Guest: Marcus Taylor, co-author of the book Get Noticed
About four months ago Rob (co-author) and I were discussing whether to self-publish our book or instead go down the traditional publishing route, in the end we chose to self-publish – after all, we had written a book about getting noticed, so we decided to put our money where our mouth is and use the exact same concepts from within the book to get ourselves noticed.
In this post I want to share with you some of the lessons in book marketing that I’ve learnt from researching, writing, and marketing our book Get Noticed.
1. Be in the Right Place at the Right Time, All the Time
Unless you already have a large network of bloggers, journalists, and influential people within your book’s niche/genre, you’re going to need to meet a lot of new people and build an awful lot of relationships.
The first step to meeting those people is understanding who they are and where they spend their time. Which forums do they talk in online? Which conferences, events, orMeetups do they attend in the real world? Know where the people you need to meet spend their time, and then start spending a larger proportion of your time in those places. For me, this meant using Meetup.com and Eventbrite.com to find lots of social gatherings around the country where I could meet good contacts.
2. You Personal Brand Can’t be Any Bigger Than You Are
In many genres, the most successful authors are those who have built credibility as an author, and have thus built a ‘personal brand’. How to build a strong personal brand is outside the scope of this blog post, but one thing that I learnt from marketing Get Noticed is that your personal brand can be no bigger than you are as a person. You need to get outside of your comfort zone, meet as many people as you can and invest in your communication and networking skills if you want to compete for the top spot and create a community around yourself and your work.
How do you pave the way for increasing the size of your personal brand? I believe the answer lies in developing people skills. There is a great study by the Dale Carnegie Foundation that suggests that 85% of our social and financial success in life is determined by our communication skills, which goes to show just how important your communication skills are when it comes to networking and building a brand.
3. Getting Noticed follows the 80/20 rule
When it comes to getting noticed as an author, the reality is that 80% of your marketing efforts won’t send your book to the #1 spot on The New York Times bestsellers list, but 20% of what you do will have a positive impact. The thing to remember is that marketing is cumulative, and to acquire the 20% of gold, you have to do the other 80%.
With Get Noticed I tried Facebook Advertising, sponsoring Meetup groups, running live Ustream events, handing out promotional business cards about the book, and running several competitions, all of which flopped below my expectations. Then I decided to record some YouTube videos and set up a ‘tweet to unlock a chapter’ function on the website – both of which have been very effective to date. The trick is to be persistent.
4. Aim high and you’ll score high
If you believe that your book will appear on CNN or the BBC, chances are it will. Similarly, if you don’t think it will ever appear on national TV, then you’re probably right, too. What you believe has an enormous impact on your journey as an author and how you market your book, which is why it’s so important to not only believe in yourself, but also in your product. If you don’t have one hundred percent faith in the product you’re representing, your faith will gradually undermine your success.
As people, we often manifest the things we think about into our reality, and so by thinking positively about your book and envisaging large goals, you increase the probability of those goals being achieved.
How do you make yourself aim higher? Make ‘aiming high’ second nature through practice.
It may sound crazy, but earlier this year I set myself some crazy goals including skydiving and I genuinely believe that it changed how I think about business. Whenever a big challenge arises I say to myself “this is nothing compared to jumping out of a plane!” in other words, it expanded my comfort zone allowing me to deal with bigger challenges that reap bigger rewards.
5. Know how you’re going to introduce yourself and your product
If asked to summarise your book in fewer than two sentences, could you do it in a way that made them want to buy it? If someone asked you what you do at a party would your book enter your personal elevator pitch? It may sound like marketing 101, but how others see you and your book is largely based on the sentence you come out with when asked what your book is about – make sure it’s great!
Hopefully these tips have been useful and have given you some ideas on promoting your book. As always, I’m keen to meet and speak to any other authors who are passionate about promoting their book and getting noticed, so if you want to get in touch and arrange a call over Skype feel free to connect with me or drop me an email (Marcus at wegetnoticed dot com).
This blog post was written by Marcus Taylor, co-author of the book Get Noticed, a how-to guide on mastering the process of getting noticed. Marcus is also the head of social media at SEOptimise and founder of TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk.
