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Amy Snook
My Role:
Founder, Writer, Editor
Year:
2023
Service Provided:
Editorial and Writing
Setting Your Author Goals
What do you want your book to mean?
Whenever you’re embarking on a new creative quest, you have to ask yourself: What are my goals?
I don’t mean this in the stodgy business sense. You’re welcome to draft financial and sales goals if you’d like, but before you get there take a few steps back and think about your goals in two ways:
What do you want this book to mean for you, the author?
What do you want this book to mean for readers?
You can also start to think about your holistic author goals, about whether you want this book to be the start of a long and fruitful author career or if you want this to be a one-and-done type of deal, but for now let’s focus on the book you’re working on right this instant.
Not only is this important from a content perspective, but it will greatly inform your marketing strategy. This is one of the most essential exercises you can do.
Thought Leadership and Voice: Taking Risks
What you say is less important than how and why you say it.
I’m going to say something controversial: there are very few stories that haven’t already been told. There are a million business books with the same promises of wealth and success, a million self-help books guaranteed to move you through trauma and pain, a million memoirs about life’s ups and downs. Unfortunately, most people aren’t buying your book because they’ve never come across anything like it. They’re buying it because they believe in your ability to tell the story and they relate to and trust your voice.
How to Think Like a Marketer: Defining Audience
But I'm an author, why is this important?!
If you’re a writer, especially a fiction writer, and you see the words “think like a marketer!” you probably recoil in some mixture of fear and disdain. You’re not a marketer, you say, you’re a writer. Your job is to write moving and original prose, bringing readers into an enthralling story.
But if no one knows your prose and story exist, would they matter?
For some select few writers who can afford to write books but not sell them, perhaps it wouldn’t matter. Most writers I’ve met do rely on the income they generate from writing so it matters more than anything.
You may get lucky and have a publisher who’s adept at marketing and publicity and who’s willing and able to shell out a lot of money for a marketing campaign. This is rare and should not be counted on. You should count on doing a lot of the work yourself. I asked an accomplished writer who’s late in her writing career (she’s published 13 books now) what she wished she knew about the industry before she had published her first book and she said, “I wish someone had told me how important it would be to figure out how to be my own marketer.”
So, with that in mind, let’s talk about one of the first questions marketers ask: who’s the target audience?