Cindy Dees's Blog, page 12

MARKETING PLAN - YES, YOU NEED ONE

Are you groaning yet? Most people do when asked to write a business plan or, heaven forbid, a marketing plan. Having just participated in a group of extraordinarily successful authors using one to methodically put a book on the New York Times Bestseller List, I'm here to tell you, marketing plans work.

Over the next few months, my plan is to walk you all through the development and implementation of the marketing plan for a print book I have coming out about a year from now. Before you roll your eyes and tell me I've already got a bunch of sales and audience established so anything I'm doing won't apply to you, next year's book will be a fantasy novel. I've never published anything in the fantasy genre, so I'm coming to the table with nothing. Zilch. I'm starting from scratch. I'll report on the project as I go, and you can follow along. We'll learn together what does and doesn't work and find a few pitfalls along the way, I'm sure.

I started with a marketing plan--wrote it over the past several days and put it to bed last night. I have a little money to spend here and there, but my goal is to do the majority of the work myself rather than throw a lot of money at other people to do the leg work for me.

First, what the heck IS a marketing plan? It's a list of all the things you're going to do to publicize your book and convince potential readers to buy it. Not too tricky in theory, right?

But why bother? Because it gives you focus. A discrete list of things to do. Efficient use of your non-writing time. You can set deadlines for yourself based on your plan, if that floats your boat.

Too often, writers approach publicity in a random fashion without any real direction. Or they time their marketing efforts poorly--either stretching them over too long a period of time, or not concentrating them immediately after the book's release. My usual crime is to focus hard on publicity for a little while, then get involved with my writing for several weeks and ignore marketing entirely in the mean time in too stop-and-go a fashion. A marketing plan can help you remedy these issues.

It doesn't have to be fancy. But it does have to have a list of all the things you can realistically task yourself with doing to publicize your book. If you have a budget for marketing, now's the time to figure out where and how you're going to spend it.

I sort my marketing plan into types of activity and then make To-Do lists under each heading. That's pretty much it. This is actually what I show my publisher when it's time to have marketing meetings for my print books, too. For this marketing plan, my main areas are: Street Team, Author Social Media Campaign, Publisher Social Media Campaign, Paid Promotion, Interactive Website, Original Written material, Personal Appearances, and Miscellaneous.

If you don't know what to put into your marketing plan, look at the marketing other authors are doing for their books. Choose the stuff that won't make you crazy to do and emulate that. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of books available on marketing self-published books, and there are thousands of websites, blogs, and articles devoted to it. This is the part where you do your homework and decide what fits you and your book best and what is most likely to reach the target audience for your book. (You do know who your target audience is, of course.)

Once your plan is drafted, pick a release date if you're self publishing, or use the release date your publisher gave you and work your way backward, setting dates by which you need to have all the pieces of your plan in place. You'll likely notice a horrible log jam of deadlines when your book comes out and perhaps two weeks before it comes out. I always seem to hit a wad of deadlines about 4 weeks and 8 weeks out, too.

At any rate, look at the stuff in those crazy overloaded times and pick the ones you can front load. Slide those deadlines earlier. These are projects like pre-writing blogs for blog tours, per-loading Tweets into my Tweet Deck for that time period, maybe getting books ready to send out to reviewers (either packing and addressing envelopes for print copies or getting PDF files properly formatted and ready to go out for ecopies).

There will always be more marketing you can do, so beware of losing yourself and your writing time in trying to chase down every lead and every idea you run across. Remember, if you're not writing more great books, you'll soon have nothing to market at all. Many authors I know spend around four hours per day writing and four hours per day doing business and marketing. Me, I prefer to write about twice as much as I work on marketing stuff each day...maybe 4 and 2 or 6 and 3. Or on a bad day, 8 and 4.

However, when it comes down to a hard choice between writing or marketing where you can't do both...WRITE.

Up next, I'll write about researching reviewers, finding readers, and building lists. And I'm hoping you guys will help me with that one...

