This month Orna's planning workshop is focussing again on the three layers of marketing (part two). Below she explains what those layers are and how you integrate them together into a comprehensive marketing plan. To access the replay of Three Layers of Book Marketing Part 1, join Orna's creative business planning membership for authors and poets on Patreon. More details here.
Orna Ross, Director of ALLi
There are three layers to any book marketing plan. Last time, the workshop (Three Layers of Book Marketing Part 1) took a step back to do the groundwork exploration of those layers and evaluate where you are with each:
- your author platform
- your book positioning and placement
- your book promotion
This follow-on workshop (Three Layers of Book Marketing Part 2 will build on this foundational exploration to construct a concrete marketing and promotion plan for each of the three aspects.
Before diving in the most important thing to remember is that you cannot, and shouldn't, try to do everything.
When planning this week, this month and this quarter, don't think about all the things you can do. Instead, isolate the one thing that will most satisfy your creative and commercial intentions (pleasure, purpose and profits). And know whether it is:
- foundational work to establish your author platform
- foundational work to position and place your latest book
- a book promotion tool or technique that you're experimenting with
- a book promotion tool or technique you've decided to keep, develop and grow.
Choosing Your Current Book Marketing or Promotion Activity
Having done last month's workshop, you should now understand the difference between author platform building, book positioning, and promo activity. In the next workshop, we bring that down to the marketing or promotional activity you should be engaged in right now.
It's time to choose and commit.
Marketing: is it getting some aspect of your ACCESS marketing right? Setting up a transactional website? Your free offering? Your reader magnet? Your introductory autoresponders? Your first sales funnel?
Promotion: As well as selling books, your book promotion has to fit in with your writing and other publishing responsibilities. And it has to suit your temperament and inclination. So the idea with the list is to, firstly, take an author platform perspective on your overall offering and ensure you've done all necessary set-up.
Then, from a book positioning perspective, look at your latest book and establish the kind of book it is, its genre, niche and microniche. Its metadata. A one-sheet that gathers all necessary information together. And a list of comparable authors. (You can do this before the book is complete, indeed before you even get started).
Then, from a promo perspective, zone in on one thing that sets you tingling, that fires you up, that makes you feel energised, and enthusiastic, and eager to act. Do it. Observe the results and either:
- Drop it and choose something else
- Do it again, and again, getting better and better at this form of book promotion.
You'll need to plan your weeks and months to ensure you fit this promotional activity in alongside your writing. And you'll find that this marketing work will feed back into the writing of your next books.
Creative Business Planning for Authors
The next workshop will help with this, doing a recap of author platform and book positioning, answering any questions arising, and then working on putting together your book marketing and promotion plan for March, and for Q2 2021.
The workshop is on Friday 28th February at 5pm UK time. Find out more about Orna's creative business planning membership here. And about the workshops here.
