I recently caught up with Penny Sansevieri, book marketing expert extraordinaire. Penny is founder and CEO of Author Marketing Experts and has helped take eleven books to the bestseller list. If you want to write a book, it's important to get a marketing education! Here's a good place to start.
Below is an excerpt from that interview--(or you can listen to the recorded call here).
Lisa Abbate: Well
then let me ask you, here’s a question. Do you find a big difference between marketing
nonfiction books compared to marketing fiction?
Penny Sansevieri: I do, and
most of that is because nonfiction is always easier to promote, and candidly we
got into doing a lot of the internet work because 8 years ago – and now even
more so than back then – there really wasn’t a lot of opportunity for fiction
authors, especially self-published fiction authors. The window continues to
narrow for these folks, and the internet has really shown to be much more open,
much more accepting of authors who write fiction.
Lisa Abbate: I’m
finding that people, some readers, they don’t necessarily know or care who’s
published the book. They just want to read it.
Penny Sansevieri: Right,
exactly.
Lisa Abbate: Let me
ask you this then. If we start to kind of get into five great ways to get
exposure for your book, I’ll say that in general, there are some things that
you need to have in place before you start marketing, such as a website and a
capture page, but when do you think is a good time for authors to begin
marketing their books or begin the marketing process? Some people wait till
their book is completely is finished, but is that really the right thing to do?
Penny Sansevieri: No, it
really isn’t, and I would suggest that authors look at going after their
market, or at least start to dig into that marketing as soon as they put pen to
paper because with any book that you publish, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction,
self-published, traditionally-published, there is the long run way of
promotion. Generally, it’ll take twice as long as you think to get into your
market. So the earlier, the better.
Lisa Abbate: So what
are some great ways then to begin to get exposure for your book?
Penny Sansevieri: Well, I think that we really want to just sort of step back from this, and I think in order for an author to get exposure for the book, they first have to understand the landscape. They have to understand their particular book’s ecosystem. And most authors don’t take the time to really assess what their market is. And there’s a lot of hot stuff they can be doing. They can be doing video, they can be doing Twitter, they can be doing Facebook, but none of that makes sense unless they know what their market needs. And so one of the things I recommend that they do is put their sort of detective hat on and start to get to know other experts in their industry.
So I generally recommend, authors listen: follow the top five to ten authors in your market, go on to Google, plug in your search terms, follow the five to ten authors, see what the guys are doing. Especially in fiction because this obviously gets a little tougher for those fiction authors, and I write fiction, so believe me I know how difficult this can be sometimes. See what they’re talking about on Twitter, see what their posting on their Facebook fan pages. Now granted, if you’re a fiction author and you’re looking at someone like Heather Graham or Debbie Macomber, those folks have platforms that have been built over the years, so yes they’re going to have thousands, and thousands, and thousands of people following them. But as you move down this list through the top ten, you’re going to start to see authors you’ve never heard of who are still on the first page of Google and it’s up to you to figure out why. So what is it about their messaging? How do they speak to their fans? What are they giving to their fans?
Those are the
types of things that will really help an author to start to put together a plan
because anybody can put together a road map, but you got to know where you’re
going first. So to step back from it in that fashion, helps an author to
really, really, really educate themselves. And the more time that you take
doing this homework upfront, I’ll tell you something, the more time and money you’ll
save in the long run.
Lisa Abbate: That’s
really interesting. Also then for nonfiction, the same thing applies, in your
category you go the bookstore. In addition to knowing a few of the authors, who
they are, but going to the bookstore, looking at the big names, and seeing what
those people are doing and what they’re offering to their market, on their
website, whether it is some kind of download or free information. Are you
finding those kinds of things to be helpful? I know you just did a couple of big
campaigns in nonfiction, what were some of the things that you felt were really
working?
Want to read more? Download the whole interview here (free PDF).