Marketing Plans — Yes, You Need One

Are you groaning yet? Most people do when asked to write a business plan or, heaven forbid, a marketing plan. Having just participated in a group of extraordinarily successful authors using one to methodically put a book on the New York Times Bestseller List, I’m here to tell you, marketing plans work.

Over the next few months, my plan is to walk you all through the development and implementation of the marketing plan for a print book I have coming out about a year from now. Before you roll your eyes and tell me I’ve already got a bunch of sales and audience established so anything I’m doing won’t apply to you, next year’s book will be a fantasy novel. I’ve never published anything in the fantasy genre, so I’m coming to the table with nothing. Zilch. I’m starting from scratch. I’ll report on the project as I go, and you can follow along. We’ll learn together what does and doesn’t work and find a few pitfalls along the way, I’m sure.

I started with a marketing plan–wrote it over the past several days and put it to bed last night. I have a little money to spend here and there, but my goal is to do the majority of the work myself rather than throw a lot of money at other people to do the leg work for me.

First, what the heck IS a marketing plan? It’s a list of all the things you’re going to do to publicize your book and convince potential readers to buy it. Not too tricky in theory, right?

But why bother? Because it gives you focus. A discrete list of things to do. Efficient use of your non-writing time. You can set deadlines for yourself based on your plan, if that floats your boat.

Too often, writers approach publicity in a random fashion without any real direction. Or they time their marketing efforts poorly–either stretching them over too long a period of time, or not concentrating them immediately after the book’s release. My usual crime is to focus hard on publicity for a little while, then get involved with my writing for several weeks and ignore marketing entirely in the mean time in too stop-and-go a fashion. A marketing plan can help you remedy these issues.

It doesn’t have to be fancy. But it does have to have a list of all the things you can realistically task yourself with doing to publicize your book. If you have a budget for marketing, now’s the time to figure out where and how you’re going to spend it.

I sort my marketing plan into types of activity and then make To-Do lists under each heading. That’s pretty much it. This is actually what I show my publisher when it’s time to have marketing meetings for my print books, too. For this marketing plan, my main areas are: Street Team, Author Social Media Campaign, Publisher Social Media Campaign, Paid Promotion, Interactive Website, Original Written material, Personal Appearances, and Miscellaneous.

If you don’t know what to put into your marketing plan, look at the marketing other authors are doing for their books. Choose the stuff that won’t make you crazy to do and emulate that. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of books available on marketing self-published books, and there are thousands of websites, blogs, and articles devoted to it. This is the part where you do your homework and decide what fits you and your book best and what is most likely to reach the target audience for your book. (You do know who your target audience is, of course.)

Once your plan is drafted, pick a release date if you’re self publishing, or use the release date your publisher gave you and work your way backward, setting dates by which you need to have all the pieces of your plan in place. You’ll likely notice a horrible log jam of deadlines when your book comes out and perhaps two weeks before it comes out. I always seem to hit a wad of deadlines about 4 weeks and 8 weeks out, too.

At any rate, look at the stuff in those crazy overloaded times and pick the ones you can front load. Slide those deadlines earlier. These are projects like pre-writing blogs for blog tours, per-loading Tweets into my Tweet Deck for that time period, maybe getting books ready to send out to reviewers (either packing and addressing envelopes for print copies or getting PDF files properly formatted and ready to go out for ecopies).

There will always be more marketing you can do, so beware of losing yourself and your writing time in trying to chase down every lead and every idea you run across. Remember, if you’re not writing more great books, you’ll soon have nothing to market at all. Many authors I know spend around four hours per day writing and four hours per day doing business and marketing. Me, I prefer to write about twice as much as I work on marketing stuff each day…maybe 4 and 2 or 6 and 3. Or on a bad day, 8 and 4.

However, when it comes down to a hard choice between writing or marketing where you can’t do both…WRITE.

