Marketing plans

I had trouble with the marketing plan on mine, because there weren't examples for memoirs to use as templates. What's the subject of your memoir?
Your marketing plan is what you can realistically do to increase book sales. Unless you know Andy Rooney, you shouldn't put that you're going to go on 60 Minutes, because that's not gonna happen, but if you went to college with a local tv reporter, you can probably get her interview you. The more detailed you can be, the better off you will be.

If it's surviving cancer, part of your marketing plan might be to offer to donate copies to cancer support groups, oncology waiting rooms, setting up booths at events like the Race for the Cure etc.

If your memoir is about living in France for five years, think about giving copies to french professors hoping maybe they'll use your book as part of their syllabi. You can prepare lectures for HS and college classes. Speaking to students might not get you tons of sales, but it will get your name out there and give you public speaking engagements.

If your memoir is going from homelessness to becoming a gazillionaire, give free copies to homeless shelters, welfare offices, even to prisoners getting paroled (since you're so rich as a gazilionaire, you can afford to do that.) You'd probably have a good niche in motivational speaking, so you'd want to get started on that before you're even published.

Do you get the idea?

Maybe you're struggling because you have 2 books-- 1 memoir and one non-fiction about your work. I'm a psychologist and if I were to write a book about issues clients face, even if those issues overlapped with mine, I would do it in a separate book to keep the boundaries between personal and professional clear. I might include a chapter in my memoir about how my work and personal life overlapped, but not go into detail about clients.
I wholeheartedly agree that we all have a story to tell, but you're pulling self-help into an already complex tale about you and your clients. I think narrowing your focus is a good idea. I bet you've got enough to write about each component for at least 2, possibly 3 books .

Gosh PinkAmy, I love reading your responses. I always find them VERY helpful. You write with such clarity, making everything so simple. Most times i just think, "Oh, I see...now I get it!" Big thank you, PinkAmy!

Purple Rose said:

Gosh PinkAmy, I love reading your responses. I always find them VERY helpful. You write with such clarity, making everything so simple. Most times i just think, "Oh, I see...now I get it!" Big thank you, PinkAmy!

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Can you come live with me and say nice things to me every day .

PinkAmy, you, I mean, YOU, of all people don't need that!!! I'm just one of many telling it like it is Thank you again, for everything, for something or like right now, for nothing. Thank you all the same I value your contributions.

PinkAmy is right - you do have two books but you have to choose which book you are going to focus on right now. I would suggest the non-fiction book would be much more straightforward to market - you're a healthcare professional talking about something you know something about. The marketing strategies are clear: you have to make yourself the expert on the topic, and you have to make everyone else look to you as that expert.

There is a ton of info on the net on what to do, but you have to decide what you can do and what applies to you. If you're an established author the advice on the net makes a lot more sense. If you're just starting out then some of the advice (like - go on a national speaking tour) might seem a bit off the wall.

The funniest advice I received from an agent? "If you can get on Oprah - that would probably help." Really???

Good luck.

I agree with starting the non-fiction before the memoir. With the NF you'll have a better opportunity to build a platform and you'll have that platform for when you query your memoir.

Red Bird said:

So, I have a huge platform. I'm just not sure where the focus should be. My theory is that we all have a story to tell and need someone to listen. How do I narrow that down?
Hopefully, I haven't further confused you

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You have a huge platform? The definition varies but, in general, it's the number of potential buyers you can bring to an agent to demonstrate it's worthwhile for them to take on your book. Others describe it as the number of people who know you rather than you know.

One of the so-called "Howto" tips on platform building says create a Facebook fan page. Some peg the "significant" number of fans at around 1000.

Another of the so-called "Howto" tips says create a blog and get lots of people subscribed to your blog.

Yet another is to use Twitter and Tweet your way to success. Always be fresh, interesting, and useful, so the advice goes.

All of these "tips", and more, can be part of a marketing plan, but they won't add up to a hill of beans if you don't know how to use them.

For what it's worth, I think your story sounds interesting though I don't understand the concept of using their skin to read their life story. [edit: I found a previous post. It's what I thought it was]

As for finding someone to listen - well, that's the whole trick, isn't it? Some call this "finding your tribe" - but once you find them you have to then lead them, and for that you need to know how.

