Most authors are extremely knowledgeable about the subjects they write about but are not formally trained or experienced in marketing and selling. Maybe that’s your situation. In this article, I’m going to explain the basics of the marketing and selling processes so that you can apply them to help put your book in the hands of as many readers as possible.
People have a natural aversion to the word marketing. It conjures up thoughts of people calling over the dinner hour to convince you to change your lawn service or people who try to take advantage of family relationships to sell products. Let me say that there’s much more to marketing than that sort of thing. Marketing is a very important business process—the process of creating awareness. In your case, that means creating awareness of your book. Viewed from this perspective, marketing and selling can be noble activities. Marketing and selling techniques are ways of connecting people with goods and services that will make their lives better. There is a science and an art to marketing and selling, a series of logical steps that you can apply to distributing your book. And quite frankly, not much would happen in business if marketing and selling did not take place.
Now, you may also be thinking, “Hey, wait a minute. I’m an introvert, and that’s why I wrote my book; I speak through my writing. I don’t want to try to become some sort of pushy type A person.” That’s fair. But you cannot depend on readers to stumble across your work by chance and buy it if nobody tells them about it. If you want to sell books, you must be willing to step up and be a spokesperson and cheerleader for your work. I’m an introvert too, and the good news for people like us is that social skills are learnable—and so are marketing and sales skills. And we can acquire those skills to promote our work. You don’t have to become salesperson of the year, but adding a few of these skills to your skill set can help you sell books.
Phillip Cutler, who is known in academia as the guru of marketing, says that the role of marketing is to identify opportunities, build distinctive brands, and generate demand. The role of sales, he says, is to convert that demand into orders. Many professional salespeople would say that the role of sales includes identifying opportunities, building brands, and generating demand, and it’s true that the marketing and selling functions cross over quite a bit. But it is accurate to say that selling is a subset marketing, and marketing is a broader and more diverse set of activities.
You might think that the role of marketing is to make sales superfluous or unnecessary. Write a great and interesting book, post it on the web, and bingo, the books will jump right off the shelves and no selling will be needed. Actually, of course, it’s not that easy. Buying is a process that involves much more than just gathering information and making a decision. People are generally risk averse. They will him and haw and procrastinate, and they’ll drag their feet when it comes to making a buying decision, even when it’s obvious that it’s in their best interest to make the purchase. Cutler tells us that although selling is a subset of marketing, it is a vital function, because nothing happens until a sale is made.
So let’s go over some selling basics. The best definition of selling I have heard comes from sales trainer Brian Tracy: “selling is a transference of feeling or belief.” In other words, a sale is made when you have successfully convinced someone else to feel the way you feel about an idea, a product, a service, your book. It sounds simple, right? Well, it is simple. But it’s also very, very, powerful. It means that if you are not completely convinced that your book is a great product and of great value to a prospective reader, then you’re going to have a difficult time artificially creating that belief in the prospect. People can spot a phony a mile away, and you don’t want to be disingenuous. That’s why it’s essential that professional salespeople completely believe in the product or service they’re selling to others.
Another interesting consequence of our definition of a sale as a transference of feeling or belief is the idea that a sale is made in just about every human interaction. In every discussion, glance, or gesture to another, a feeling or belief is transferred. If you smile at a stranger, nine times out of ten, he or she will smile back. In that very brief interaction, you transferred the feeling or belief of friendliness. Selling a product or service involves much more than smiling at somebody, but you get the idea. It all starts with how you feel and how you transmit your feelings and beliefs to another person.
Selling is really a series of steps that you lead your prospect through. The classic model of these steps is called the AIDA model, which was originally published in the Journal of Applied Psychology way back in 1925. This model is widely accepted in the advertising and copywriting industries. To sell someone a product, you must first get their attention. Then, you must capture their interest. Then, you must build a desire in them for your product. Finally, you must cause some sort of action as a result of these first three steps: attention, interest, desire, action.
