Three Critical Ingredients Your Book Marketing Strategy Needs for Long-Term Impact
By Elizabeth Marshall
Over the past 20 years, the publishing landscape has evolved dramatically. Tactics and trends have come and gone, only to return in new forms. New factors, such as AI, have created significant disruption. As a result, it’s easy to feel confused about which strategies to follow.
Despite all the changes, some things have stayed the same, including the three critical ingredients your strategy needs for long-term impact.
The Best Strategies are Diversified
Several years ago, one of my clients secured a promotion with a significant thought leader who had a community of a few million subscribers. A few days before the launch, that promo partner had a personal emergency, which meant the email asking her subscribers to buy his book didn’t happen.
While this might seem like an outlier, I can tell you that I’ve witnessed something like this with every single launch I’ve helped design. The best strategies are diversified in two ways:
Variety of Tactics –
- Email/newsletters – these typically convert better than social media
- Podcasts
- Social Media
- Guest articles
- Videos
- Direct outreach to individuals and groups
Variety of Promotion Types
- Long-form content to spread your message (i.e. marketing and branding_
- Pre-order campaigns and sales offers (i.e sales tactics
- Third-party interviews and articles to establish credibility (PR)
Why is diversification important? Here’s a few reasons why:
- Promo partners can drop the ball or change their schedules
- Tactics that worked for others may not work for you
- Strategies perform better for some topics and audiences than others
- The Fate Factor is alive and well
Back to the author I mentioned earlier. While he was understandably disappointed that the “big one” fell through, he had secured email promotions, guest posts, interviews, and other opportunities to build visibility for his book and brand. If my client had put all his promotional eggs in one basket, he would have been in a bad situation.
Your best defense against unpredictable situations is a diversification of strategies and supporters. Yes, you want to prioritize things that move the needle and lead to sales, but not everyone is ready to buy. Long-term marketing and PR build credibility and visibility over time.
The Best Strategies are Dynamic
Moltke the Elder, a Prussian military leader, is known for saying something like, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Although his advice was meant for the battlefield, it’s sage advice for authors, too.
Last week, my client, Dr. Elisa Song launched her new book, Healthy Kids, Happy Kids: An Integrative Pediatrician’s Guide to Whole Child Resilience. Although we finalized the 1.0 version of her launch strategy months before her publication date, the version she and her team actually executed was more like version 10.4 – and that was by design. Why?
We saw an opportunity to host a free 5-day challenge tied to a national holiday week that was highly relevant to her book and audience. We changed the timing and tactics for the three weeks leading up to the launch, altered the “ask” from some of her promo partners, and shifted some of the positioning to align with a national news item.
The result? She grew her audience significantly, engaged several thousand potential readers, and boosted book sales with pre-order incentives. She could have easily stuck to the original plan. Instead, she pivoted in response to a real-time opportunity.
This principle also applies when the strategy you developed shows signs it’s not going as planned. One client I worked with had a bulk sale that was “guaranteed to happen” fall through a month before the launch. Two days later, he gained an unexpected invitation to speak at SXSW’s popular Book Reading series.
The bottom line? You want to build in the capacity and mindset to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to adapt quickly when unforeseen challenges arise.
The Best Strategies are Designed for YOU
If you conduct a quick Google search on phrases like “book marketing” or “how to launch a book,” you’ll quickly see a plethora of advice. When you review these articles, some advice is clearly outdated, inaccurate, incomplete, or just plain bad. However, some of it feels legit and sounds like it could work for you—great! Unfortunately, there are two problems with this “good-sounding” advice:
- It lacks context, making it difficult to know whether it will work for your unique message, audience, business model and current stage as a thought leader.
- It assumes that “all tactics and strategies will work for everyone.”
I call this Conventional Wisdom. While it can offer best practices and great examples of what’s possible, the trick is to customize this advice to fit YOU versus using it exactly as presented. Or, as my brilliant colleague Clay Hebert likes to say, “Don’t copy what worked. Copy WHY it worked.”
Here are three criteria to evaluate whether a tactic is right for you:
- Will it reach my target audience?
- Is it a good fit for my unique gifts, skills, and talents?
- Am I excited to use this tactic, or am I forcing myself to use something that worked for someone else?
Here’s a few examples of how this criteria can impact your decisions:
- If you are a strategist with a leadership book, TikTok is probably not the best medium.
- If your natural talents shine more on the page than in front of the camera, launching a YouTube channel is probably not the best strategy.
- If keeping pace with the latest IG influencer sounds like nails on a chalkboard, building strategic relationships with relevant industry groups and associations may be more energizing—and effective!
While customizing your strategy is an iterative process and involves additional considerations, such as the alignment of your book with your business model and brand, these three criteria serve as a powerful filter you can use anytime you’re considering a new tactic or strategy.
If there’s one thing I know to be true from my 20 years of working with authors and thought leaders at all levels, it’s this: you need (and deserve) a strategy that is as unique as your message. While this is easier said than done, creating a strategy that is diversified, dynamic, and designed just for YOU, this gives you a much greater chance at playing the long game and becoming a perennial seller in your category.
Elizabeth Marshall is a strategist for authors and thought leaders who want to make a lasting impact on their audience and industry. For the past 20 years, she has worked with many influential speakers and authors, including Seth Godin, Michael Port, and former Starbucks President, Howard Behar.
As a published author, she co-wrote The Contrarian Effect with New York Times best-selling author, Michael Port. The Contrarian Effect won awards from Porchlight Books and Amazon’s editorial board. In addition, she’s delivered keynotes for various industry conferences and hosted/moderated over 200+ virtual events since 2007, including C-Suite roundtables and industry leadership events.
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