What have you done thus far to reach an audience?

Red Bird said:

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So, I have a huge platform.

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I'm not sure you understand what a platform is. First time authors who are neither celebrities nor experts in their fields rarely have a large platform.

The platform is the marketing of yourself, and how because you are YOU people will buy that book. If you have a website with 1 million unique visitors a month, that counts as platform. If your website gets 1000 hits a month, not so much If you do a weekly radio show on NPR, that's a platform. If you do weekly lectures with 30 people in attendance, not so much. If you have a monthly column in a nationally distributed magazine, yet. A column in your local paper, maybe, but not that impressive as a platform.

A platform is not something you will do or that you hope to do (unless you personally know Oprah and she has agreed to use your book, your platform isn't Oprah's book club). If you want to speak on college campuses, but haven't yet taken any steps to do so, that's not part of the platform.

The platform might sound like marketing, and in a way it is, the difference being YOU as the tool vs. your book as the tool.

It's hard to have a huge platform for a memoir unless you're a known expert or celebrity.

So, it's not about their medical conditions as much as it is about how I learn about my life by first understanding theirs. The structure is sound and is the best thing about the book.

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I assume you have all the signed releases from your patients and that they are current and up to date.
I wrote my doctoral dissertation on a patient 15 years ago, but if I were to make that into a book to publish, I'd need a new release. Even if I had written a book 15 years ago, I would still need that release both to cover my butt and to be sure the client didn't feel exploited, even if I changed identifying details. If you combined case studies to use typical situations, without using true specifics you wouldn't have a problem.
I wonder if this truly is the most interesting part of your book, because your work is probably good enough to stand on its own without the case studies.

Red Bird said:

I am out of my league Geesh, learning curves can be both exciting and anxiety provoking.

So, I used the term platform when I should have said target audience. Specifically, my target audience could be recovering junkies, people who have been silenced, women who've been abused, parents of recovering children, or those who need someone to listen to their stories. That's the decision I need to make before developing a marketing strategy. As worded, it seems to broad to me? I'm concerned that if I go with the drug abuse strategy, my book will be minimized to a recovery book, but there's a large population of recovering people and I'm active within the community.

As far as a release, I did check into that before I began writing. The information I used to recall my memories was gathered from my observations of a specific person, but the identifying marks are typical within the general population. So, I think I'm okay there.

Do most authors set up a fan page before they even know which direction their book is going?

I know how difficult it is to reply to questions with little knowledge of what's gone before and want to thank you both for taking the time to help me sort through this stuff.

Where are you both with your projects? I'll see if I can find some of your posts and read something you're working on. There's so much to learn Silly me thought all I had to do was write a book

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I'm in a similar position to you. I've written my memoir and am working on the marketing part of it - looking for my tribe, so to speak. I've been reading, and reading, and reading some more about marketing, and all I can say is it's frustrating - there's a lot of "What to do" but little "How to do it." For example, "Use Twitter!" Okay, yeah, but how? The problem is that you can end up spending more time chasing all these supposed leads and less time actually writing.

As for finding the target audience - is there any reason to limit who the book might appeal to? Why? Can you modify it to broaden its appeal? Would you?

How long ago did your mentor read the book and what have you done with the book since? I ask because I "finished" my memoir in 2009 and began searching for an agent. The second agent I contacted sent me a personal response about building a platform and, at that time, I thought author endorsement was the way to go. So I sent my manuscript to one author who liked my book - cool, I thought. Sent it to a different author who said the story was flat. She asked why I didn't emotionally differentiate between avoiding chewing gum on the street and stepping through the carnage in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing. I said the lack of emotional highs and lows were intentional but I soon realized the idea did not make for good reading. I rewrote the entire manuscript and, in the process, came to understand what the book was really about.

Just kinda firing ideas at you. Maybe something useful, maybe not.

As for "do most authors set up a fan page?" Some do, some don't. Some use Twitter, some don't. Some set up fancy web sites, some don't. Some authors promote their books on their sites, some don't. You'll have to decide. As a start, think of some authors you like and see if you can find their fan pages, web sites, etc.

