Early promotion is a key strategy for authors writing a book to promote their personal brand.
Early promotion gives you an opportunity to jumpstart your book’s success and tilt the odds of your book’s success in your favor.
It’s never too early to begin to promote your book!
Authors who don’t begin promoting their book until it’s at the printers or in stores are sabotaging their book’s success and undermining the ability of their book to build their personal brand. Authors should begin promoting their book while writing it.
Authors must promote their book while writing it.
6 ways to simultaneously write and promote your book
Here are 6 ways you can get a head start on your book’s marketing and promotion while writing your book:
- Expert testimonials. Identifying and contacting experts in your field, including authors of competing books, is one of the most efficient ways you can market your book while writing it. Begin by assembling a “wish list” of high-visibility experts in your field, and ask them to allow you to send your book’s table of contents and a sample chapter, or two, to them for their comment. Expert pre-publication testimonials can generate instant credibility for your book.
- Speaking. Begin getting the word out by speaking locally about the your book, the benefits it offers, and the problems it can solve. Each time you speak, you’ll become more comfortable with your topic and able to discuss it more confidently. In addition, by saving time for audience comments and questions. you’ll undoubtedly uncover new topics to address in your book. Start with local associations and business networking groups, then explore explore opportunities at local colleges and adult education groups. Find out who’s teaching courses in your area of expertise, and offer to deliver a short presentation to their class.
- Teleseminars. Teleseminars and teleclasses are similar to speeches and presentations, except you don’t have to travel; you can speak to a worldwide audience of hundreds from your computer. Explore resources like Instant Teleseminar and Go to Meeting. instnt
- Article marketing. There are two aspects to article marketing. One is to approach the major magazines in your field, both consumer and trade, and offer them an opportunity to excerpt a chapter from your book in the issue closest to your book’s publication. The other type of article marketing consists of writing short, 500-word, articles and submitting them to article portals like ezinearticles.
- Blogs and social media. Blogs and social media offer authors numerous promoting opportunities to blog about their book and share their writing experiences. By sharing important content ideas, plus the personal ups and downs of writing your book, with your followers builds anticipation for your book. More important, once your book appears on Amazon, you can create prepublication momentum by encouraging your followers to pre-order copies.
- E-mail newsletters and tips. Newsletters and tips sent via e-mail permits you to promote your book in an editorial, as opposed to an advertising, format. By sharing some of your advice and ideas while writing it builds familiarity with your forthcoming title and teases your market into wanting more.
Finding the time to write and promote
None of the above are tremendously time-consuming. Once you have identified your book’s table of contents and begin writing, you can easily co-ordinate your pre-publication book marketing with your writing.
Look for opportunities where you can adapt subhead topics in your book’s table of contents into potential articles, blog posts, speeches, or tips.
With a little advance planning, you’ll quickly become used to making each idea and each word you write into both content for your book and content for your marketing.
More important, you may soon find inspiration and pleasure in sharing your information with prospective readers, looking forward to their comments on your blog posts and their questions during speeches and teleseminars!
As in so many other aspects of getting published, success is a matter of commitment, consistency, and habit. In many cases, the result of simply taking the time to plan how you can co-ordinate the writing and promotion of your book and implementing your plan as efficiently as possible.
Building and promoting your personal branding success with a book is a reward for planning, commitment, and consistency.
