Groundhog’s Day book marketing messages from Punxsutawney Phil and Phil Connors

When you hear the words “Groundhog Day,” who are you more likely to think of? Punxsutawney Phil, THE groundhog for whom the day is named, or Bill Murray, star of the ubiquitous movie of the same name?

There are book marketing lessons to be drawn from both.

First, all is not as it might seem. The way Punxsutawney Phil is said to determine if winter is on its way out and spring is around the corner is by whether or not he sees his shadow. To me, it’s always seemed counterintuitive that Phil’s not seeing his shadow (cloudy day) means winter’s at its end, while seeing his shadow (sunny day) means 6 more weeks of winter.

So where might all not be as it seems when it comes to your book marketing? One place is in your results with things like blogging or social media. When you’re just ramping up and you’re not seeing many results (it feels like no one’s reading your blog and you’re not attracting many friends or followers on Facebook or Twitter), it may seem as though the effort is futile. On the contrary, my dear SBMs!* Push through the “it’s not working!” thoughts and keep on keeping on. Far too many bloggers quit, just as they were about to turn the corner on the traction they were seeking. Keep blogging. Keep Facebooking and Tweeting. Do your research, and get better at it, to be sure. But don’t quit.

Phil Connors (Bill Murray’s character in the movie), on the other hand, offers a seemingly opposite lesson. In realizing the futility of his effort to break the cycle of the recurring day (he wakes up every morning and it’s 6 a.m. on Groundhog’s Day AGAIN), he turns caddish behavior into an art form, seducing women, stealing money, driving recklessly, and eventually getting thrown in jail. Yet nothing changes.

You’ve more than likely heard the “definition of insanity”: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result. I’ve always thought it’s much less the definition of insanity than human nature; in clinging to what we know, we remain in our comfort zones. There’s only one problem with remaining in our comfort zones: It’s pretty much impossible to grow there.

So the second lesson is to selectively stop doing what you’ve been doing. Yes – I said keep blogging and keep posting your tweets and Facebook updates. But stop looking for reasons people won’t buy your book. Stop telling yourself there are lots of other books out there like yours, so why should people buy the one you wrote? Stop hiding behind the safety of exclusively promoting your book online and get out there to meet real, live people! STOP the thinking and behaviors that are sabotaging your success.

It’s not necessarily the best books – or products in general – that rise to the top, although a high-quality book sure helps. It’s consistency of message. Consistency of marketing. Consistency of posting. Consistency of touching your mailing list. Being there, being there, being there. Stay the course. Tap all the resources you have – and if you don’t have any resources yet, go out and get some.

Happy Groundhog’s Day to you – whether or not spring comes soon to your little corner of the World of Books.

Laura

*Savvy Book Marketer

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We welcome and encourage your thoughtful, courteous comments below.

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Consistency: The key to LUCK in the book business

Today I was invited to contribute a tip for Mike Michalowicz, the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, on this topic:

How do you improve your luck (the odds) in business?  Do you have a single rule or tip that serves you the best in having things go in your favor?

My response:

There’s no better key to achieve success in business than consistency in all things. When you meet new people, follow up immediately EVERY time. When you’re building your social media presence, be there on a REGULAR basis. Using a blog to make a name for yourself? Post frequently and CONSISTENTLY. Be careful not to spread yourself too thin in terms of trying to do it all. Then, increase your luck by creating a pattern or plan and being consistent about it.

Let’s expand just a bit.

When you meet new people, follow up immediately EVERY time. One of the places more business people miss out on opportunities (i.e., sabotage their own luck) is by failing to follow up promptly. Whether it’s a new person at a networking event or the opportunity to speak, an amazing number of people let those opportunities fly right out the window by hesitating or taking too long to respond. Be the early bird and nab that client, speaking gig, or other opportunity!

When you’re building your social media presence, be there on a REGULAR basis. This means that instead of making a sporadic showing on all your various social media sites, you create a plan and contribute consistently. A participant in the Author Blog Challenge Facebook group shared this post from Search Engine Watch about how to create a social media calendar. Most useful if you want to be as effective as possible with your social media presence.

Using a blog to make a name for yourself? Post frequently and CONSISTENTLY. OK, if you’ve been reading the Marcie Brock blog for a while, I’m preaching to the choir on this one. If you’re new here, expect to hear it again and again. It’s frequent, regular posting, combined with the use of good keywords, that will help you make a significant impression on the search engines.

Be careful not to spread yourself too thin in terms of trying to do it all. If you’re a one-woman show, you’ve got to be sensible about your time and efforts. Increase your “luck” by creating a pattern or plan and being consistent about it.

Happy luck-making!

Laura

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We welcome and encourage your thoughtful, courteous comments below.