Up next, I’ll write about researching reviewers, finding readers, and building lists. And I’m hoping you guys will help me with that one…

Hot Alpha SEALs is a NYT Bestseller!

Yesssss! The New York Times Bestseller list, baby! Our Hot Alpha Seals boxed set will be on the New York Times Bestseller list next week, debuting at #18 in eBook Fiction and #23 in the combined Print and eBook Fiction list. How COOL is that?! Totally psyched. Thanks to my fellow authors for writing GREAT stories, and huge thanks to all our friends and fans who helped put this terrific set of stories on the grandaddy of all bestseller lists. You guys rock!

And in case you haven’t bought the set and would like to get in on all the fun, here’s a buy link to the set:

http://bit.ly/HotAlphaSEALs

We Made USA Today Bestseller List!

The headline says it all–HOT ALPHA SEALS boxed set just debuted at #44 on the USA Today bestseller list! How cool is that? Thanks so much to everyone who supported our stories and helped put us on this awesome list. So exciting! If you haven’t bought it yet and want to get in on the fun, it’s still 99 cents for all 12 original stories about hot Navy SEALs by 12 New York Times,  USA Today, and International bestselling authors. Here’s a link to buy it!

http://bit.ly/HotAlphaSEALs

ON SALE NOW!

HOT ALPHA SEALS: Military Romance Megaset is ON SALE NOW! Already #1 Amazon Bestseller for Military Romance, 30+ 5-star reviews, climbing the Amazon rankings fast. And it’s only 99 cents for all 12 original stories by 12 bestselling authors! You can buy it here: http://bit.ly/HotAlphaSEALs

SEALs hit Amazon Top 100

Woot! Hot Alpha SEALs: Military Romance Megaset has gone #1 in Military Romance in the United Kingdom and cracked the OVERALL Amazon Kindle Top 100 paid books list! A big thanks to everyone who pre-ordered it, and what are you waiting for if you haven’t ordered it yet? What’s not to love? 12 bestselling military romance authors, 12 original stories, 12 hunky, heroic, hot Navy Seals, 12 women brave enough to love them.

tTHE LEADING EDGE OF BOOK PROMOTION

Part of your job as an author, whether traditionally print published or self-published, is to do self-promotion. But, with something like 5 million writers self-publishing these days, the promotional waters are getting pretty darned crowded. It's critically important to do self-promotion that doesn't get drowned in the deluge of other promotion, and which actually gives you a reasonable bang for the buck.

This means a second vitally important part of self-promoting is staying on the leading edge of what marketing tools are available, what's being tried and experimented with, and what's working for a lot of authors.

And THIS means you need to fairly continually research what's going on in the field of book marketing. Freaking out a little, yet?

One way to do that is to follow my posts, where I try to highlight marketing and promote tools I've found that are working for some or many authors.

For example, here's one I learned about today from another VERY marketing savvy author. It's called THUNDERCLAP. It's like a Kickstarter Campaign for self-promotion. You put a book up on the site, and then you have to gather 100 supporters. If you do that, then your advertisement goes out to the various social media lists of all those people automatically. If you fail to get the minimum 100 likes, then your campaign dies and is nixed. If you want, you can turn it into a bit of a game among your friends, family, and fans.

Here's the link to the THUNDERCLAP campaign I'm doing for a terrific boxed set of books I wrote in. Give the link a click and check it out. This may be something you can do for your book. And hey. The price is right. It's free! If you're feeling generous, feel free to support our series. Will be happy to do the same for yours...

http://thndr.it/1s2JVcr LINK

THE LEADING EDGE OF BOOK PROMOTION

Part of your job as an author, whether traditionally print published or self-published, is to do self-promotion. But, with something like 5 million writers self-publishing these days, the promotional waters are getting pretty darned crowded. It’s critically important to do self-promotion that doesn’t get drowned in the deluge of other promotion, and which actually gives you a reasonable bang for the buck.

