BooksGoSocial Conference Magazine
Rethinking Book Marketing by Christine Keleny Book Marketing seems like an elusive beast to most writers. We spend a lot of time and effort learning and honing our writing skills to put together the best book we can and now we’re supposed to get a marketing degree?!
But book marketing doesn’t have to be so complicated. Dan Blank of WeGrowMedia (a guru of book marketing – wegrowmedia.com) interviewed Ze (Zay) Frank, president of Buzzfeed Motion Pictures (Buzzfeed. com), about connecting with people. Dan’s feeling it is a matter of “collaboration” on a personal level. I think you can use the word “collaboration” in a few different ways, but I took it more as connecting. With Buzzfeed, Ze works primarily with social media. And get this: Ze says with some of his more viral posts, he doesn’t really know why they went viral. I think that says a lot. Like, maybe we over think this stuff ! Dan goes on to say: But for the 1,000 other things you do to try to develop an audience for your work — articles, events, interviews, blogs, newsletters, social media — don’t assume you know what will work. Experiment and allow others to help you learn what does and doesn’t work to engage them.
That means trying a lot of different things. I think that is how most of the best marketing works for most authors. It’s not that one post or that one event you go to or that one person you meet, but over time, it’s all those posts, all those events, all those people you meet who add up to opportunities to share yourself and your stories with others. Everyone is looking for a quick fix related to marketing their book(s). Think about it – if it existed, don’t you think someone would have found it by now. It takes time and effort, lots of efforts, actually, and missteps (let’s not call it failure – it’s a learning process, right?), but there will be targets hit along the way and lots of fun experiences, too!
What I have found is things I do in person work the best and sometimes lead to things I can’t predict.
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