I’ve been blessed to have two phenomenal authors as clients (Dan Pink and Gretchen Rubin).
With the success of Dan’s books (Johnny Bunko and Drive) and Gretchen’s new release, The Happiness Project (both are in the top 50 of Amazon’s best-seller charts today and UPDATE: just found out that Gretchen has hit #2 on NYT best-selling list during its first week) a few people have asked me:
“How can I market my book through social media?”
Well, I’ll say first off-- that’s the wrong question. It’s not about social media, it’s about how you market your book, period. Then, how you have social media and social networks serve to enhance the effect.
The underlying assumption is that you have a really good story to tell. Best way to test that hypothesis is ask yourself: What Movement Am I Starting?
After that, here are a three things that I think you need to do, if you want to drive the sales of your book. (No guarantees of course).
- Get out in front of it.
- Give early and often to your audience and fans BEFORE you ask them for anything.
- Be the Community Connector
Get out in front of it.
In some ways, this is the story of Never Stop Marketing. It’s the story of networking for a job. It’s about an ounce of prevention, pound of cure.
Once the book is released (or its release is imminent), it’s too late to start thinking about it.
The Happiness Project released on Dec. 29th. We’ve been working on it since March.
I don’t necessarily mean you are doing all types of marketing activities every day for months in advance, but you are thinking about and developing your plan way in advance. Then, you are testing and iterating.
The marketing of the book is as important as writing the book. Otherwise, why are you writing the book?
Give early and often to your audience and fans BEFORE you ask them for anything.
In an attention economy, you can’t afford to pay for media (attention), you have to earn it. And you earn it by providing value over time.
This value can certainly be expressed through social media the form of blog posts (Dan and Gretchen), Twitter streams (Dan and Gretchen), and teleseminars, but it is also about an attitude.
It’s about asking yourself the question in those blog posts, tweets, and in your 1:1 interactions with people (and especially with your Raving Fans), “how can what I am doing HELP this person achieve their goals?”
This is the cultivation part (stage 2) of Community Driven Marketing, but if you ever have the privilege to meet Dan or Gretchen, you’ll see that this is a key part of their personae.
Be the Community Connector
Now, when I say “community,” I don’t mean “people you can blast with an email who will submit themselves to your will, buy your book like robots, and automatically forward to 500 of their friends.”
No, I mean people who deeply care about the movement you are starting and about whose success you actually care.
And the more that I study community, the more that I realize that Community (with a capital C) can be expressed mathematically through “Reed’s Law.”
In layman’s terms, the more connections that each of the people in your network have with other people in your network, the more valuable your whole network is.
Dan and Gretchen committed to this early.
Dan in the form of Bunko Breakfasts and Gretchen in the form of Happiness Project Groups.
Simply put, they facilitated a mechanism for putting their fans in touch with each other.
Lesson: There’s no “silver bullet” to having the word spread about your book, but there are certainly things that you can do to identify and cultivate your Raving Fans, so that when the time is right, those fans will go out and spread the word for you.