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In honor of our 1-year anniversary (May 2, 2012), we’re hosting the Author Blog Challenge! It starts June 2 and is open to published authors, authors-in-progress, and would-be authors. Come check us out and register today!

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Marketing a book is different than marketing a smartphone or a pair of shoes

(Please click on image to enlarge.)

Up to this point, we’ve covered lots of marketing basics involved in becoming an SBM*.  We’ll soon be heading into some more specific techniques and trends in book marketing. Before we go there, though, it’s imperative that you understand this next piece: a successful marketing plan for YOUR book is going to depend on the specific audience for YOUR book.

While every marketing campaign must be directed to its target audience in order to succeed, books need particular care and attention because every book is different. Not only is the audience different from genre to genre (would you market  a romance novel the same way you’d market the latest Social Media Strategy guidebook?), but it can shift from book to book for a single author. Think about where the world was when David Baldacci’s first thriller, Absolute Power, was released in 1996 and where we are today. World relations are different; US leadership is different; the economy is different; the publishing industry is different. Does this impact Baldacci’s audience? You bet it does! And it also impacts the way he must market to his audience.

This goes back to our discussion a few months ago about knowing your audience, and knowing how to find and connect with them. Many readers are online, so social media strategies will work well for them. However, there are still a LOT of folks out there who would rather do it the old-fashioned way: see you at a bookstore; hear you on a radio interview, have a friend recommend your book; come across your postcard at their favorite coffeehouse. It’s essential that you know which strategy/strategies are the ones that will reach your readers.

Then, you know what to do. Get started, and stay active every day!

See you Thursday!

MARCIE

*Savvy Book Marketer

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Visit Write | Market | Design to download your Marketing Skills Evaluation. This will help you determine how close you are to SBM status, and where you may need a little extra boost.

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We welcome and encourage your thoughtful, courteous comments below.

__________________

If you’d like us to add a link to your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog, please send us a note. If we think it’s a good fit, we’ll be happy to add you. Of course, we’d appreciate the reciprocity of the same!

Additionally, Marcie would be happy to make a guest appearance on your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog. Just let us know the theme or your idea (preferably including a 6-panel concept), and we’ll see what we can draft for you.

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PREVIOUS POSTS

Thursday, July 21 – Book marketing is like brushing your teeth; you have to do it EVERY day!http://marciebrockbookmarketingmaven.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/book-marketing-is-like-brushing-your-teeth-%E2%80%93-you-have-to-do-it-every-day

Monday, July 18 – Erratic marketing is just like once-in-a-while exercise. Results? Not so much

Thursday, July 15 – New mantra for procrastinators and perfectionists: DONE Is Better Than Perfect!

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Book marketing is like brushing your teeth – you have to do it every day

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If you take nothing else away from these last few posts, please let it be the idea that your marketing efforts must be consistent. Are you old enough to have heard the expression “sounds like a broken record”? Records – shiny vinyl disks from which music flowed, once upon a time. No not CDs – bigger. Before cassettes. Before 8-tracks. Records. Look it up on Wikipedia. Anyway, they were played using a needle (yes, kind of like a sewing needle … oh, wait, never mind), and the needle sometimes skipped, causing the record to get stuck and the words to repeat.

My mom used to love to tell my sister and me we sounded like broken records when we’d whine about the things kids whine about. It used to bug me, but right now, I embrace the comparison because I really, really, really want you to understand the importance of consistency in your book marketing campaign. Honestly, if you’re not going to be consistent, you’d probably better not start at all. Every SBM* is willing to make a committed, consistent effort, no matter what else is vying for their attention.

What is the most consistent action you can take? Doing something every day. Not necessarily the same thing, so that you get bored, but commit to taking at least ONE step in your marketing campaign daily. Remember, your goal is to build a platform of people who are clamoring to buy your book as soon as it’s available. If your platform right now is on the teeny-tiny side, you’ve got no time to lose to start meeting people and telling them about your book. We’ve already talked about finding time vs. making time, and where/how to squeeze it all in. Just get committed and get started.

And then once you get started and have some momentum behind you, keep up the good work!

See you Monday!

MARCIE

*Savvy Book Marketer

__________________

Visit Write | Market | Design to download your Marketing Skills Evaluation. This will help you determine how close you are to SBM status, and where you may need a little extra boost.

__________________

We welcome and encourage your thoughtful, courteous comments below.

__________________

If you’d like us to add a link to your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog, please send us a note. If we think it’s a good fit, we’ll be happy to add you. Of course, we’d appreciate the reciprocity of the same!

Additionally, Marcie would be happy to make a guest appearance on your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog. Just let us know the theme or your idea (preferably including a 6-panel concept), and we’ll see what we can draft for you.

