There's been an interesting discussion on marketing/publicity on ITW's ThrillerWriters message list recently. It started out as a discussion on book trailers, but has moved on from there. A few people have contributed some excellent advice that I wanted to pass along because I think it's worthwhile for all authors (or prospective authors) to read. (The posters gave their permission for this to be used.)
M.J. Rose, marketing guru and thriller author, was first up with these thoughts:
The rule of thumb is this: When figuring out where to spend your marketing/PR dollars, a video comes after a website and advertising. A video is what to put in your ads. It’s not an ad PR effort on its own. The questions to ask are: How will this help me? Where will people see it?
Never do a video as the only effort. Never do a website as an only effort. They are both static -- meaning no one sees them unless they go looking for them. The bulk of your money and effort have to be on outreach, not in-reach. Videos and websites are both in-reach.
Make sure to ask your publisher: if you do a video, will they pay for it? Will they pay for half of it? If not, and you pay for it yourself, will they use it? How?
There's no magic bullet to marketing your book. The only way to do it is do a lot of different things in as many places as you can. The goal is get exposure for the book in as many places as you can, in as many ways as you can.
The other goal is: for every PR dollar you spend, spend an equal marketing dollar. Meaning: if you hire a publicist for $10,000 you should be spending the same thing on marketing. The reason is that PR is a gamble even with the best PR people, and marketing is an absolute.
(With non-fiction it’s easier to get PR, but with fiction it’s very hard even for the biggest names. For instance, Jon Stewart has 200 books a year on his show. None are fiction.)
I'll share more thoughts in the next post.
Comments