You’re finished! You’ve typed, The End and you’re thrilled. Congrats! But now comes the marketing. So where exactly do you start?

Where do you even start with marketing?

Thomas: Maybe you don't know where to start. Maybe you're overwhelmed by the amount of material out there and all the suggestions on where to begin. We're going to talk about how to get the best results at the end of the road.

James: Many novelists say, "I'm not a marketer. I don't know where to start." These days you can type "marketing" into a search engine and find thirty years' worth of material on the first page alone.

Thomas: Most everything you'll find in those first results is not where you want to start. Here's why. It goes back to a quote from Sun Tzu, who wrote The Art of War 2,000 years ago. He said, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest path to victory, but tactics without a strategy is the noise before defeat."

Strategy is the big picture. Tactics are the details.

Most authors read a blog, sign up for Facebook and Twitter, and start doing tactical things without figuring out the big picture first. It's a lot of noise and effort without results, and they get frustrated, burn out, and start hating marketing. Many of you who hate marketing have had this exact experience with a previous book, or with your current one.

So we want to help guide you on that path.

James: We're not trying to get you to love marketing. We want you to make a truce with it, to do it in a way that doesn't burn you out. You should come out of your marketing seasons thinking, that wasn't so bad.

Who are you writing for, and who are you?

Thomas: Tip number one is to think first who, then what. The first question is, who am I writing for? A lot of authors never answer this, or they say they're writing for themselves. That's fine, as long as you're okay with yourself being your only reader. If you want people to read your book, you need to write for other people, or have a representative reader in mind.

Some very successful authors have written for a specific person. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for his son Christopher, and Christopher was his target audience. Every decision about the book came down to what Christopher would like. Last I heard, it sold quite a few copies.

The second question is, who am I? What makes me different? A lot of authors try to be as much like some other successful author as possible. The problem is, we already have a Mark Twain. We already have a C.S. Lewis. We already have a Stephen King. Trying to be the next Stephen King isn't going to work, because we already have the best Stephen King. He's alive, and his name is Stephen King.

James: We'll do a podcast at some point on branding, on how you brand yourself. This is really the first question of branding, who am I, what makes me different. I don't care how good a Beatles tribute band is, they're still a copy, and you won't pay as much to see them. You can't go see the actual Beatles anymore anyway, not since 1966, but you get my point. However good a copy you are of Stephen King's voice and style, you're still a copy. You have to be you.

What are your strengths, and what should you delegate?

Thomas: To dig deeper into who you are, ask what your strengths are, what you're good at. This will help your marketing, because you want to play to your strengths and delegate your weaknesses. If you're good with people and good in front of audiences but not good with technology, craft your marketing around being in front of people, and get someone else to handle the technology. If you're a good writer but a terrible editor, don't edit your own work. Find a co-author or an editor. If you're a good writer but need someone to hold you accountable, find that person.

I worked with an author who didn't have much of a platform himself, but he had a lot of influential friends. So we built his marketing strategy around calling those friends and asking them to promote his book. Those friends had email lists of 20,000 addresses and blogs with hundreds of thousands of readers. His entire first printing sold out within weeks, even though his own platform wasn't big, because we found his strengths and played to them.

Be honest about your weaknesses too. A lot of authors see a weakness and decide to turn it into a strength through sheer effort. That works when you're young, maybe at twelve you have your whole life ahead of you, but if you're older, life is too short. Your strengths will only become excellent if you focus on making them better.

James: Some of you are probably thinking, this is old material, you're familiar with a book and website called StrengthsFinder. For those who aren't, here's the short version. They tested two groups, slow readers and fast readers, and gave them both the same training. The slow readers improved significantly, increasing their speed and comprehension by 600%. The fast readers, who were already skilled, improved by around 2,000%. You can take a strength and make it extraordinary, or focus on a weakness and get a little better.

Thomas: That matters, because in a world of six billion people, the only way to stand out is by doing one thing exceptionally well. In our founding fathers' era, there were only a few hundred million people on the planet, so there was a lot less competition. There are more people living in Harris County, Texas today than lived in the entire United States during the Revolutionary War. It was a lot easier to stand out then. Now you have to focus much more than you used to.

