Six excuses for not marketing your books
By now there should be no writer left, no matter how new in the trade, who does not know the importance of marketing so that their books are known to readers and critics.
A few years ago there was more ignorance on this subject, many writers thought that it was something that did not concern them. Among other things, because the majority considered the traditional edition as the only means of publication, in which the editor is in charge of the promotional work.
With the rise of self-publishing, writers began to understand that selling their book was their job. And that, without marketing, it is very difficult to have sales.
But not only when you self-publish you must take care of marketing. Also, if you choose other forms of publishing, you need to get involved in promoting your work. Supported by your editor, of course, but working day after day to make yourself visible to your ideal reader.
Yes Well, most writers are already clear about the importance of marketing, many of you still show a certain reluctance to get down to work to build your writer platform and implement a marketing plan well orchestrated. And that reluctance takes the form of excuses that you make yourselves or that you wield in front of others when someone mentions the need to do marketing.
Set excuses is the simplest form of self-deception. It means putting the blame off so that the responsibility of making a decision and taking action does not rests on your own shoulders. So today we are going to review some of the excuses that writers use most often for not doing marketing.
1. I don't like to sell
Is is perhaps the strongest reluctance a writer has to overcome to decide to promote your book: reconcile the idea of ​​sales with that of the art.
For many writers writing and selling are antonyms. Writing is a drive creative and intellectual whose result is an artistic work that cannot it must be commodified.
Without However, that ideal collides head-on with reality. Without readers, the work, for genuine and artistic as it is, it will never be completed It is the reader who culminates the play.
And without marketing there are no readers. Thousands of new titles are published every year, so if you do nothing to remedy it, yours will be lost in that tidal wave of news. The reader will never know about it, and then why have you invested so much effort in writing a unique work?
There is still a more prosaic reality, but one of undeniable forcefulness: writers also have bills to pay and, if there are no sales, there will be no money either.
You need to reformulate your ideas about selling books. You must reconcile those two notions that seem opposite, but are not really so: the idea of ​​creative, intimate and disinterested work; and the idea of ​​promoting that work so that others want to read what you write.
2. I don't know how to do marketing
Everything related to marketing is something unknown to many writers. Ideal reader, marketing plan, author platform, marketing message, sales pages ... all of these seem like words from an unknown language and something very difficult to put into practice.
However, it is not. Marketing is one of the disciplines with the most sense, where the line between action and reaction is always quite clear. You just have to get hold of some concepts and the use of some tools and you can get going. And, best of all, you'll start to see results right away, which is very rewarding.
Remember when you started writing. There were many things you did not know, but little by little, you were getting a notion of the importance of the conflict, of the need for good planning, how to develop the arc of your characters ... until you mastered the technique that allowed you to write your books.
Alone you have to repeat that process. Without fear, breaking with your comfort zone. Knowing that you might be wrong sometime, but that it won't matter because of mistakes are also learned.
Not forget you don't have to become a marketer overnight the morning. You can go little by little, learning and putting into practice techniques and strategies to make readers aware of that wonderful book you have written for them.
But if you want to optimize the learning process, you can do it with our Marketing for Writers course, with which you will learn everything you need to know to promote and publicize your books: to articulate a marketing message, what are the elements that make up your personal brand, how to organize yourself and use the right tools and how to design an effective marketing plan adapted to you for the next twelve months.
3. Fear of visibility
Other of writers' reluctance to the idea of ​​marketing for Selling your books is all about fear of visibility.
Most authors are aware that marketing involves exposure. People, readers, are going to know about you and your work and they are going to judge you both. And that is something that makes many nervous. Therefore, to avoid having to face exposure, some writers prefer to abort any marketing attempt. Thus they resign themselves to being obscure, unknown, unread writers.
If you think about what people others read your texts it causes you discomfort, yes it makes you nervous to attract the attention of others to you or your books and if you almost prefer not to be read than to leave your comfortable anonymity is that you are afraid of visibility.
That is why it is vital for a writer learn to live with shame and fear of exposure.
4. Writers who sell are bad writers (or commercial writers, not literary ones)
Another common excuse that some writers wield not to do marketing has to do with the idea preconceived that the writers they sell are bad writers.
In the opinion of these authors quality need not be trumpeted. The writer who needs to do marketing is who has written a bad work, so he has to resort to sales techniques for readers to buy.
Or they consider that the Marketing is something that only concerns business writers. The author which is considered more literary than commercial abhors marketing because it seems like a way of prostituting his genius. That is, this reluctance is it relates to the first one we have seen: I don't like to sell.
But the reality, once again, is that works of a literary, non-commercial nature also require marketing to be sold. That is why authors who write non-commercial fiction also need (perhaps even more than those who write commercial literature) to know how to do good marketing and, in general, to have a certain entrepreneurial attitude.
5. Number of results
Some authors have done their first steps in marketing, but they have abandoned it convinced that it is something that does not work.
Usually these Writers disenchanted with marketing are those who have launched into do some uncoordinated actions, without a good plan behind; Believing that Any reader may be interested in your novel; without having articulated a effective message; probably without having a writer's website acting as base camp of your marketing strategies (because having a Facebook page It's not marketing folks.)
Again we can compare marketing with writing. Remember your first texts, when you still did not know many of the elements that go into a work of fiction or how to use them, when you wrote a little by instinct. Surely those texts now cause you a certain blush when you compare them with those you have written more recently, now that you already know much more about writing.
Something similar happens with marketing. If you have launched yourself to do some actions in isolation, without work on the base well beforehand: personal brand, message, ideal reader, platform author ... it is normal that the results are not as expected. But that's not reason to throw in the towel. What it indicates is that you have to learn some things to improve.
6. It's a lot of work
Finally, there is writers who have already tried good marketing: articulating your plan, developing your message, setting up your website ... Or that they haven't done it yet, but they know the steps they have to take, and, in both cases, they consider it busy.
It is. We never have denied and if someone tells you otherwise or promises you instant results he is not telling you the whole truth.
Marketing requires of constant (and well thought out) work that you must do day after day. And that work is going to join your other writing tasks: writing, training, documenting, read…
But marketing is also part of a writer's job. It always has, but especially in the 21st century. To deny it is to hide your head like an ostrich. So the solution does not lie in not doing marketing, but in organizing your time better.
If you have recognized in your reluctance to finally start marketing any of these six excuses, you know what there is.
Of course you can decide not to do marketing, but that is a conscious decision: «I do not do marketing Because I do not want to. It has nothing to do with time, with the lack of knowledge or with the disgust that the idea of ​​commercializing my art produces in me ».
Now, in that case you must assume that you are going to have few readers and few sales, unless you have a miraculous stroke of luck. But that would be like someone quitting their job hoping they will win the lottery.
Do you already do marketing? Or have you recognized that you use any of these excuses to postpone the moment of start taking care of promoting your works? Which of these excuses is the yours? Can you think of any other?