Top 3 Truths About Book Marketing
Would you rather help 10 women change their lives or sell 1,000,000 copies?
Honest reader feedback is the most precious thing an author could wish for. In the world where you can pretty easily buy and swap reviews, people reading your book and telling you it has had an impact on their lives make all your writing worth it. They are also your true inspiration to try harder and not give up on your marketing efforts.
About those marketing efforts… Here are the top 3 truths I learned about book marketing after self-publishing and launching Moving Without Shaking, my book to help women move abroad and thrive.
- You will have to deal with rejection. A lot. Silence counts as rejection, too, not a sign of acceptance.
Marketing your book is tough, tedious and fairly depressing unless you can take rejection better than any door-to-door salesman could 50 years ago. You have to keep going! Everyone already knows how hard it is to get an agent interested and what rejection letters from agents look like. Guess what, you run into a lot of rejection trying to email different bloggers, other writers and news outlets. People are busy and they really don’t have time to care about how amazing you and your story are. Many of them won’t reply at all, so you wouldn’t even get a rejection note. Treasure the ones who reply and engage with them!
- It can get very expensive! Exposure costs money. You cannot do it all by yourself.
Paid marketing activities are costly and time consuming. I recently read a blog by Laurence O’Bryan where he quotes a publisher’s saying that “publishing is a casino, you have to pay to play. And you don’t always get your money back”. I have tried various levels of marketing investment in the past year and a half and wholeheartedly agree. One big difference, however, and the one that makes it all worth it, is that you gain extremely valuable experience of learning what works and what doesn’t in a much shorter period of time as well as strengthen your online presence and connect with interesting people who could help you later.
- Lead conversion to sales can be pretty low for a long time.
Anything you think you know about leads, marketing, and conversion to sales is not going to work how you expect when it comes to book sales. The amount of effort you put in and the sales you get do not seem to correlate in any logical way. Why? Buying a book is an emotional thing. You have to capture attention, evoke emotion and convince the reader to get to the buy button and click on it in less than a minute.
The means to reach our audience and channels we use today are plentiful and it takes a very long time to determine where exactly success is going to come from. Hard work, your financial investment into getting your future readers’ attention and luck all have to align for you to hit those sales targets and with that your dream of selling 1,000,000 copies.
This last point brings me to this article’s title. Would you rather help 10 real women change their lives or sell 1,000,000 copies? I would like to do both!
Moving Without Shaking is a product of many conversations and interviews with fellow women expats about what they have learned from their experiences of living abroad. My stats: I have now lived in 5 countries (Ukraine, the US, Switzerland, Tanzania and the UK), went to 3 universities in different countries, worked in 4 and volunteered in 1. I lost track of what I call home long time ago and prefer to claim global citizenship.
There are so many women out there who want to have similar experiences but don’t know where to start or what to expect or simply have fear of failing. Those who have gone to live abroad often say that they wish they could read a book 10 or more years ago, when or before they started, to learn what it would be like and be better prepared.
Moving Without Shaking is your guide to successful life abroad; or as Selena Rezvani, women’s leadership consultant and author put it to me: “Move up by moving abroad”. Several hundred people have read the book. It has quite a few great reviews on Amazon for which I am truly grateful. The most precious and personal feedback came from 10 women who told me that they have implemented some of the tips and are now serious about creating plans to explore life and study or work abroad.
Single women in their 20s and 30s with a foreign language and good networking skills are the ideal candidates for jobs abroad according to this Telegraph article. I believe you can do it at any age and hope my book helps you build your international career, glamorous expat life style and thrive!
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Yelena Parker’s career is in sales in technology sector. She lives and works in London. She also coaches and mentors women to help them build international careers. To learn more, please visit her website www.movingwithoutshaking.com , or follow on Twitter @yelenaparker and @movingwtshaking
Category: On Book Marketing, On Writing
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