How To Develop Your Marketing Plan

Marketing can be a dirty word for writers, or something to be afraid of. Self-promotion can feel uncomfortable and overwhelming.

Alongside my writing, I’ve spent the last 11 years working in marketing, mostly in the arts. That experience has been useful in helping me to prepare for the publication of my debut novel, The Disappeared.

Not to mention that – ahead of its launch – I spent 10 months crowdfunding the book with UK publisher Unbound. While this was a fantastic learning experience, it definitely took me out of my comfort zone!

Over the last few months I’ve been developing a marketing plan. Here’s how I did it.

What is your strategy?

Defining a marketing strategy is a good place to start. If your marketing plan explains how you’re going to do something, your strategy should explain what it is you’re trying to achieve and outline your overall approach.

If you’ve written a book about your experience as a parent, your strategy might be to focus on the spaces online where other parents congregate or start your own community and build a following who will be interested in your writing.

Literary writers might choose to focus on submitting their work to awards and competitions in the hope of boosting the book’s visibility and status.

A marketing strategy should deal with a few things, including your short and long-term goals. Do you plan to publish more books in the future, or is this a one off? How many copies would you like to sell? Do you hope to earn a certain amount so you can write full-time? Would you like to sell the film and TV rights?

It helps if your goals are measurable too. And they don’t always have to be about sales: you might decide to aim for 10,000 Twitter followers or sign ups to your newsletter, or you might want a review from a major newspaper.

You might also find it useful to think about what makes you – and your book – unique. How can you convert that into sales or publicity?

Strategy is also about defining your target audience and considering how you can reach them. There’s no point spending all your time on Facebook if your core readers are all over Twitter.

And finally, decide at the beginning if you will invest some money in promoting your work and set your budget.

Develop an action plan

A marketing plan can be as simple or as complex as you like, but it should provide an outline of all the tasks you intend to carry out in order to promote your book. While it helps to pull together a plan before you publish your book, it should be a living document that you update as you go. Don’t be afraid to delete something if you feel it’s not working!

I created my plan in a spreadsheet which contains a number of tabs for research in various areas, such as literary festivals and possible blog tour hosts. The main tab is where I list all my tasks, broken down into smaller items. It currently runs to over 200 lines and I’m steadily working through ticking things off.

Some of these items are vague and speculative: ideas for promotion that might come to nothing.

But some of them are very detailed. Each task has a start and end date, a box for notes and one to mark off when it’s complete. Naturally I cheat and move the dates around if I need to – don’t put too much pressure on yourself to get things done just because.

The headings on my plan cover the following areas:

• Website – setting up an author website and creating content for it
• Blog and online articles – regular blog posts leading up to launch, guest blogs and articles for other websites, profiles on literary websites
• Email – start an email newsletter, grow a mailing list
• Social media – create image and/or video content, planning, researching hashtags or relevant campaigns like World Book Day
• Events – launch, book signings, readings etc.
• PR – contact local media (or national if you’re brave, or have a good hook), organise a blog tour, giveaways, radio interviews
• Advertising – Amazon, Bookbub, social media
• Miscellaneous – design and print cards, bookmarks, banners etc., ask friends to write reviews and help with promotion, come up with publicity stunts

Make marketing manageable

One thing I’ve learned about marketing is that there is always something else you can be doing.

That means it’s vital to know when to push on and when to take a break. Every writer is different and will be able to do different things. Some people have a team and a big budget behind them, while others are running everything solo.

If you can outsource something for a small fee, it might be worth it to preserve your own energy – especially if you’re writing and/or working a day job too.

Always be experimenting – learn from the things that work (or don’t)

Another key thing about marketing is to measure the impact of your actions. This helps you to understand what works and invest your time and money in that rather than something else that doesn’t achieve results.

And again, all our journeys are different. What works for one writer may not work for you. Don’t persevere if you’re not seeing results, or getting something out of it. Even if all a task brings is enjoyment, it’s still worth pursuing.

Of course, promoting a book is a new adventure for me. So if you’ve got a great tip or a piece of advice, I’d love to hear it!

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About the author:  Amy Lord is a writer, blogger and digital marketer from North East England. Her award-winning debut novel, The Disappeared, will be published by Unbound Digital in May 2019. She blogs at Ten Penny Dreams and tweets at @tenpennydreams.

THE DISAPPEARED

What if reading the wrong book could get you arrested?

In a decaying city controlled by the First General and his army, expressing the wrong opinion can have terrible consequences. Clara Winter knows this better than anyone. When she was a child, her father was taken by the Authorisation Bureau for the crime of teaching banned books to his students. She is still haunted by his disappearance.

Now Clara teaches at the same university, determined to rebel against the regime that cost her family so much – and her weapons are the banned books her father left behind. But she has started something dangerous, something that brings her to the attention of the Authorisation Bureau and its most feared interrogator, Major Jackson. The same man who arrested Clara’s father.

With her rights stripped away, in a country where democracy has been replaced with something more sinister, will she be the next one to disappear?

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‘Provocative and prescient, The Disappeared is an unflinching tale of resistance in dark political times. Set in a near-future Britain where books are banned, this is a thought-provoking dystopian debut.’ – Caroline Ambrose, Founder of The Bath Novel Award

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Category: How To and Tips