5 Things I Learned About Marketing from Writing a Novel, Part 5

Four weeks ago, 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 last lesson—well, the last lesson I’m going to write about in this series, anyway—about what I learned during the writing of The Reluctant Coroner.

Lesson 5: “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”

I’ve worked at three different enterprise software companies with a sales leader named Terry Mahoney. Terry is a driven sales leader, and if he ever needs anything from the marketing, I’m pretty sure he’s got me on speed dial. He wants to blow out his numbers every quarter—and he almost always does—and I think 80% of his success can be attributed to his mantra: “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”

 

Last week, I talked about the importance of teamwork in the success of both novels and B2B marketing. But teamwork doesn’t come at the expense of ownership and accountability.

 

Many indie authors write books, sink to the bottom of the Amazon charts, selling only a few books a month, and blame everyone else for their failure. It’s Amazon’s algorithm. It’s the Big 5 Publishers’ stranglehold on the market. My favorite one: readers are too stupid to know what they want.

 

What they need to do is figure out why it’s not working. Maybe your cover looks unprofessional. Maybe your book description sounds boring. Maybe when people click “Look Inside!” they’re not hooked on the first couple of pages. Maybe you’ve been targeting the wrong audience.

 

B2B marketers can react in similar ways when their marketing programs fall flat—and I’ve heard every excuse in the book (and I’ve made...Read More