Marketing a book has parallels to marketing any other product or service. With that reality in mind, I have put together a 14P framework that can be used to conceptualize and plan any marketing effort.

Publication of books It can be defined as make a book in print and available to the public for purchase. Over the past decade, the first part, getting a book in print, has been dramatically simplified thanks to print-on-demand (POD) manufacturing. POD allows authors to avoid paying a large print run and manage inventory, and still have exactly as many books in print as necessary. The pages of a POD book can be in full color or black on white; the binding can be pocket or case (hard cover) with dust jacket or laminated cover.

The second part of the definition: make books available to the public for purchase – has been a marketing responsibility shared by the publisher and the author. Making it available can be thought of as having two components: making potential buyers aware of your book, and ensuring that copies are easily accessible for buyers to purchase.

Depending on your publisher or service, you will have access to different tools to create awareness and accessibility. It is best to understand the book selling environment so that you can be more effective with your marketing initiatives, at whatever scale and by whatever means you decide to promote your book.

MARKETING IS NOT THE SAME AS HIGH PRESSURE SELLING

Some people are terrified and paralyzed by the irrational notion that marketing is synonymous with personally harassing people, forcing them in some way to buy something they don’t particularly want or need. Relax! You really don’t need to transform yourself into an obsessive self-promoting ego-maniac to be successful.

Such common misconceptions can prevent an author from seeing that marketing is actually a creative exercise, an intriguing puzzle-solving process with limitless possibilities. Authors are very creative people and therefore well equipped to find wonderful solutions. All they need is a practical framework for decision making, plus some basic knowledge of book trading and the options available.

For your book marketing to be sustainable, you need to find a balance: weighing family life and other priorities, on the one hand, with your time and financial commitment for book sales, on the other. The balance is easier to maintain if you can select marketing tactics that suit your tastes, so that you can enjoy promoting your book, rather than feeling drained or uncomfortable. I am confident that you will be able to find the time and commitment to do some high-performing promotional activities. After all, you had the personal discipline to write an entire book, right?

Before you and I go any further, let’s agree on what marketing means and entails.

Surprisingly, despite the fact that an advanced college degree in marketing can be obtained, there is no consensus in the academic or business world on a definition of this word. I know this because I have taught marketing at the university level. Imagine the confusion when I switched to managing a communications consultancy, and clients would say marketing when they meant selling in person, or advertising, or creating distribution networks, or promoting franchises, running contests, or nearly so. anything. This was frustrating, sometimes embarrassing, and always counterproductive, until I came up with the definition shown below.

This definition is the conceptual framework for the marketing mix that you can develop. This framework has been used with remarkable success to generate tens of millions of dollars of wealth for authors and other business clients.

When developing a marketing strategy in any line of business, you will be thinking about how to allocate resources and align your efforts in several areas simultaneously, trying to juggle priorities. The classic ‘marketing mix’ that I once taught business students states that there are only four things (the 4 Ps) to consider: product, price, location, and promotions. Jerome McCarthy created this definition of marketing mix in his 1960 book titled Basic Marketing: A Management Approach. In the real world, the 4 Ps framework is clearly inadequate. I suggest that you use a more robust definition with 14 Ps when you are mapping out how to sell your new book.

Marketing is the process of creating, implementing, monitoring and developing a strategy for the complete marketing mix, which is:

• have a need product (or service)
• available in a convenient square (and time)
• for a satisfactory mutual price (value),
• ensuring that the correct segments of the public
• are conscious (the promotional mix)
• and motivatedpositioning),
• all in a way that leverages strategic advantages associations
• and contributes to the general objective (passion).

The promotional mix includes:

• Personal sales,
• advertising & public relations,
• paid advertising,
• and sales promotions.

Ideally, this will be done with respect and consideration for:

• financial Profits,
• tea planet (our environment)
• and people (society).

As you digest that morsel, consider that as you solve the puzzle of your book’s marketing mix, you will often be substituting creativity and personal connections for costly brute force strategies employed by major publishers.

The above marketing tip is an excerpt from Book Marketing Demystified by Bruce Batchelor [ISBN 978-1-897435-00-7].