You imagined it, you wrote it, you edited it, you published it. Now it’s time to sell it!

Planning a Marketing Strategy

And a part of your job as an indie, self-published author is planning a marketing strategy to do it. For the actual launch of a new book you need a specific strategy, but we will not talk about it today. For the long term, though, you need something different.

Yes, you dedicated yourself to create good books, you dedicated yourself to create a brand, a recognizable product. That’s all nice and good, but this will help to sell only once you actually already got a reader’s attention. They know you, they read your books, they’ll look for more.

What before? How do you actually get in contact with new readers that are potentially interested in your books?

Pull vs Push

In marketing there is a huge distinction between push and pull techniques, where “push marketing” means “pushing your product to the customers”, while “pull marketing” means “pull the customers to your product”.

Push marketing is more focused over short-term sales, and that’s will the launch of a new book strategy is usually a push one. Pull marketing is focused on acquiring loyal customers, or at least prospect.

In the era of social media and social marketing, a low-cost pull strategy is usually based on blogs and socials. But what is a good strategy to acquire potential readers?

In the past months on Facebook and Twitter I saw lots of authors publishing advertisement of their books 5-10 times a day. Nothing else: just marketing and, maybe, some sporadic comment or repost. Such push marketing, in my opinion, can work only to some extent.

They want to acquire new customers, they want them to buy their new book, and they are aggressive about that, I understand it. Problem is that pretty much all social networks have an “unfollow” or “mute” option. You can reach a good number of new customers every day, but they’ll unfollow you if you keep pestering them with advertisement. You can have 10000 Facebook followers but if 9000 of them have muted you, you’ll reach only 1000. That “10000” becomes just a badge: you can brag about it, but it’s not useful for your business.

Why do they follow you?

If you want loyal readers, you need to give them a reason to want to read you.

My opinion is that the only reason why someone will continue following you in the long term is that you produce and post enough free original content that they like, or that is useful for them.

I write my daily shorts, as I explained, as a mean for me to train my skills daily. But they also became part of my pull strategy. I want readers that could eventually buy my books. A potential customer is someone who likes the genre I write: so why not producing erotic shorts? With the correct tags, they become a powerful means to reach new readers. Not all of them will buy my books, most will never even think about buying one, and I still hope with all my hearth they’ll enjoy my daily free shorts. But the ones who will buy, will probably buy more than one, because they like what I give them.

I also want fellow erotica writers to follow me, because a good network is something a good buisiness lay his foundations upon. So I try to produce content that is valuable for them too. The “Becoming an Author” series of posts is both a personal diary, a way to organize my thoughts but also to reach potential business partners (cover designers, editors, proof-readers, reviewers, … )

That’s it. I give something to you, you want to follow me because of that.

In the era of “mute”, “block” and “unfollow”, your treasure are the ones willing to read you.