5 Things I Learned About Marketing from Writing a Novel, Part 2
Last week on May 22, 2018, I officially published my debut novel. Writing and publishing 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. This is the second of five lessons about what I learned during the writing of The Reluctant Coroner.
Lesson 2: Be your authentic self.
This doesn’t have anything to do with “building your personal brand” or anything like that. This is about your mindset and how you present yourself—and the products you’re trying to market—to your audience.
When I finished my first draft, I started to look into how to market my book. After all, I had seen the disastrous consequences in my professional life of throwing a product over the wall and having it land with a splat—unclear audiences, salespeople who weren’t sure how to talk about it, a market that wasn’t sure where it fit. Much like the cover of a book must align to reader expectations—a romance must look like a romance, a thriller must look like a thriller—I wondered if I had to conform to reader expectations as well.
Unless you live in France, or Canada, or Louisiana, chances are, you don’t know the correct pronunciation of my name. I don’t even pronounce it correctly when I’m introducing myself to other people—I say “Arr-dwawn”—it rhymes with “Hey kid, get off our lawn”). In French, you roll the R, you don’t pronounce the N, and you tell American fighter jets they can’t use your airspace. (It’s very complicated.)
I figured that NO ONE would be able to spell or pronounce my name, that I’ll get killed with SEO and Amazon searches and my book would die, lost and alone, stealing bread for survival like Jean Valjean.
