A book marketing plan is a critical component to success as a published author.
Yet many authors tend to skimp on taking the time to put one together.
For one, they may feel that putting together a marketing plan for their book is time-consuming.
Or, they may simply find the process too confusing.
In this article, you will learn three reasons why you need a book marketing plan if you plan to succeed as an author.
Book marketing is important in crafting a strategy to getting your books in front of the right readers. It is important to know exactly how you plan to get your books read.
1. A smart marketing strategy will help you to define opportunities that are available to you in your chosen book niche. You will be able to identify these opportunities because you will have to do research while crafting your plan. This research may include locating book clubs that read books in your niche, finding magazines that you could possibly advertise your book in, and so forth.
2. A book marketing plan will help you get clear on your target audience. Your target audience is out there; and they are just waiting to read your book. Your job is to find that audience, and get in front of them. Putting together a marketing plan will help you to find out just who that target audience is, by causing you to do market research. Market research helps you to create a customer avatar. A customer avatar is a fictional person you create that symbolizes the type of person you see yourself working with, or in this case; who you want to sell your books to.
Being clear on your ideal audience, aka, your readers, will help you to have laser focus on how and what it is that you need to do in order to reach them.
3. Your book marketing plan will help you stay focused on marketing. Yes, you read that right. Your marketing plan will help you to stay focused on task at hand; and that is marketing your book. Marketing is very important. If you don’t learn how to market your book, you will not sell any books, and that is the truth.
Most authors just want to simply focus on writing the book, and not on how they will market it. That is a costly mistake that far too many authors make.
Craft your plan to focus on reaching the people who are really looking for your books, and you will see an increase in your book sales.
Take the time to work on your plan, and if necessary, get with a marketing professional to ensure that you are addressing every possible outlet that is available, so that you can reach as many readers as necessary.
A book marketing plan may indeed take work to put together; however, taking the time to actually put one together will prove to be one of the best decisions you could ever make in your career as an author.
Sandra N. Peoples is an author and publisher with a business brain. Over the years, her amassed skill set has allowed her to be able to train countless authors & entrepreneurs on how to use books as a business tool to get clients. An award winning blogger and author, Sandra has been featured in Publishing World Magazine, brass Magazine, BlogTalk Radio, AAMBC, The Flint Journal & NBC25 News. She is also a Platinum Expert Author with Ezine Articles and was a Shorty Award nominee for her content.
