Marketing Archives - Page 4 of 15

11 January, 2019

Book Signings and Back-of-the-Room Sales

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:53:41-07:00January 11, 2019|Authors Academy, Marketing|Comments Off on Book Signings and Back-of-the-Room Sales

You may know that here at the Authors Academy, we’re strong advocates of using the Web to build your author platform.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to build an audience face-to-face, too: either locally, regionally, nationally, or beyond.

The truth is, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of meeting your readers (and gaining new fans) in person!

And, of course — in addition to being a great way to build buzz for your projects — book events can be just plain fun.

Join us next week as we tackle “Book Signings and Back-of-the-Room Sales” with one of our favorite Tucson-based publicists, Lynn Wiese Sneyd.

Lynn Wiese Sneyd coordinates national, regional and local publicity campaigns for authors of non-fiction and fiction books. She’s scheduled author appearances on major television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and PBS affiliates), Sirius Satellite, syndicated AM/FM radio shows, and internet podcasts.

In addition, she’s worked with […]

23 July, 2018

Think About Book Marketing: What is Your Annual Book Buying Budget?

By Support@wheatmark.com|2023-06-09T11:04:35-07:00July 23, 2018|Marketing, Publishing, Resources|Comments Off on Think About Book Marketing: What is Your Annual Book Buying Budget?

Writers . . . you know yourselves, and you know the work and play of creating a manuscript. You know your characters, topics, arcs, themes, word counts, and gerunds. You are the ones wondering who your readers will be, and what you want to know is: who will be the buyers of your book?
Here’s a list of potential customers for your book-as-creative-product:

• Libraries
• Corporations that buy in bulk to distribute to employees or clients
• Parents, on behalf of their children
• People who love to read and have space in their homes for a printed book collection
• People who love donating and/or reselling their printed books
• People in the general population, one-by-one
• Friends and family
• Activists who appreciate going to lectures and meeting authors

Now, here are questions to you from the other side of your desk:

What is your annual book budget?

What do you […]

11 July, 2017

Are you, too, missing this marketing tool?

By Support@wheatmark.com|2023-06-09T11:06:42-07:00July 11, 2017|Marketing, Resources|Comments Off on Are you, too, missing this marketing tool?

Almost everyone you meet these days has a smart phone. And while the smart phone is one of the greatest new marketing tools, this phenomenon is contributing to one of the greatest marketing failures people commit every single day.

Let me explain:

Any new person you meet at a business mixer or social event can, technically, just tell you their phone number or email and you can simply enter it into your phone on the spot, right? Or save it in a voice memo.

So who really needs business cards these days?

Additionally, you can just have them enter your contact info into their phones when you meet them, right?

If only that were so easy….

For one, people you meet may not have time to give you their contact information and certainly no time to wait while you stumble around in your phone to open the right app. This happened to me recently and the […]

15 March, 2017

The Power of the Reviewer’s Pen

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:07:51-07:00March 15, 2017|Marketing, Publishing, Resources|Comments Off on The Power of the Reviewer’s Pen

MarthersBook Periodically I call one of our authors with a better-selling book and chat with them about their book marketing efforts, and what they believe is responsible for their sales success. I had one such conversation recently with Janet Marthers (janetmarthers. com), the lead author of Follow Your Interests to Find the Right College (ISBN: 9781627872621). The book is different from other college guides in that it uses students’ interests, both academic and non-academics, as the primary tool to help them navigate the college selection process, and discover colleges and opportunities that they might otherwise overlook. If you or someone you know is evaluating colleges, I highly recommend that you check out this unique book.

Follow Your Interests to Find the Right College was published in December of 2015. In March 2016 Forbes interviewed Marthers about the book, and she noticed […]

1 March, 2016

The one-step method to make your website work

By Support@wheatmark.com|2023-06-09T11:01:04-07:00March 1, 2016|Marketing, Resources|Comments Off on The one-step method to make your website work

What’s the most efficient, as well as most effective, way to get from your couch to the fridge? Is it a shortcut such as taking a giant leap? Or is it taking a number of comfortable steps?

Walking, which is one step—and always and only one step—at a time, has been the winning transportation tactic employed by people since the dawn of time. Gliding and flying aren’t possible in a living room setting while jumping and leaping are just too energy consuming to make it worthwhile. If you kept exerting the amount of energy needed for jumping, you’d end up having to make more frequent trips to the fridge than otherwise needed. So “one step at a time” is the best way to get from your couch to the fridge.

What does this have to do with book marketing?

We take the one-step method granted when it comes to biped mobility, but we […]

12 October, 2015

How big is your audience?

By Sam Henrie|2023-06-09T11:10:07-07:00October 12, 2015|Marketing, News, Publishing, Resources|Comments Off on How big is your audience?