Red Bird said:

I keep finding myself torn between submitting, editing, building a marketing strategy, and learning how to build web pages. Well, we did finish the manuscripts

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Well, in my case, indecision has been meaningful in telling me I wasn't ready for prime time quite yet.

One thing I noticed about my manuscript - at some point during the rewrite process the main story suddenly fell into place and every piece I built from there on felt rock solid while the edits became smaller and smaller. I have my final hard copy handy and every now and then I open it at random and read a page, and I'm always reassured.

The marketing has been a very frustrating experience mostly because there are so many "experts" out there who seem to just repeat each other saying nothing of real value. Like "Use Twitter". Yeah, well, any monkey can use Twitter - the question is HOW to use it effectively? I think that is an art form in itself, and I'm reminded of an episode of M.A.S.H. where Winchester says, "I can play the notes, but I cannot make the music."

My suggestion, FWIW, is to not stop any one thing in favor of another.

As for building web pages - have a look here: http://www.harpercollins.com/author/websites.aspx

Good luck finding consistency of color, layout, content, etc.

Red Bird said:

I am out of my league Geesh, learning curves can be both exciting and anxiety provoking.

So, I used the term platform when I should have said target audience. Specifically, my target audience could be recovering junkies, people who have been silenced, women who've been abused, parents of recovering children, or those who need someone to listen to their stories. That's the decision I need to make before developing a marketing strategy. As worded, it seems to broad to me? I'm concerned that if I go with the drug abuse strategy, my book will be minimized to a recovery book, but there's a large population of recovering people and I'm active within the community.

As far as a release, I did check into that before I began writing. The information I used to recall my memories was gathered from my observations of a specific person, but the identifying marks are typical within the general population. So, I think I'm okay there.

Do most authors set up a fan page before they even know which direction their book is going?

I know how difficult it is to reply to questions with little knowledge of what's gone before and want to thank you both for taking the time to help me sort through this stuff.

Where are you both with your projects? I'll see if I can find some of your posts and read something you're working on. There's so much to learn Silly me thought all I had to do was write a book

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Yeah, silly me too, I thought the hard part would be writing the book.

I'm querying, I have some partials and a full out, but I decided to go back and tweak.

Don't feel bad about getting confused about the platform, I think most of us have made the mistake when just starting. I think for a memoir, it's particularly hard to have a platform if we aren't famous. We're obviously experts on ourselves, LOL.

What you need to decide is which aspect of your story makes it unique and different. My memoir is about abuse recovery, but I was told there were already a ton of books on the subject, so what made my story different from everyone else's. Since about 1/2 of my memoir was already devoted to what happened when my parents sued my therapists' for "alienation of parental affection" when I told them to take a hike (and a bunch of other stuff), I focused on that aspect of my story since there are maybe a half dozen people in the country who have had my experience (lucky me, LOL). It's only part of what I had to overcome, but that's my angle. You have to figure our what yours is.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who've been abused or used substances who've become therapists (I learned just how many when I was doing my competition section. Sheesh, there are probably fewer people who didn't become therapists, LOL). Unless you can show the agent that you're more a expert or that you've done it uniquely and differently, you probably shouldn't go that route.

So what is your specific angle going to be? Focus on that part of your story for your query letter and for how you are going to sell your book to the agent. This part is probably going to be the hardest, the rest will fall into place. (eg: if you've written a humor book, and everything else on the market is serious, that could be an in).

PinkAmy said:

If it's surviving cancer, part of your marketing plan might be to offer to donate copies to cancer support groups, oncology waiting rooms, setting up booths at events like the Race for the Cure etc.

If your memoir is about living in France for five years, think about giving copies to french professors hoping maybe they'll use your book as part of their syllabi. You can prepare lectures for HS and college classes. Speaking to students might not get you tons of sales, but it will get your name out there and give you public speaking engagements.

If your memoir is going from homelessness to becoming a gazillionaire, give free copies to homeless shelters, welfare offices, even to prisoners getting paroled (since you're so rich as a gazilionaire, you can afford to do that.)
Do you get the idea?

