Marketing Begins Before You Have Anything to Promote

Adventures in Self-Publishing Part 6 of 9

One of the most irritating pieces of advice given to me when I was starting out was that I should start marketing my book before I’d even finished writing it.

I had no idea what that meant. How was I supposed to promote a book that didn’t exist? What could I possibly say about it for the eighteen months before it would be ready to launch into the wild? How many photographs of my laptop and coffee cup can one reader reasonably be expected to endure?

This is what I learned:

Marketing and promotion aren’t the same thing.

A traditional way of describing marketing is through the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion. For an author, the product is the book itself and the experience it promises the reader. Price is what the reader is asked to pay, including decisions about formats, discounts and perceived value. Place is where and how the book can be discovered, sampled and bought. Promotion is how you draw attention to it: advertising a sale, arranging a cover reveal, offering advance copies, appearing on a podcast, running a giveaway or announcing that the book is now available.

All four Ps matter and work together. This article focuses primarily on place and promotion, supported by product positioning: understanding what sort of book you have written and who is most likely to enjoy it, deciding how to describe and position it, and making sure interested readers have somewhere useful to learn more, stay connected and eventually buy. It does not cover pricing strategy in detail. You can’t promote a book that doesn’t exist, but you can begin building the marketing foundation to ensure the book won’t arrive in the world as a complete stranger.

In practice, that foundation has three parts: knowing the reader and the promise of the book, creating places where interested people can learn more and stay connected, and building recognition gradually through useful, genuine contact.

Begin with the reader

It’s tempting to say that your book is for everyone.

It may be suitable for a wide range of people, but not everyone is going to want it. This isn’t a criticism of the book. It is simply how reading works. There can be any number of reasons why a reader passes over your book, and many have nothing to do with the book itself. Their to-be-read pile may already be toppling. They may be short of money, short of time or simply not in the mood for that particular kind of story. They may be waiting for the paperback, the audiobook or a quieter week. Or another book may have caught their attention first.

And sometimes the reason is not circumstance but fit: every book makes a particular promise about the experience it will give the reader.

A reader looking for a cozy mystery has made a different emotional bargain from one choosing grimdark fantasy. Someone who loves slow, thoughtful character development may be quite happy to wait for the action to build. Someone else will be wondering why nobody has been murdered by page twelve.

Identifying your likely reader doesn’t mean constructing an elaborate imaginary person called Susan who lives in Milwaukee, drinks Earl Grey tea and shops for books on Tuesday afternoons. It means understanding the reading experience your book offers.

What other books might your reader enjoy? What expectations will they bring to yours? Are they looking for escape, excitement, romance, comfort, intellectual challenge or the satisfaction of seeing an unpleasant person get exactly what they deserve?

The more clearly you understand that, the easier almost every later decision becomes. Your cover, description, categories, keywords, sample chapters and advertising should all be inviting the same reader into the same book.

Marketing can’t compensate for a confused promise.

Know how you, the author, want to be positioned

There’s positioning your book in the vast ecosystem of available titles (this is all rolled up in your metadata) and then there’s author positioning. Author positioning sounds alarmingly corporate, but it is simply the answer to a reader’s unspoken question:

What can I expect from this writer?

That answer may come from genre. It may come from subject matter, tone or a particular way of looking at the world. An author might become known for tightly plotted historical mysteries, hopeful science fiction, practical books for creative entrepreneurs or fantasy novels about older women who are nowhere near finished having adventures.

This doesn’t mean you can’t write anything else. Nor does it require you to manufacture a public personality or turn yourself into a brand mascot. It does mean giving readers enough consistency to understand why they might want to hear from you again.

Your author photograph, biography, website, newsletter and social-media presence don’t need to be identical, but they should create a consistent expectation of who you are and what reading your books offers. Readers don’t need every part of your public presence to match your books, but sharp contradictions can make that expectation harder to understand. If your books are warm, thoughtful and gently funny while your online presence consists entirely of furious arguments with strangers, readers may struggle to reconcile the two.

Positioning yourself as an author is not about pretending to be someone you’re not. It’s about deciding which genuine parts of yourself and your work are most relevant to the readers you hope to reach.

Build somewhere for interested people to go

Before spending money or effort attracting attention, make sure there is somewhere useful for that attention to land.

At minimum, an author website should tell visitors who you are, what you write and how they can hear from you again. Once books are available, it should also make them easy to find and buy.

It doesn’t need to be enormous. It doesn’t need animated graphics, a complicated merchandise shop or a weekly blog you will come to resent. A small, clear, current website is far more useful than an ambitious one last updated three years ago.

Your mailing list is even more important.

Social-media platforms are borrowed spaces. Their rules change, their algorithms change and occasionally the platform itself disappears or becomes somewhere you no longer wish to be. An email list gives you a direct way to contact readers who have chosen to hear from you.

That doesn’t mean sending relentless sales messages. A mailing list is a relationship, not a captive audience. It should offer something worth opening: news, stories, useful information, glimpses into your work or simply the pleasure of spending a few minutes in your company.

You don’t need thousands of subscribers before publishing your first book. Ten people who genuinely want to hear from you are a beginning. So are fifty. The object is not to look impressive (nobody knows how big your list is anyway except for you and your email list provider). It’s to establish a way of staying connected.