A few years ago I had a weekend evening to myself, and decided to go to a play. I found a performance of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘night Mother by Marsha Norman showing at the Tucson Temple of Music and Art.

I arrived very early, so I wasn’t surprised that there was only one other person in the audience, but was surprised when no one else showed up. The play started, and I thought to myself: “Now I am stuck here, even if the performance is terrible. I’m 50% of the audience. I can’t just stand up and walk out.” That turned out not to be a problem. The performance was completely engrossing.

‘night Mother is a two-hour play with only two actors. I can’t even begin to imagine what it took for the actors to sustain the emotional intensity that they exhibited for those two hours, let alone what it took […]

22 September, 2015

The World’s Worst Ebook Artwork

By Grael Norton|2023-06-09T11:10:46-07:00September 22, 2015|Authors Academy, Marketing, News|Comments Off on The World’s Worst Ebook Artwork

Wheatmark client and Authors Academy member Bill Corbett sent me the link to this sobering article the other day.

It talks about how the digital era has led to a decline in income for authors.

The article cites a number of reasons for this, but another one (which the article doesn’t discuss) is increased competition.

According to recent numbers I’ve seen, there are now more than 4,500 books published every day.

That’s a heck of a lot of books vying for readers’ attention!

How do you compete with all those titles? One great way is to submit your book to—and win—contests.

But—and you can see this one coming—with all those books being published each day, far more books than ever before are being submitted to contests for consideration.

How do you ensure your book has a good chance of standing out from the crowd and getting recognized?

Some tips are obvious. Don’t make this mistake.

But there […]

16 July, 2015

Amazon gets flamed

By Grael Norton|2023-06-09T11:11:01-07:00July 16, 2015|Authors Academy, Marketing|Comments Off on Amazon gets flamed

As I write this, folks all over the Internet are flaming Amazon for over-hyping its latest sales promotion, Prime Day.

Here are some choice tweets:

Amazon has gone crazy! I mean, 64% off Antarctic krill oil? http://t.co/mVRgvP5o3k
— John Aboud (@jaboud) July 15, 2015

Amazon sub-prime day. https://t.co/qu6jitO6SL
— Brenda Kelly (@Brenda_Kelly) July 15, 2015

Amazon Prime Day? More like Amazon “let’s get rid of this excess inventory” Day
http://pic.twitter.com/y0g2fVs1dD
— Neil Cybart (@neilcybart) July 15, 2015

The outrage is perhaps matched only by the recent uproar created amongst authors when Amazon announced that it would pay self-published Kindle Direct Publishing Select participants only for the pages that readers actually read of their books.

(Before you freak out, too, be sure to check out the rebuttal in this article.)

Hard to believe it, but 15 years ago, Amazon was just a hardscrabble online bookseller (albeit one already worth north of $16 billion.)

Meanwhile, the Kindle was just […]

9 June, 2015

Is your book cursed?

By Grael Norton|2023-06-09T11:11:44-07:00June 9, 2015|Authors Academy, Marketing, Publishing|Comments Off on Is your book cursed?

Wheatmark client Michelee Cabot forwarded me this fascinating entry from Wikipedia about the dreaded “book curse.”

The best way I can describe it in contemporary terms is that it was like medieval copyright protection!

According to the article, “a book curse was the most widely employed and effective method of discouraging the thievery of manuscripts during the medieval period.”

Punishments usually included excommunication, damnation, or anathema. Harsh!

These days, the punishment for swiping someone else’s work is more pedestrian: typically, the ripped-off author is entitled to financial damages.

Copyright is one of least understood areas of publishing, while simultaneously being one of the areas of highest concern for authors… and first-time authors in particular.

Here’s the scoop: even in its draft-manuscript stage (for example, in a Microsoft Word document stored on your computer’s hard drive) your manuscript is copyrighted under US law.

If someone steals your draft and publishes it as their own work, it’ll be […]

24 April, 2015

What should you be doing to market your book?

By Grael Norton|2023-06-09T11:12:48-07:00April 24, 2015|Authors Academy, Marketing, News|Comments Off on What should you be doing to market your book?

I received an email recently from long-time Wheatmark client Eddie Browning that invited him to display his books at Book Expo America (BEA) next month.

Eddie’s kind enough to keep me in the loop about all the different kinds of promotions authors receive on a daily basis that claim to help them market their work.

Eddie doesn’t have any intention of taking the bait, but I saw this as an opportunity to share a valuable marketing lesson with all of our readers.

The lesson is that good marketing is a process, not an event.

This is a tricky concept for many authors to grasp.

They equate “marketing” with “selling.”

They’ll often say things like “I tried marketing my book, and it didn’t work.”

Usually, what they actually mean is “I tried selling my book, and it didn’t work.”

What’s the difference?

“Selling” is pretty straight-forward. It means asking for the sale:

“Would you like to buy my book?”

“Would you like […]

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