Step #9
Gauge If You Make a Good Publishing Partner or Indie Publisher

An integral part of your business plan involves considering how you will help your book succeed—what you will do to promote it once published. That’s what a promotion plan details and what you must produce as you complete Step #9, Gauge If You Make a Good Publishing Partner or Indie Publisher. Your promotion plan is part of the overall business plan for your book. However, it’s a plan in its own right.

This step is tied to the previous one, in which you determined if you have done anything to date to build author platform. Author platform serves as prepublication promotion for your book and for you as an author. The promotion plan you create serves as post-publication promotion. You need platform to successfully promote your book upon release. However, platform remains important during the book launch and post-launch periods and up until your next book has been published—and beyond. It’s an ongoing process that requires an Author Attitude since you must be willing to build it continuously over time.

If you recall, in Step #1 you determined what success meant to you. You visualized success in a variety of ways—how it might affect your life, your ability to build a business around your book, and how many books you might sell per year. In the last chapter, you evaluated whether you have done anything to date to help you and your book succeed. Now it’s time to put your platform to use with an action plan consisting of promotional ideas that target your market and sell books to readers.

Hold on to your business hat. Promotion equals business big time because it’s all about selling books.

What Is a Promotion Plan … Really?

Your promotion plan represents the crux of your business plan for your book, and publishers take it very seriously. That’s why approaching this step in your Author Training with an Author Attitude is crucial. Even if you hate salespeople, feel marketing is somehow dirty, or swore you would never sell or promote anything, if you want to succeed as an author, you must wear a promoter’s hat. When you develop and evaluate your promotion plan, you want to clearly see what an agent or acquisitions editor sees and then evaluate in the same manner. They think “business” (and publishing business revolves around selling books), and so must you.

While the Platform section of a book proposal tells an agent or acquisitions editor if you have created an author platform from which you can sell your book, the Promotion section outlines specifically how you will sell that book once released to your desired market both from the author platform you have built and from beyond it in new places and in new ways. Remember, the Markets section relates how many potential buyers exist for your book; i.e., the audience for your book. Your business plan (if you are not trying to publish traditionally) does the same thing, but it’s for your benefit as the self-publisher.

Thus, these three pieces work together to form an almost complete picture of your potential book sales. If you add the Competing Titles (the research and evaluation you completed in Step #4) into this formula, you form a more complete picture and the basis to make some fairly accurate conclusions about your book’s potential to sell in a particular target market. Your Competing Titles section tells an agent or acquisitions editor—or just you—how well similar books have sold in your target market.

As you can see, the work you have done previously in your Author Training now comes into play as you put the final touch on your business plan—creating and evaluating how you will help promote your book. The way in which you plan to promote your book to potential readers is crucial to your book’s success—more crucial even than the platform you built. Without a strong platform, however, you will find it very hard to succeed. Promotion turns into book sales, which is the name of the publishing game.

How to Create a Promotion Plan That Helps Your Book Succeed

Unlike some of the other steps in this training process, no difference exists between the Promotion section you will create for your business plan and the one you would include in a book proposal. In both cases, you tell a publisher—even when you are the publisher—what you will do to promote your book once it is released. The format is simple: At the top of the page, write “The author will:” (for traditional publishing) or “I will:” (for self-publishing), and follow this with a list of bulleted action items that describe how you will promote your book upon release.

Whether you plan to traditionally publish or self-publish, a promotion plan is essential. It is your to-do list once your book is published. It is how you will meet your goal of creating a successful book and serves as your roadmap beyond publication to your final destination—successful authorship. Without a promotion plan: You create a publishing business with no clear way of reaching customers—no way of letting readers know you and your book exist so they can purchase it. You wander around, book in hand, wondering how to get anyone to notice your book even if it has ended up in the online or brick-and-mortar bookstore.