Prepare the places where the buying happens

Your own website may introduce readers to your work, but many of them will eventually buy from a retailer. Your book page must do its share of the work.

That means professional cover images, a clear and appealing description, accurate categories and properly formatted sample pages. It also means claiming and completing your author profiles wherever possible.

Amazon Author Central, Goodreads, BookBub and other retailer or reader platforms allow authors to connect their books, add biographies and photographs, and sometimes notify followers about new releases. None of these tasks is particularly exciting, but together they give a prospective reader a clear, current and trustworthy picture of the book and its author.

Check the links. Check them again. Click on them from another device.

A beautiful website is no help if the purchase button leads to the wrong edition. An enthusiastic launch post is wasted if the retailer page has an outdated description, a missing cover or a sample that begins with four pages of blank space.

The machinery should work before you invite people to use it.

Give readers a way to sample your work

Asking someone to buy a book by an author they have never read requires a considerable leap of faith.

A sample chapter makes that leap smaller. So does a short story, novella, checklist, guide or other reader magnet that gives people a genuine taste of what you do.

The best reader magnets are closely connected to the work you eventually hope to sell. A deleted scene, prequel story or standalone adventure featuring a secondary character may appeal to readers of a novel. A practical workbook or resource list may suit a nonfiction author.

A useful test is whether someone who enjoys the free material is likely to want the paid book for the same reasons. If the connection needs a long explanation, the offer is probably attracting curiosity rather than genuine reader interest.

The purpose is not simply to obtain an email address. It is to attract the right email address.

A thousand subscribers who downloaded an unrelated free item and have no interest in your books are less useful than fifty readers who enjoyed a story set in your fictional world and would like to return to it. There are few things more discouraging than seeing people sign up for your list, take the free item and then promptly unsubscribe.

Free material should still represent your work well. It should be edited, formatted and presented with care. It is not the place to dispose of something you decided was not good enough to publish.

For many readers, it will be their first experience of your writing.

Familiarity matters

Most of us are more willing to consider a book when we already recognize the author’s name.

That recognition doesn’t require celebrity. It may come from reading an interesting newsletter, seeing a thoughtful comment in a discussion, enjoying a short story or encountering several useful posts over time.

This is why marketing can begin long before a book is ready for sale. You can talk about the subjects that interest you, the books you love, the questions you are exploring and the world in which your future book will live. You can participate in communities as a person rather than arriving abruptly with a purchase link.

You don’t have to share your entire private life. You don’t have to post every day. You certainly don’t have to make your unfinished book perform in public before it is ready.

You are simply allowing people to become familiar with you and your work before asking them to spend money on it.

You can’t force that familiarity. It has to be earned through consistent, genuine contact—and genuine doesn’t mean constant.

A following isn’t necessarily an audience

A large social-media following can be useful, but it’s not the same thing as having an audience for your books.

People follow accounts for all sorts of reasons. They may enjoy the author’s jokes, political commentary, recipes, photographs or writing advice without having any interest in reading the sort of books that author publishes.

Other writers can be generous, supportive and valuable members of your community. They are not automatically your customers.

The important question is not simply How many people follow me? It is Why are they following me, and does that interest connect naturally to my books?

This is also why engagement figures can be misleading: attention to a post is not the same as demand for a book. A post about a pet, a garden disaster or an infuriating encounter with technology may receive far more attention than a book announcement. The personal post may still have helped people get to know you, but its popularity does not measure interest in your books. Likes and book sales measure different things.

An audience is made up of people with some reason to care about the work you produce. A following is merely a number attached to an account.

The two may overlap beautifully. They may not.

Start with a modest foundation

None of this needs to be elaborate. Before you begin actively promoting a book, it helps to have the basics of reader fit, presentation, connection and access in place:

• a clear understanding of the readers most likely to enjoy it;
• a consistent way of describing yourself and your work;
• a simple, current website;
• a mailing list with an uncomplicated sign-up process;
• completed retailer and author profiles;
• working purchase and sample links;
• and something that allows a curious reader to experience your writing.

You can build these things gradually while you are writing and preparing the book. In fact, that’s usually preferable to attempting all of them during the frantic weeks immediately before publication.

If this still feels like a great deal, begin with one small task: write a single sentence describing the reader who is most likely to enjoy your book and the experience you hope to give them. That sentence can guide the website, mailing list, sample material and profiles you build next.

Marketing begins early because relationships, recognition and trust take time. It does not begin early because you are expected to spend two years shouting, “My book is coming!”

The objective is not to manufacture an audience before you have earned one. It is to leave a clear, welcoming path so that the people who might enjoy your work can find it, try it and choose to remain.

Then, when you finally do have something to promote, you’re not standing alone in an empty field with a megaphone. You already know who you are speaking to—and at least some of them know who you are.

Next, we’ll peer into The Promotional Cauldron: newsletters, advertising, giveaways, ARC services, price promotions and all the other ingredients authors are encouraged to throw into the pot. I’ve tried most of them, with results ranging from gratifying to absolutely nothing at all. We’ll look at what each one is actually for—and how to choose without attempting everything at once.