information about metadata.
- For place, I will be providing information about selling books online and selling books offline in various places. For promotion, I will talk about book launches, author websites, offering freebies, presentations and Storytime, free publicity, and some other promotional ideas.
Before we move on, though, I just want to mention that you should actually be thinking of marketing and promotion ideas before you officially publish your book to help build momentum for your book. Some of the ideas included within this course require research to complete or they may require books being submitted to places before they are officially published. However, if you have already published your book and are now looking for ways to promote and market, then there are still some ways to do that. It’s better to start late than never at all. Some of the ideas in this course may be better suited for prepublication, whereas other ideas should be fine whether or not you have already published your book. Something I have heard some authors doing is conducting research to determine what is popular and in-demand before they even write their book. Their thinking behind this is that they have an audience built in to sell their book to. Then, they can tailor their book and strategies specifically to that group of people. If you have a blog with a huge following, maybe it would be best to see what topics would interest your audience the most and write something along those lines. If you don’t have a blog or a large audience or if you have no intention of writing a book based solely on researching what’s popular first, that’s completely fine, too. That may work for some authors, but it might not be right for you. In fact, all of the strategies that are discussed within this course may work well for some authors but may not work as well for others, so please choose to do what you think will work best for you and your book, which may take some time, trial, and error to determine.
Finally, set a budget before publishing a book to determine how much you intend to spend on producing the book and how much you will have for promotion. There are many ways to promote a book for free, so it’s okay if your budget is not high for this. It’s best to work with what you do have.
This course is full of ideas for marketing and promotion, but you do not have to do everything. It’s okay to try different techniques and see what seems to be working best for you and your book. The nice thing with self-publishing through platforms such as KDP Print and IngramSpark is that you can look at your sales reports whenever you would like to see if any additional sales came in through a particular promotion. If something doesn’t seem to be working, you can try to do something else that does work. Each author may have different techniques that work best for them. Again, don’t do everything at once. If you try to do everything at one time, you won’t be able to do each technique well, you may not be able to tell if it is working well or not, and you may get overwhelmed by everything all at once.
Decide what technique you think would be best to implement for you and your book first and try that. If it doesn’t work, try something else. It’s up to you to determine what is best for you and your book.
That’s it for this blog. As I had stated earlier, I will be going more in depth about the 5 Ps in marketing. So, in the next blog, I will be talking about the first P – people. Specifically, I will be talking about a target audience. Until then, may you have a wonderful day!