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Yes I do get the idea - thank you very helpful. It had never occurred to me to give free copies away myself. I had got so hung up on the mantra "you shouldn't have to put in any money yourself if you're with a genuine 'traditional' publisher" that this hadn't occurred. Or maybe you mean it's the publisher that gives them away (but the author suggests to whom)? Although I imagine there might be deals out there where an author says "OK I'm not going to take an advance just put it into marketing" and/or "use all my royalties up to $X to plough back into marketing" - and that would be in effect the same thing as dishing out free books oneself.

Completely new to all this, so may be saying something remarkably dumb and/or covered elsewhere. Sorry if so.

janwyl said:

Yes I do get the idea - thank you very helpful. It had never occurred to me to give free copies away myself. I had got so hung up on the mantra "you shouldn't have to put in any money yourself if you're with a genuine 'traditional' publisher" that this hadn't occurred. Or maybe you mean it's the publisher that gives them away (but the author suggests to whom)?

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One of my mentors published 2 memoirs with traditional publishers and she told me to expect to put some of my advance into the marketing of my book, whether that be financing book tours or giving away free copies. She said this is the norm these days and that much of the book sales will be self generated (doing lectures, providing books for waiting rooms etc). When the publisher gives the contract, we can negotiate for a certain number of free books or to be able to buy books at a huge discount for these purposes. She said 10 years ago it was different, publishers sent writers on book tours. Now unless we're Steven King, that's not going to happen. I was shocked to find this out, but my goal is to publish my book, not to get rich, so it doesn't matter much to me. I think you're gonna need a new mantra, LOL.

PinkAmy said:

Yeah, silly me too, I thought the hard part would be writing the book.

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LOL - isn't that the big kick in the teeth? I'm spending so much time trying to market my work I'm almost no longer writing. Something is broke.

PinkAmy said:

One of my mentors published 2 memoirs with traditional publishers and she told me to expect to put some of my advance into the marketing of my book, whether that be financing book tours or giving away free copies.

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Actually I'm pretty happy with this. I have no platform whatsoever, but I think I'll be able to come up with some good targeted groups for giving out free copies. Which is great, because until I saw this thread I had literally no idea what I could do to market my book. Much along the lines of what's been said in that other thread you were involved in with Fruitbat and others (which now annoyingly I can't find): Everyone says blog, tweet, facebook etc, but there's stuff-all point in me doing that unless I'm going to get a decent following on any of those media - and I haven't thought of a way to do that yet. But giving away free copies, now that's something I can believe will be an effective use of my time and money (and the publisher's). Which is very good news, because not much else I can think of does that.

PinkAmy said:

my goal is to publish my book, not to get rich, so it doesn't matter much to me. I think you're gonna need a new mantra, LOL.

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Yup, same here. I'd have given up long ago if I needed to make any money out of this. And dam you, now I'm going to waste hours trying to come up with a witty new mantra instead of doing what I oughta

Red Bird said:

Great stuff here
So, does anyone know how to write the marketing proposal? It would be so nice to see an example of the formatting. Then, I'll have something else to be confused about.

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Is there a specific format, per se? I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me, not at this point.

I did a quick google search and found this.
http://dogearpublishing.net/newsletter_060101.aspx

And this: http://bookmarketingmaven.typepad.com/book_marketing_maven/book-marketing-plans.html

And this: http://www.yudkin.com/sampleplan.htm

You should see a pattern. They aren't specific but should give you an idea of what you need to do and be doing. Good luck.

Red Bird said:

Many thanks, Khobar. I'm heading over to check them out now

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You're welcome, but keep in mind these sites will tell you what to do but not how to do it. For example, I just watched a ten minute promotion and it mentioned the usual stuff - Facebook, Twitter, etc. That's all fine, but in order to use Twitter, for example, on needs to know what to be Tweeting. I don't think, "big dog crapped in the flowers" is going to work - unless I'm misunderstanding the whole concept completely. I've been told NOT to make a lot of noise (seems counter-intuitive) and to write excellence (which is fine, but unless I have a large audience it doesn't seem to be worthwhile especially compared with some of the stuff I've been reading).

Maybe I'll start a Twitter thread on this very topic - what to Tweet to get the sales or something like that.