Guest Expert: Tony Eldridge
Tomorrow is the mid-term election in the United States. Regardless who your favorite candidate is, there are some great communication lessons authors you can learn by observing what is happening. Some lessons may be worthy to emulate while others may be best to steer clear from. While politics can be divisive, your marketing business communications, for the most part, should not be.
Communications is important: Whether you are talking debates, commercials, editorials, news reports, interviews, speeches or a myriad of other mediums, thousands of hours and millions of dollars spent on communicating a message cannot be better seen than during election season. If you neglect communicating your message, you are killing your author platform. As an author, words are your life. Spend as much care with your marketing communications as you do with the words in your books.
Gutter Communications Often Rallies Part Of Your Base But It Often Destroys Part Of It As Well: Like a high-school tussle after class, people often like to see a good fight. But in the end, you may please a small portion of your base, but you will almost always alienate a large group of people as well. You will rarely benefit when you get into this kind of mean-spirited activity. While engaging in controversial messages, make sure that you don’t cross the line of controversy and get into a shout-out or name calling with others. Remember, as an author you want to use your communication skills to make friends, not drive people away.
Repetition Of Message Is Important: It is not enough to say something once and hope that people get it. Like watching the same commercial over and over helps a candidate nail his or her point home, so does repetition of your message. Speak your message boldly, and speak it often. Use Twitter, blogs, Facebook, your website, and any other medium you have as an author to get your message out. I can’t tell you how many times I visited an author’s site because I read a marketing message for the 4th or 5th time. By then, it was familiar and I bit.
Communication Lives On Forever: Once you let it out of the bottle, especially on the internet, your communication can surface long after you make it. Make sure that what you communicate will make you as proud tomorrow as you were the day you said it. Just as your book will live long after you do, your great Internet marketing messages will live on through search engines.
Lies Will Be Found Out: Unlike politicians who may lie with impunity, you will probably not be able to get away with it. Being caught in a lie is powerful enough to tarnish your author platform and ruin your reputation, making running for office your only means of providing a livelihood. Seriously, the consequences of truth are almost always better than the consequences of lies. Make sure your testimonials are true, your book’s awards are legit, and your news stories are accurate. Fiction makes a great novel but a poor marketing message.
You know that communications is vital to your author platform. Remember that you and your book are much too important to leave up to poor communications. It’s in your communications that your integrity can be found, so don’t take a lesson from the politicians. Communicate as though your future depends on it, because it does.
Tony Eldridge is the author of the action-adventure novel, The Samson Effect, and author of the video e-book, Conducting Effective Twitter Contests. On his Marketing Tips for Authors Blog you can find practical advice on low cost and no-cost methods for marketing your book. Sign up for his free newsletter to get video tips to help you with some of the more technical aspects of marketing your book online.