Your promotion plan includes those things you will do online, such as:

• a blog tour
• a virtual book tour (blog tour plus podcast and online radio show tour)
• an e-mail blast to announce your book release
• a video book trailer
• online press releases
• blogging about your book
• free teleseminars based on the book

It also includes a list of those things you will do offline, such as:

• a speaking tour of the top three to five cities that target your market
• writing articles for top newspapers and magazines in your target market
• using a PR agent to seek out radio and television interviews and book reviews
• offering a series of workshops around the nation
• speaking at conferences in your target market

How to Target Your Market

Armed with your market research from Step #3, you can now think about how to target your market. Review the market description you produced. How can you reach that audience from your platform and use all you learned about building a platform? What do you know about the people in your target market? For instance, where do they hang out online and off? This type of information can lead you to ideas about where you could sell your book in bulk, such as a particular type of specialty store or online forum. It also might give you ideas about conferences at which you might speak or particular radio stations or podcasts you could pitch.

For example, if you are writing about dance, you might discover that your target audience—dance teachers—attends the Dance Teacher Summit each year. You could submit a speaking proposal to the summit organizers. Additionally, you could submit a proposal for a series of guest blog posts to danceadvantage.net, a highly trafficked website on the subject.

Let’s return to the orchid example I mentioned earlier in this book. The research I completed makes it clear that a book on this topic might be sold in many places besides Amazon.com and brick-and-mortar bookstores. You could, for instance, sell it through small orchid shops as well as large garden-store chains, like Home Depot, and at orchid shows. Most people purchase their first orchid in a grocery store. Thinking like an authorpreneur, therefore, might lead to a way to target your book to grocery stores or to the orchid producers, who could market the book to grocery stores when they sell their flowers. Plus, publishers like books seen as gift items. Orchids make great gifts; if you can tie your book into the gift-giving aspect of orchids, all the better.

Remember Carla King and her self-published memoir about her escapades on her motorcycle? She sells her book not only in online bookstores and via Smashwords.com but also at motorcycling shows and adventure-travel shows. “At motorcycle shows, there is a big podium in the center of the convention hall and lots of noisy competition for attention, but usually when people walk by and see a woman talking and a slide show of motorcycling in China, Morocco, and Albania, for example, they slow down to take another look,” King says. “I actually sell more books by hand at motorcycle shows than any other place. I walked away with $4,000 cash after my first one and was sold on doing conferences. I sell it for $20 flat, tax and autograph included, and people throw twenties at me all day.”

If you know you have a niche market or a specific large market, consider creative ways to reach those readers. Often you can sell more books in places that are not bookstores. For instance, with my book How to Blog a Book, my publisher (Writer’s Digest Books) explored putting the book in some Urban Outfitters stores with the thought that young, hip twenty- to thirty-year-olds might be interested in blogging. I have placed them in a local grocery store where some people know me. Whenever you’re out and about, notice what types of books are being sold in untraditional places and think about where your readers shop or spend time. Could your book be sold in there?

If your book discusses coffee drinking, it could be sold in Starbucks or local coffee shops. If it’s about business, it could be sold in FedEx/Kinkos or Office Depot. A novel about a lady with a dog-walking business in New York could be sold at dog shows and New York pet stores. The idea is to discover where your readers are and put your book in front of them.

Now take a look at your competitive analysis, which you created in Step #4. Did you discover anything about what your potential readers need and want that they weren’t finding in other books? Apply this information to your promotion plan. You might write a short e-book related to your new book (like a spinoff) and give it to those on your mailing list for free if they purchase the book. You might offer those on your mailing list or those who subscribe to your blog a free excerpt from your book, then immediately follow up with a special offer. For instance, if they purchase the book, they get another free gift. Brainstorm ways to blog about your book in a manner that gives potential readers what you know they want and need and leads them ultimately to purchase your book. Provide a trail of bread crumbs, if you will, that leads to a “buy” button.

Before entering the marketplace, do some intelligence preparation—similar to what the military does before going into battle. “Spy” on other authors in your category. Find out where they speak, what organizations they belong to, and what activities they participate in online and off. How can you put that intel to use in your plan? Maybe you can arrange speaking gigs at the same places after your book is published, or you can join the same organizations. For example, many organizations will run newsletter articles about members who publish a book or have a success of some sort. Others will let you write an article or a blog post. By thinking ahead (as part of building platform), you can join the organization and make the impending announcement, article, or blog post a bullet point on your promotion plan.

