Given what we’re working on at Bookigee these days, and the awesomeness we’re putting together for the February 12th TOC Author (R)evolution Day, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about the future of book marketing. What’s working? Where’s it going? WTF?
One of the things I’ve been tracking for awhile now is something I’m calling the “marketing inversion.”
Where it used to be that book marketing was something you stuck on AT THE END of the creative process, in this age of social media and word-of-mouth economies, the best success stories are coming from people who are doing it the other way around—they collect an audience (by marketing their interestingness) first, and then make a book or project for that audience.
This all crystalized last week when a good industry friend asked me “If you met a new writer just starting out, how would you advise them to get their career going?”
My answer: start building a good network—no a GREAT network—1-2 years before you actually want to get published. Build it methodically, and with great attention.
And that’s the key—you do not try to build a social media following (sometimes called the “platform”) and market a book at the same time. The platform comes first, then you publish the book, and hopefully convert that audience into interested readers.
(Or you sell the book to a publisher who will be much more likely to publish you because you’ve got that audience—the bigger the better.)
If I were to draw a roadmap for this new marketing paradigm, here’s what it would look like. The beauty of this strategy is that it will work no matter what your eventual path to publishing.
<*dramatic pause*>
So in case you hadn’t heard, Margaret Atwood is publishing her latest project serial style on Byliner. We’re going to follow her lead.
Tune in tomorrow for part two (see here) in this Topsy-Turvy Book Marketing adventure, and in the meantime get your ticket for TOC’s Author (R)evolution Day, where we’ll be talking about the new book marketing paradigm and a whole lot more.
