The more I work in this industry the more one key feature comes to the fore, marketing. People don’t really NEED books. That is a sad reality. There is no reason for 1000 or 20,000 or 2,000,000 people to buy any book.
A book will not help them to breathe and work and walk and talk and sing and swim or to do any of the things that people do from day to day. It will not make them rich (though it might inspire them to become rich). It will not provide them with food or drink. People, in short, need a reason to buy a book.
It is a concept to remind yourself of every single day if you intend to get involved in the publishing industry. if you cannot create a reason for a book to be bought then there will be no sales. Every book cover must suggest itself to the buying public as a potential purchase and indeed must compete with the other “essential” and “non-essential” products that that consumer could buy.
And a cover is not enough. You can have a pretty cover that misses the mark and an ugly cover that connects with a potential buyer. You can have a book that to the elite appears predictable and clunky but raises the pulse of the majority of readers.
For no other reason than its exceptional marketing you should admire Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. It has created millions of purchases and a global hit. Even reaching one percent of the sales it has racked up would be an incredible achievement for most books.
By far the majority of discussion on the web seems to be about how to publish books, either how to get your book taken on board by a large publisher or the best way to self-publish. But if one does not consider the importance of marketing and with that marketing, effective distribution, then you may as well burn your money. That goes for your choice of publishing firm too if you do decide to go with a traditional publisher. If they have no defined plans for publicity, your book may well sink amid the large numbers of books published each year in all major markets.
Filed under: Authors, Books, Bookselling, Business, Future of Books, Future of Publishing, Self Publishing, Business, Google Book Search, Publishing Companies, Self Publishing
Your post inspired me to write about how our Da Vinci eBook got written.
I think you will find it a fascinating journey.
Any of your readers can match a book to a target market by following this process. I’m going to document the full story as it was a fascinating process and all the questionaire software and advertising keywords etc can easily be found on the net.
http://www.paulniederer.com/wp-trackback.php?p=60
You’re so right. I’ve blogged on this (my old blog at http://www.thoughtblog.net, which I’m moving to the new blog) and I see people doing some of the most time-consuming, costly and ineffective marketing tactics you can image. I mean, putting an image of book cover on a t-shirt and expecting people to not only pay $20 for the t-shirt, but for that to somehow generate sales is just plain silly. But they do it. All the time. Self-publishers need to target their niche market very carefully.