Additionally, you can gather information from top websites in your category. Those of top bloggers and authors in your subject area may provide ideas for workshops, talks, teleseminars, courses, and more (or could provide a place to pitch a guest blog post). Notice how other authors promote their books. All of these items can be added to your promotion plan—especially if you can target an activity at a particular community or place that fits within your target market. Every time you can show that your promotional activities actually reach your audience, your promotion plan gets stronger in the eyes of an agent or editor. That means it should get stronger in your eyes as an indie publisher as well.

In addition, research specific publications that target your market and add writing for these magazines or newspapers to your plan. Figuring out how to approach specific organizations, online groups, or forums can prove fruitful. Of course, you want to use your social networks and mailing list. Be sure to take into consideration how you will promote via Face-book, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Pinterest, and include this in your plan.

Get creative as you build your promotion plan. Think outside the box. I love some of the things Patrick Schwerdtfeger, author of Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed, did when his book was released. For example, he launched a Twitter tip campaign and a video tip campaign, providing one tip for every one of his eighty chapters. Take a look at his book for some out-of-the-box ideas.

Other great resources include:

• Guerrilla Publicity for Writers by Jay Conrad Levinson, Michael Larsen, and Rick Frishman
• 1001 Ways to Market Your Books by John Kremer
• Red Hot Internet Publicity by Penny Sansevieri
• The Frugal Book Promoter by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
• Plug Your Book by Steve Weber

Don’t forget to look at your platform-building activities for more ideas. You want to build on all you have been doing to promote your book. After all, that’s what your platform is there for—to help you eventually sell books from it. Evaluate what has been achieving the best prepromotion results for you.

Then consider how to build on what’s working. Could you:

• start a weekly Twitter chat?
• begin an online radio show using Blogtalkradio.com?
• create a contest via your blog or Facebook page?
• develop a thirty-day tip program (that includes a link to purchase your book) delivered by autoresponders to your e-mail list?
• host a series of Google hangouts?
• speak at conferences?
• teach or speak at colleges or in other classrooms?
• present your book as a supplemental text for a particular course in schools?

Last, as part of Step #7, you evaluated what resources you need to complete your book. It’s time to revisit the issue of money. Promotion often takes money—money out of your pocket. Think about the funds you might need to carry out your promotion plan.

It’s possible that you may need to stick to online promotion, which can be virtually (pun intended) free and a great option if you have a tight budget. Sometimes authors who receive a traditional publishing contract put their advance, even if it is only a few thousand dollars, toward promotion. They pay for the help of a public relations (PR) or a social-media expert, or they hire someone to help them organize a blog tour or give them media training. You might also need money to pay travel expenses to get yourself to your target-market cities for speaking engagements; often when you start out as an author, conferences and organizations won’t pay for travel expenses or offer a stipend for speaking. Still, it’s in your best interest to do these things.

Will Your Promotion Plan Make Your Book a Bestseller?

No one can look at your promotion plan and say, “This plan will create a bestseller.” However, an agent can look at it and tell you if an acquisitions editor will believe you are willing and committed to promoting your book in ways that should prove effective. How do they know this?

First, they know what has worked in the past for other authors, such as speaking at notable conferences, doing interviews with magazines with large readerships or radio shows with large audiences, and producing blogs or newsletters with large readerships. That said, every author and book is different. No one can predict if doing the same things that made one book a bestseller will make yours a bestseller as well.

Second, they look at the size of your platform and the list of ways you say you will promote your book and determine if the plan has strength. They can tell if it builds on the prepromotion you have done to date for yourself and your book.

Third, they also assess if your plan is realistic. If you have done nothing to create platform in the past, and you claim that you will do one hundred things that require you to be active online and offline every day to promote your book after it is published, they will not believe you. Such a plan will not instill trust. Venture capital partners need to trust potential partners before they invest in them; they need to know you will do what you say, hold up your end, and carry out the plans that have been made. That’s why you need a track record, which in the publishing industry is called an author platform.

Be realistic. Don’t say you will do things you won’t or can’t. That said, you can stretch … a little, but be prepared to do what you say you will do and base it on your previous accomplishments.