This means a second vitally important part of self-promoting is staying on the leading edge of what marketing tools are available, what’s being tried and experimented with, and what’s working for a lot of authors.

And THIS means you need to fairly continually research what’s going on in the field of book marketing. Freaking out a little, yet?

One way to do that is to follow my posts, where I try to highlight marketing and promote tools I’ve found that are working for some or many authors.

For example, here’s one I learned about today from another VERY marketing savvy author. It’s called THUNDERCLAP. It’s like a Kickstarter Campaign for self-promotion. You put a book up on the site, and then you have to gather 100 supporters. If you do that, then your advertisement goes out to the various social media lists of all those people automatically. If you fail to get the minimum 100 likes, then your campaign dies and is nixed. If you want, you can turn it into a bit of a game among your friends, family, and fans.

Here’s the link to the THUNDERCLAP campaign I’m doing for a terrific boxed set of books I wrote in. Give the link a click and check it out. This may be something you can do for your book. And hey. The price is right. It’s free! If you’re feeling generous, feel free to support our series. Will be happy to do the same for yours…

http://thndr.it/1s2JVcr LINK

Facebook Algorithms, part deux

It's good to lurk on multiple writer's loops where authors compare notes and experiences. Recently, a lot of us have been talking about our dramatically shrinking FB reach. As far as we can tell, our favorite social media host is messing with its "post reach" algorithms again.

What seems to be happening--and this is by no means scientific or confirmed, but merely the observation of multiple authors--is that when a post goes out, if many or most of the first 5-10 people who read it interact with it by liking it or sharing it, then the post is labeled "hot" and gets a much wider distribution.

Conversely, if few people or no people interact with the post immediately, it's buried, and very few people see it.

Also, posts with key words like "New Job" or "New Baby" get wide distribution immediately.

When a post gets a lot of comments with the word "Congratulations" in them, the post gets wider distribution.

FB admits to having up to 100,000 parameters that determine how widely posts are distributed. Hence, I think it makes great sense to copy your articles and news and post them on other social media platforms that are readily accessible to your readers, friends, and fans.

In my case, I post the big stuff to Goodreads, my Amazon Author Page, and most importantly, my website. I talked in my last post about setting up a widget folks can opt in to that notifies them anytime I make a post there. IT gives a short sneak preview of the post (just a few sentences) so people can decide if they want to click over an read the whole thing. Very handy, and my fans, friends, and readers never miss a post.

Unlike here, where your odds of seeing my posts are currently sitting at a whopping 1.5%. Just sayin.

FACEBOOK ALGORITHMS, part deux

It’s good to lurk on multiple writer’s loops where authors compare notes and experiences. Recently, a lot of us have been talking about our dramatically shrinking FB reach. As far as we can tell, our favorite social media host is messing with its “post reach” algorithms again.

What seems to be happening–and this is by no means scientific or confirmed, but merely the observation of multiple authors–is that when a post goes out, if many or most of the first 5-10 people who read it interact with it by liking it or sharing it, then the post is labeled “hot” and gets a much wider distribution.

Conversely, if few people or no people interact with the post immediately, it’s buried, and very few people see it.

Also, posts with key words like “New Job” or “New Baby” get wide distribution immediately.

When a post gets a lot of comments with the word “Congratulations” in them, the post gets wider distribution.

FB admits to having up to 100,000 parameters that determine how widely posts are distributed. Hence, I think it makes great sense to copy your articles and news and post them on other social media platforms that are readily accessible to your readers, friends, and fans.

In my case, I post the big stuff to Goodreads, my Amazon Author Page, and most importantly, my website. I talked in my last post about setting up a widget folks can opt in to that notifies them anytime I make a post there. It gives a short sneak preview of the post (just a few sentences) so people can decide if they want to click over an read the whole thing. Very handy, and my fans, friends, and readers never miss a post.

Unlike here, where your odds of seeing my posts are currently sitting at a whopping 1.5%. Just sayin.