The Dale Carnegie Organization follow the AIDA model in their professional sales course, and they include an additional step, conviction. Let’s walk through each of these steps in order. The first step is to get your prospect’s attention. To do that, you need to talk about something he or she is already interested in—it doesn’t even have to be related to your book, necessarily. At this stage, you’re just trying to get the prospect to pay attention to you for a moment. Next comes interest. To arouse a prospect’s interest, you need to say what your product can do for him or her. This means you’ll have to gather some information, because you’ll need to know what needs the prospect has that your product can satisfy. The next step is conviction. In this step, you provide some facts or other support for your claim that the product is beneficial. The key here is to give the prospect enough facts and no more. Once you have the prospect convinced, there’s no need to drone on with additional information. The fourth step is desire. In this step, the goal is to paint an image in the prospect’s mind of what it would be like to enjoy your product. Finally, once you know you’ve convinced a potential buyer, close the sale. This is the action step, when you get the prospect to commit to making a purchase.
Here is an example of a sales conversation I might have at a book fair in which I’m trying to sell the book I published with AuthorHouse. For the attention step, I might say, “Hello. It’s nice to meet a fellow book enthusiast. Thanks for coming to the show.” At this point, I have the prospect’s attention, so I move on to the interest step: “Do you have a need for improving your career situation, by chance? Oh, you do? In what ways?” That question allows me to gather some information about how my book might be useful to the prospect. Next comes conviction: “Well, Mr. Prospect, this book features fifty-six short essays, many of them are directly related to the situation you just described to me. Here, take a look at these.” Then the desire step. “Think of the time you’ll save reading these short essays. They’re short and easy to read quickly. You can focus on the ones that will relate to you and ignore the others.” Now the prospect is imagining him or herself reading the book, so it’s time to close the sale. For this step, I might say something like, “I appreciate you taking a look at the book. We accept cash, credit cards, or you can buy the book online. Here’s the web address.” As you can see, the five steps to a sale can happen very quickly. Or you can spend some time on each of these five steps to lead your prospect through the process more gently.
As you learn these steps, it might be helpful to keep in mind some of the personality traits that the best salespeople tend to have in common. Of course, you’re not planning to change your personality and take up a career as a professional salesperson. However, you can learn a thing or two about the selling process by understanding what sets top salespeople apart from other people. Many years ago, the Greenburg Team of Psychologists studied the most successful salespeople from the insurance industry, and they came up with three common personality traits. The first is ego drive. That doesn’t mean salespeople have big egos; it means they are personally gratified by exercising their ability to persuade other people. They get their kicks from making sales. The second is ego strength. That’s the ability to not take a rejection personally. If a prospect decides not to buy, it’s not a personal slam; it just means that prospect isn’t interested in the salesperson’s business proposal that day. The third trait is empathy, the ability to accurately sense the reactions and feelings of others. This is essential, because people are not going to tell you how they feel when you ask them directly no matter how friendly you are.
There are a few things you can learn from these traits even if you don’t feel they match your personality. Ego drive motivates the best salespeople to be persistent, to keep trying until they get the sale. The lesson here is to be persistent (without badgering, of course) and to be sure to ask for the order. Ego strength is something you can learn from too. Remind yourself not to take it personally if someone doesn’t buy your book; there are other potential readers out there, and a decision not to buy isn’t a reflection on you personally. Finally, you can learn to have empathy, which will let you know how a prospect is reacting during your pitch. It’s important to note that empathy is not the same thing as sympathy; sympathy means feeling the way another person feels, whereas empathy is being able to tell what another person feels without necessarily feeling the same way yourself. You can have empathy and still be objective.
In addition to knowing the basics of the selling process and the attributes of successful sales people, there are a few additional fundamentals worth remembering. First of all, you don’t want to mention the price until you’ve convinced someone of the value of your product. If somebody asks you right away how much your book costs, you might want to talk about what’s in the book before you tell them what the price is.