__________________

PREVIOUS POSTS

Monday, July 18 – Erratic marketing is just like once-in-a-while exercise. Results? Not so much

Thursday, July 15 – New mantra for procrastinators and perfectionists: DONE Is Better Than Perfect!

Monday, July 11 – Your book marketing efforts need to be as consistent as Lady Gaga’s hit songs

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Erratic marketing is just like once-in-a-while exercise. Results? Not so much

(Please click on image to enlarge.)

Lately we’ve been emphasizing the importance of consistency in your marketing efforts. Compare it to other things you need to do regularly in order to sustain any gains or progress: brush your teeth, clean the house, exercise. Exercise? As a matter of fact, there are many natural comparisons between a strategic book marketing campaign and an exercise plan.

#1. Be Accountable – A profound yet almost universal self-sabotaging aspect of human nature (even for aspiring SBM’s*) is that we’re more likely to be accountable to someone else than to ourselves. If this is you, don’t beat yourself up; recognize the problem, and set up an accountability system. At the gym, you can hire a trainer or find a workout partner to make sure you exercise, even when you don’t feel like it. Consider finding someone to help you with strategy and accountability for your book marketing campaign.

#2. Follow a Regular Schedule – Exercise only works if you do it. Exactly the same thing is true when it comes to marketing your book. Send your e-mail/newsletters at regular intervals, post to your blog X times per week, calendar your social marketing time, etc.

#3. Exercise ALL Your Muscle Groups – A good workout regimen works all of the muscle groups on a a regular rotation. While you want to start with one book marketing strategy, eventually you want to integrate several techniques simultaneously. With the explosion of social media, lots of people seem to be forgetting all about offline tactics. The best plan is the one that integrates both on- and offline strategies.

#4. Don’t Overdo It – An essential rule of the gym is knowing when enough is enough. The same is true of your book marketing plan. First, you must HAVE a plan. Then you must be sure you can realistically stick to it. Don’t shoot for the moon only to have your rocket fuel run dry because you overextended yourself.

#5. Maintenance Is Essential – What would happen if you began an exercise plan and then quit as soon as you started seeing results? You’d blink, and the results would evaporate. The same will happen with your book marketing campaign if you begin to neglect it as soon as it starts proving effective. The best time to market a business is when one is B-U-S-Y. Once you get going, keep going! Maintain your marketing progress for best results.

There are no two ways around it – marketing, like an exercise plan, requires time and effort. Lots of dedicated effort. But you don’t have to go it alone, and once you get going, it will get easier. Focus on just one step at a time, and add subsequent ones as you are ready.

Let’s keep each other accountable – share your success with us so we can cheer you on!

See you Thursday!

MARCIE

*Savvy Book Marketer

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Originally published by Marcie Brock author, Laura Orsini, at the Write|Market|Design blog as An Exercise Plan/A Marketing Plan: Lots of Similarities on August 3, 2010.

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We’d love it if you’d take a few minutes to give us some feedback via SurveyMonkey about an upcoming Author Sales Training Webinar series we’ve got in the works. Anyone who completes the survey and provides a viable e-mail address will be eligible to win a $10 Amazon gift card.

__________________

We welcome and encourage your thoughtful, courteous comments below.

__________________

If you’d like us to add a link to your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog, please send us a note. If we think it’s a good fit, we’ll be happy to add you. Of course, we’d appreciate the reciprocity of the same!

Additionally, Marcie would be happy to make a guest appearance on your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog. Just let us know the theme or your idea (preferably including a 6-panel concept), and we’ll see what we can draft for you.

__________________

PREVIOUS POSTS

Thursday, July 15 – New mantra for procrastinators and perfectionists: DONE Is Better Than Perfect!

Monday, July 11 – Your book marketing efforts need to be as consistent as Lady Gaga’s hit songs

Thursday, July 7 – What gets MEASURED gets done, when it comes to book marketing

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Your book marketing efforts need to be as consistent as Lady Gaga’s hit songs

(Please click on image to enlarge.)

Love her or hate her, one thing you cannot do with Lady Gaga is ignore her. She is a one-woman PR MACHINE! And you, my lovely SBMs*, would do well to take a very specific page out of her book: BE CONSISTENT.

To the left is a summary of Lady Gaga’s recording chart history to date. From the looks of it, every song is a hit that shows up on multiple charts.What has that got to do with your book marketing efforts? Well, the number 1 rule about book marketing is that you MUST DO IT. The second rule, though, and the one without which #1 is pretty much dead in the water, is that you must do it CONSISTENTLY. If you apply your marketing strategy as consistently as Lady Gaga has landed on the recording charts in her short career, you will be well on your way to a successful campaign.

