5 Things I Learned About Marketing from Writing a Novel

Today, Tuesday, May 22, 2018, I’m officially a published novelist, something I’ve longed to be since I was six years old. The Reluctant Coroner was a frenetic, messy, wonderful process, and I learned a whole lot—especially the way writing and publishing a book correlates to B2B marketing. For the next five weeks, I’ll share five lessons about what I learned during the writing of The Reluctant Coroner.

Lesson 1: Judge a book by its cover.

For all the talk of artists talking about writing what their heart wants to write, when it comes to getting other people to pay attention to your book, 90% of it is done with the title and the cover. My book was originally called Out of the Park—because the main character was named Fenway Stevenson (yes, after the stadium where the Boston Red Sox play). And because the murder victim was found outside a state park. Two details which would never get across in the half-second someone browsing on Amazon or Kobo or in an independent bookstore would ever get.

I had to ask myself: if I saw a novel called Out of the Park in the mystery section, what would I think? Would I think it’s a thinking person’s mystery with family drama, suspenseful action, complicated people making heartbreaking decisions? No. I’d think it was a baseball mystery. And I’d be disappointed, no matter how good it is, because it didn’t meet my expectations.

If you’re in product marketing, like I have been for most of my career, this means you can’t be overly clever naming your products or your features. By the same token, Woman Solves A Murder isn’t descriptive enough (like “Acme Network Firewall”), but Out of the Park was so, ahem, out of left field—just like some of the weirder product names you find, that may make a lot of sense in context. But it’s context the audience doesn’t have when they’re making the...Read More