Book Sales and Marketing for Introverted Writers
"Authors are not entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are sales people, and sales people are extroverts. Authors are introverts." While I acknowledge that an introverted personality will have more difficulty getting out there and "selling themselves" than a natural extrovert, the fact remains that authors who do extra marketing on top of their publishers' efforts will see the most success. That's the reality of this business. There's no getting around it.
Anyone who has read a few of my blog entries and articles (such as Authors Are Entrepreneurs and How Proactive Authors Sell More Books) will know that I am a strong proponent of self-promotion. To be a truly successful author, you have to treat book publishing, sales, and marketing as your own business. The same holds true whether you take today's supported self-publishing route or go with a traditional trade publisher.
Each time I write about this, I receive emotional comments from various writers that look something like this:
"Writers should be paid to write. Period. Promotion is the publisher's job."
"If I were a car manufacturer, I would not be expected to go on the road and promote my product after I manufactured it. I would be paid to make the car and someone else would be paid to sell it."
When I read comments like, "if I were a car manufacturer, I would not be expected to sell my product after I make it," I immediately see the mindset of an employee rather than an employer/entrepreneur. This is what writers need to understand—they need to shift their mindset from that of "employee" to "employer" so that they take the necessary steps to ensure their own success.
Sure, if you were hired as an employee to manufacture cars for someone else, you wouldn't be all that interested in selling them. Why would you care? You'd receive a salary for your labour by the company's owner regardless of the sales. (It is also worth noting that your income would be capped regardless of the sales.) But if you owned that business and you were manufacturing those cars for yourself, not only would you be concerned about the quality of cars you were manufacturing; you'd also do everything in your power to ensure you had successful sales. Otherwise, you'd be out of business. On that note, here's a rhetorical question for all the writers who believe sales and marketing is "someone else's responsibility" but their own: did you write the book with your publisher's success in mind, or did you write it with your own success in mind?
There are several ways even introverted authors can improve the sale of their books:
Don’t wait for your publisher to take charge and invest their time, money, and effort into selling more of your books. Take charge of yourself right now. The most successful authors are the ones with an entrepreneurial spirit. They aren’t sitting back and waiting for someone else to bring them success; they are proactively venturing out there each day to find that success for themselves.
Not only is it possible to move a surprising amount of books at a signing, but it is also a great way for a new author to get used to being "on display" in public without the "pressure to perform and entertain" they may experience at a public reading.
If writers feel shy about contacting a book store to arrange a signing, they can hire a publicist or friend to do it for them.
Another possible substitute for a public reading is a video reading. Why not hire a film producer (or a friend) to film you reading from your book? Then post it on YouTube where it will be available to the public to enjoy.
A blog is not only a great place to showcase your topic and writing skills to an interested audience, but it allows you to stay in front of that audience indefinitely. Do you want to know why companies like Coke and McDonald's still continue to advertise even after all their success? They do it for "top of mind awareness" so that their brand is the first thing that comes to mind when someone thinks about having a beverage or an affordable treat. If you stay in front of people, they will recall your name when they require your product or service. The more they hear your name, the more they will begin to trust it as the valued source of whatever it is you're offering (branding). And, the more they trust your brand, the more apt they are to not only buy from you once but also keep coming back in the future.
PPG is a Canadian book publisher dedicated to serving Canadian authors. Visit our book publishing website to learn how you can publish your book today.
Good article. Strange comments from writers. There have been many literary author/entrepreneurs in the past, including Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press), who published their own books.
I'm an author and a publicist who has worked with another author. Big publishing houses in the U.S. don't "hire" publicists for a book, they have an in-house staff, which handles many books at once. There are no marketing budgets for unknown authors and, in most cases, it behooves writers to hire a publicist themselves. My client was smart this way and had both the in-house publicity person and me working on her book. Guess who got the bigger, better press for her...me. It doesn't have to be that expensive, especially if you hire a boutique pr person. My client had a non-fiction book and an established platform. The publisher also didn't allow any budget for or schedule book signings, as they said they weren't worth the bother. I had to do the book signing launch with no budget. The publisher sent a poster.
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"Big publishing houses in the U.S. don't 'hire' publicists for a book, they have an in-house staff, which handles many books at once. There are no marketing budgets for unknown authors..."
The same can be said for the small Canadian literary press I once worked for. I assume the same can be said for the larger Canadian trade publishers. And, of course, the same can be said for my supportive self-publishing house, PPG. This is why I try to stress to authors that they are entrepreneurs who must help themselves ... to set them up for the reality they will face in this business.
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