Fourth, agents and acquisitions editors must see consistency in your plan. It’s important to put effort into your book’s release. However, promotion has less to do with how to promote your book the first day it is available for sale and more to do with making sure your book has an extended stay on the Amazon bestseller list instead of simply making the Amazon Top 100 list for an hour. It’s about longevity. It’s been said that selling books, or creating a successful book, is a marathon, not a sprint. When reviewing a promotion plan, both an agent and an editor will look for the marathon aspects: How will you promote the book for the first month after it is released, the next three months, the next six months, and even the next year.

That’s why your spinoffs, created in Step #7, may come into play during promotion. You can renew interest in your first book by putting out a second book. You might include the timing of the next book in a series in your plan: “I will write my second book twelve months after the release of my first book. Promotion of that book will begin that year and tie into promotion of book #1 in these ways ….” Such a plan demonstrates long-range strategy as well as your determination to build a brand that will create a Long-Tail Effect.

Fifth, your promotion plan needs to show that you are willing to invest something more than just your time and energy writing the manuscript. An agent or editor will ask himself if your commitment comes through loud and clear in the list of things you say you will do to help promote your book.

Once written (you can do so in your journal by following the training exercises), evaluate your promotion plan by looking for the same five elements:

1. Does your plan contain tried-and-true promotion tactics used by best-selling or successful authors?
2. Is your plan based on what you have done to date to promote yourself and your book?
3. Is your plan realistic based on your prepromotion (platform building) activities?
4. Does your plan provide a long-term picture of how you will promote consistently over time?
5. Does your plan instill confidence that you are committed to making your book successful?

If you can answer yes to all five questions, you’ve got a strong plan that enhances and supports your overall business plan. It provides the map—and the directions—for the last leg of your journey.

Putting Promotion into Action

The first publisher who ever called me in response to a proposal I directly submitted without an agent asked me, “What are you willing to do every day to help promote your book?” I didn’t have a definitive answer. I said, “I’ll seek out speaking engagements so I can speak about once a month. I’ll approach publications to write articles for them. I’ll keep on blogging about the topic ….” I had two young children at home and wasn’t as willing to commit to as large a promotional effort as I might have indicated in my proposal. Although my proposal had a promotion plan, when it came down to seriously knowing what I would do each day, I didn’t have a good answer to the question. I didn’t land the deal.

You need to have an answer to the same question I was asked: “What are you willing to do every day to help promote your book?”

No matter how you plan to publish, your promotion plan provides that answer—or should. You shouldn’t have to go much further than the plan itself to know what to do each day. Unless you are a successful author already (really, really successful), few publishers are going to help you with your promotion, so you have to be prepared to do this work yourself. If you self-publish, the work of promoting your book falls totally to you anyway. Plus, when it comes right down to it, no one can promote a book better than the author.

To answer the question above, include in your plan a list of things you can do every day to promote your book. Then, as one of your bulleted action items, say you will apply Jack Canfield’s “Rule of Five” to your promotion activities. In The Success Principles, Canfield tells the story of how he sought the advice of a teacher who told him, “If you would go every day to a very large tree and take five swings at it with a very sharp ax, eventually, no matter how large the tree, it would have to come down.” Jack and his partner, Mark Victor Hansen, took that lesson and began doing five specific things every day to move themselves closer to completing their goal of making Chicken Soup for the Soul a #1 New York Times Best Seller. For example, each day they would promote their book by:

• doing five radio interviews
• sending five copies to editors to review
• making five phone calls to network marketing companies
• giving five free copies to celebrities
• sending five press releases

They did this for two entire years and ended up selling over eight million copies of their book.

Put the Rule of Five in your plan (and be sure to put it to use daily). Then you’ll have something to tell a publisher if asked what you will do each day to help promote your book upon release. You can say, “I will do one of these things every day …” and list such things as:

• respond to five reporter queries on Haro.com, reporterconnection.com, and pitchrate.com
• send out five guest blog posts queries
• contact five radio-show hosts
• write five e-zine articles
• send five press releases and books out for review
• comment on five blog posts
• contact five organizations or conferences where I might speak

Better Late Than Never

More often than not, aspiring authors send me book proposals for editing, and I turn to the promotion section and find it just as bare as the platform section. Yet they want to approach publishers the following week. You must evaluate if you are ready to become an author … now. Look at your promotion plan, and be willing to consider that it’s highly likely that an agent or acquisitions editor will look at your lack of platform and decide it negatively affects your ability to promote your book—and that you seem to lack the commitment necessary to help yourself and your book succeed. Do you think they will consider you a publishing-business partner or sound investment? Probably not. What do you think that says about your ability to succeed as an indie publisher?