As I once heard marketing superstar, Kelly O’Neil, say:

Bad marketing done consistently
is far more impactful than good
marketing done inconsistently.

Is this permission to be sloppy with your marketing plan? Absolutely not! You are a Savvy Book Marketer, so you take time, care, and precision with your marketing strategies. However, this IS meant to be a kick in the butt to get out there, launch your marketing campaign, and keep at it, as regularly as your time permits. It’s less important that your blog posts be perfect than they get written. So your postcard has a typo in it. Unless it’s the spelling of the recipient’s name, chalk it up to “Done is better than perfect,” and into the mailbox it goes.

We’ve spent the last few posts talking about making time for marketing. Well, just as making time to market your book is an individual decision based on your own circumstances, the concept of “consistent marketing” will likely look different from one author to the next. As a rule of thumb, a well-crafted marketing campaign will “touch” the people on your list no less than 36 times a  year. That’s 3 times a month, across a variety of mediums: social media, snail mail, phone calls, e-mail.

For some of you, consistency will mean daily, in one from or another. For others, it may be once a week, or once every other week. One Write | Market | Design client, a financial advisor, has been blogging once a week for about 2.5 years, and he’s getting a tremendous return on his efforts: all of his live workshops are now fully booked, and he’s getting 100 percent post-workshop enrollment, in the form of attendees agreeing to have a staff member from his company contact them and/or schedule an appointment with them. His consistency is paying off BIG time! You can see the same results if you apply the same effort.

Come on, all you SBMs … find the Lady Gaga in you and get your marketing campaigns rocking!

See you Thursday!

MARCIE

*Savvy Book Marketer

__________________

We’d love it if you’d take a few minutes to give us some feedback via SurveyMonkey about an upcoming Author Sales Training Webinar series we’ve got in the works. Anyone who completes the survey and provides a viable e-mail address will be eligible to win a $10 Amazon gift card.

__________________

We welcome and encourage your thoughtful, courteous comments below.

__________________

If you’d like us to add a link to your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog, please send us a note. If we think it’s a good fit, we’ll be happy to add you. Of course, we’d appreciate the reciprocity of the same!

Additionally, Marcie would be happy to make a guest appearance on your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog. Just let us know the theme or your idea (preferably including a 6-panel concept), and we’ll see what we can draft for you.

__________________

PREVIOUS POSTS

Thursday, July 7 – What gets MEASURED gets done, when it comes to book marketing

Monday, July 4 – A commitment to book marketing means MAKING time for it

Thursday, June 30 – How much TIME will you devote to marketing your book?

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Start with ONE book marketing strategy, and BE DILIGENT about it!

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In our last post, we reenforced the understanding that becoming an SBM* is neither terribly complicated nor difficult. What it requires is creativity, strategy, and a significant commitment of time and energy. Book marketing strategies are probably as plentiful as the authors who employ them. Your goal should be to determine ONE strategy to begin with – email, social media, postcards, newsletter, phone calls, networking – and be faithful and diligent about it.

First, choose the strategy that makes the most sense to you. If you already have a sizable mailing list, an e-mail drip campaign might make sense. If you’ve got a good-sized social network, you may want to begin there. If you are building your platform from the ground up, a blog may be the best place to start.

Next, create a schedule and stick to it. Blog three days a week. Create a weekly e-mail drip campaign. Join two networking groups and attend every meeting faithfully – and then follow up religiously. Begin with ONE strategy, and master it. Then explore which strategy will best compliment your current effort and add another one, and do that regularly. And so on…  But start with one – the key word there being START!

See you Thursday!

MARCIE

*Savvy Book Marketer

__________________

We’d love it if you’d take a few minutes to give us some feedback via SurveyMonkey about an upcoming Author Sales Training Webinar series we’ve got in the works. Anyone who completes the survey and provides a viable e-mail address will be eligible to win a $10 Amazon gift card.

__________________

We welcome and encourage your thoughtful, courteous comments below.

__________________

If you’d like us to add a link to your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog, please send us a note. If we think it’s a good fit, we’ll be happy to add you. Of course, we’d appreciate the reciprocity of the same!

Additionally, Marcie would be happy to make a guest appearance on your writing/self-publishing/book marketing blog. Just let us know the theme or your idea (preferably including a 6-panel concept), and we’ll see what we can draft for you.

__________________

PREVIOUS POSTS

Thursday, June 23 – INTERESTED or COMMITTED – What’s the difference when it comes to book marketing?

Monday, June 20 – Take a page from the Boy Scouts: Always be PREPARED!

Thursday, June 16 – Are you using the 80/20 RULE when it comes to marketing your books?

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