That's principle one, first who, then what.

Why does training matter more than experience?

Thomas: The second thing I'd recommend is to start with education. There's a saying from Boy Scouts, a week of canoe training is worth a lifetime of paddling around. You can do the same bad techniques your entire life and never get better.

There are advanced paddling techniques you'd never pick up if you didn't study paddling. I see this most in blogging. Authors keep writing, faithful and persistent, but they never invest time in training. They write bad blog posts with boring titles that get no comments, over and over, without getting better. If they'd invested a little in training early on, they would have improved over time. Instead, they reinforce bad habits, and when they finally do get training, they have to unlearn what they've learned before learning the right way.

Where can you get good training?

James: Books, there are so many great marketing books out there. Blogs too, there's a lot of free material. I'd also recommend writing conferences, specifically ones for novelists. A writing conference isn't just about craft and editing, it also covers PR and marketing. We talk a lot about going to writing conferences, for the connections, the relationships, and the encouragement, but also for hands-on technique.

Thomas: A couple of books I recommend on marketing. One is Platform by Michael Hyatt. It's mostly geared toward nonfiction, but a lot of the techniques apply to fiction marketing, and he has a section specifically on it. Another is Inbound Marketing. We'll link both in the show notes.

I run a web design and marketing company, and we don't let anyone interview for a job here until they've read Inbound Marketing. Their very first interview is a discussion of that book. We once had an 18-year-old digital native applying for a job, and he still had to read it before his interview. No one is exempt.

James: And finally, I'd recommend Bestseller Society, which has a great number of resources.

How do you find your target reader?

James: I cut my teeth in radio, on air for years before I sold radio time, so I understood both the product and the marketing side. Everything we did centered on the question, who is the target? If it was women aged 25 to 44, we built an image of this soccer mom. We knew what her van looked like, how many kids she had, where she shopped. Everything was focused on her, because we knew our station wasn't going to appeal to the headbangers.

I see this again and again with novelists. They say the audience for their book is everybody. That's not true.

Look at the best-selling books or movies of all time, they still missed a huge number of people. Think like a radio station, think like an advertiser, and figure out who your target is. I'd also recommend writing a book proposal, even if you already have a contract, because in that proposal you have to drill down on exactly who your book will appeal to and how you'll sell it.

When I wrote my second book, Book of Days, my sell line was, "National Treasure meets M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, without the aliens." That's thinking like a marketer. I want to describe the book in a way that makes an editor, an agent, or a reader say, "That sounds interesting." Writing a book proposal forces you to figure out what other books are like yours and who your target audience is. It focuses you.

Thomas: I can imagine some of you thinking, if I pick a narrow audience, people outside it won't buy my book. In the website world we call this a persona, a fictional person that everything is written for. You call it a demo. But narrowing your audience is like painting a red dot in the center of a target. Are men going to listen to a radio show aimed at women? Some will. You're not screening anyone out. But aiming at that red dot means you'll hit the target far more often than if you're trying to write for everyone.

James: Consider that Hunger Games was a YA book targeted at a 15-year-old girl into adventure. That's pretty narrow. And then it exploded and spilled over into everybody else.

Thomas: That's right. If you're faithful with the small things, if you can thrill a small niche, they'll talk about you to a broader audience. If a big niche is just lukewarm about you, you won't get many sales at all.

Once you've answered these bigger questions, set up a Facebook page, a Twitter account, get on Goodreads. We'll have future episodes on how to do those well. But you don't want to start on the nitty-gritty tactical stuff until you know who that Facebook page is for, who you're talking to. If you don't have answers to the bigger questions, everything about running that Twitter account is going to feel hard. Stop and answer the deeper questions first. Once you have good answers there, everything else gets easier.

That's what this podcast is here to help with. If you're feeling overwhelmed, keep listening. Subscribe, and we'll walk you through these things step by step. Send us your questions too, we want to make this podcast as useful as possible for you.

Show Notes:

• Strengths Finder 
• AuthorMedia.com