Another point to remember is that you’re not going to change anyone’s mind. Once someone has made up his or her mind not to buy your book, telling that person that he or she has made the wrong decision is kind of insulting. However, you can certainly ask for a new decision based on new information. You can say, “I understand that you didn’t realize that in my book I have a chapter that applies to your situation perfectly.” The idea is to frame the decision in a new way instead of implicitly criticizing the prospect for a decision he or she has already made.
It’s also important to realize that just about every sale happens in two phases. The concept sale happens first, and then the brand sale occurs. Before somebody can be sold on the idea of buying a Kindle, for example, that person first has to be sold on the idea of reading eBooks in general. This is why independent coffee shops don’t necessarily mind if a Starbucks moves into town. Having a set of competing shops sells the population on the concept of going out to get coffee. Once that happens, the shops can sell their uniqueness to the consumer. So don’t worry about it if your book on gardening happens to appear on Amazon.com along with competing titles on gardening. You and your competing authors will draw in an audience and sell gardening books as a concept, and then you’ll find a way to sell your specific book through differentiation.
Now that you know a few things about sales, it makes sense to look in more detail at the rest of the marketing process. According to Cutler, marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. That’s really what we’re doing as authors. We create value in the form of the written word that we hope will satisfy the needs of our readers, and we hope we’ll be able to make some profit from it.
Cutler’s list of classic marketing skills includes market research, new product development, pricing, negotiating, communicating, selling, and channel management. It’s easy to see how these skills apply to book publishing. You’ve probably already done market research while writing the book—you need to know how your book fits with other books on the market and who your audience is. New product development is also something to think about; if your book’s been out for a while, maybe it’s time to think about a second edition or a complementary title to generate new interest. Pricing is also a concern; how do you strategically price a hardcover book as opposed to a paperback or an eBook? You’ll probably need to negotiate with retailers to get them to sell your book, and that too is part of marketing. Communicating is obviously important too, and I’ve already written about selling above. Finally, there’s channel management. This means figuring out how to channel both information about your book and the book itself to the market. Traditional bookstores? Other retailers? Online?
Another way of thinking about all these issues is by using the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Making marketing decisions in these four areas positions the product as an appealing offering to a target market. Whether you know it or not, you’ve probably already made several of these decisions. You’ve already written your book and made decisions about its title and cover and so on; that’s part of thinking about the product. Your choice of publisher helps to determine the place and promotion of your book, but you’ll also need to think about those elements on your own.
Another important marketing concept is branding. A brand, according to Cutler, is a promise of value. Cutler also states that the ultimate strength of a brand is based on its performance and not just its promotion. Your book’s message, plus your personal experiences, skills, and professional or academic credentials all combine to create a promise of value. That’s your brand. And in brand management, there is a concept known as viral marketing. It’s the kind of marketing in which news about your book travels from person to person by word of mouth or e-mail or blogs. This is one of the best ways to take a book to market—by networking extensively and getting people to say to other people, “Hey, you’ve got to read this book.”
While we’re on the subject of branding, a common marketing practice is the creation of a brand positioning statement. A brand positioning statement begins with a description of the target market, the people you want your brand to attract (in your case, your target market is the people who you expect to read your book). The next element of a brand positioning statement is frame of reference. This is a statement about the target market’s point of view and what they find appealing about your brand. Then you should consider what differentiates your brand, what makes it different from other brands that share this particular frame of reference. Finally, a brand positioning statement should include proof points, some sort of support for the claims you’ve made about your brand, some reason why the target market should believe you.
Here’s an example of a brand positioning statement for a book on the AuthorHouse website. It’s a cookbook meant to appeal to businesspeople, and it’s a perfect example of the elements I just described:
For busy executives and stay-at-home parents who want to cook healthy and wholesome meals for their loved ones, From Corporate Suit to Kitchen Apron is a cookbook that offers an assortment of delicious and easy-to-cook recipes. It offers color pictures with every recipe and has a wide selection of recipes, from soups and salads, to main course pastas and desserts and jams.
This statement positions the book in terms of who it appeals to and differentiates it from other products on the market. Creating a similar statement for your book is one good way to start identifying your brand.
I hope you find these marketing tips useful. Now get out there and sell some books!