The time to fix this is now—better late than never—but you need to be able to show that you are willing to put in the time. As you look at your plan, ask yourself if your list of post-publication promotional activities makes it appear that you are willing to work five to fifteen hours per week on book and author promotion, as 47 percent of the respondents to Dana Lynn Smith’s Book Promotion Strategies Survey indicate they do. Ten percent of the authors devote twenty-two or more hours a week to book promotion. And 32 percent spend less than five hours. Which authors do you think are succeeding? Will you give an agent or acquisitions editor reason enough to believe you will fall into the category with the higher success rate? Will you give yourself reason to believe?

What percent of your time will you put into promotion or business-related activities? It’s been said that writing the book represents just a small percentage of the work that goes into making a book successful; the rest of the work involves promoting the book.

If Godin is right and all aspiring authors should start promoting three years before their books are released, you have a bit of time to play with. It could be two years or more from this moment until the time your book actually gets published by a traditional publisher. Let’s say you want to traditionally publish a nonfiction book. Let’s assume it takes you a month to write your book proposal and query, one to three months (or longer) to find an agent, one to three months (or longer) to find a publisher, one month to complete the deal, six months to finish your book, three months to complete editing of the book, and then six to twelve months until it is published. That means you have at least two years and a few months to build your platform. You have at least two to four months until you need to send out your proposal since it won’t be put in the mail until after you’ve sent your query and received a request. In that amount of time, you can possibly create at least a small platform. You can put in enough effort to show a small, independent publisher you are committed and have begun platform-building activities. Your promotion plan can take off from there.

If you are writing a novel and want to traditionally publish, you won’t approach agents until your manuscript is complete—which doesn’t mean finishing the first draft. It means completing a polished manuscript and story. How long that takes is up to you—for some writers it takes many years. Once you finish, you might choose to have the manuscript professionally edited prior to submitting to agents. Let’s say it takes you a year to complete your book; that’s a year of platform-building you can do before you ever contact a publishing professional. You’ll be a much more attractive publishing partner by then.

And if you self-publish, again, you will need to write your book and have it edited and designed. This could easily take you a year or longer. This gives you at least twelve months time to work on your platform so your promotion plan has a foundation.

Passion + Purpose in Your Promotion Gets Results

Remember to read over your promotion plan with an eye toward passion and purpose as well. As with everything you do, it’s your passion that helps sell your book. In How to Write a Book Proposal, Mike Larsen claims many aspiring authors with whom he has worked felt compelled to place their mission statements at the top of their promotion plans rather than after their author bios. It’s no wonder. If you feel a strong sense of purpose about writing your book—a true sense of mission—you will also feel a strong sense of commitment to making it succeed (sell).

Just as readers should feel your passion coming from the pages of your book, acquisitions editors should feel it in every part of a book proposal. Nowhere must it come through more clearly than in your promotion plan. As an indie publisher, you should feel excited about your promotion plan as well. If you feel excited about your idea, make sure that is clear in this simple list of activities. If you feel that your book carries out your “soul purpose,” then create inspired ideas for promoting it to your target market so that agents and acquisitions editors get inspired to work with you on your project and make it as successful as possible.

It’s difficult to judge passion from a list. Yet, your promotion plan must exude passion and purpose. It must be inspired. Don’t approach it as a must or a should, however. It should not be a means to an end. If you feel you can fulfill your purpose with every promotional activity you complete, you will succeed. The question is, will your plan accomplish that for you and for your book? If so, you are ready to finish your business plan and your Author Training. WOOT!

Suggested Reading:

Guerilla Marketing for Writers by Jay Conrad Levinson, Michael Larsen, and Rick Frishman
1001 Ways to Market Your Books by John Kremer
Red Hot Internet Publicity by Penny Sanseveiri
The Frugal Book Promoter by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Plug Your Book! by Steve Weber
Sell More Books! By J. Steve Miller and Cherie K. Miller
The Nonfiction Book Marketing Plan by Stephanie Chandler