One of the most common questions I’m asked from potential clients is: “How do you gauge success?” Even though I’m asked this question frequently, I still find it difficult to answer.
The easy answer is sales. If your books are selling better than they did prior to the publicity campaign, then it’s easy to consider your promotional efforts successful. But launching a bestseller is a lot like launching a missile: everyone—publicity, marketing, and sales—needs to turn their keys. There have been a few instances where we secured amazing national media coverage, built the clients’ social media followings, and executed a handful of well-attended events, and the books still didn’t sell in the way we had hoped. This is usually a result of the sales team not securing strong bookstore placement or not having a marketing budget. Does that mean the promotional campaign we executed wasn’t successful? Not necessarily.
Even after working in this industry for nearly a decade, I am still an optimist. I believe that as long as there are readers, every quality book has the potential for success. The decline of traditional media, especially when it comes to book coverage, the surge of e-books being published, and the ever changing “rules” of social media can make book promotion more challenging. But if the book is well written and there are readers interested in the content, then with hard work and a solid strategy, I’m confident in its ability to sell.
Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse series, which inspired the hit series True Blood, often jokes that she is a ten-year overnight success. Now, every book she writes hits the New York Times bestseller list, but that wasn’t always the case. Did having a hit show help sell books? Absolutely. But she wouldn’t have gotten that hit show if she didn’t already have a solid fan base, positive publicity, and an established author brand.
In an ideal world, your publicity efforts would launch you onto bestseller lists the first time around, but the reality is, most authors don’t break out with their first book. Bestsellerdom takes time, sometimes years, or in Harris’s case, a decade.
To measure the success of a campaign, go back to your original goals. For most authors, the goal is to sell books. For others, it’s to leverage speaking engagements, teaching positions, or other paid writing gigs. Now ask yourself, am I closer to that goal than I was before the campaign began? You may have not sold hundreds of thousands of books on the first try, but did you sell more than you would have had you done nothing? You may not be booking speaking engagements with $5,000 honorariums yet, but did you speak on a panel or teach a workshop pro bono so that you have something to put on your résumé or website? You may not have gotten a guest column or regular contributor spot yet, but did you secure an op-ed or guest interview that may lead to something more regular? You cannot measure each individual campaign by whether or not you achieved your end goal; instead, you must measure success by whether or not you moved closer to that end goal.
This book is not meant to be read only once. Since every book you publish will be slightly different, I recommend scanning these sections each time you gear up for a campaign. If you switch genres, or go between fiction and nonfiction, I recommend rereading with fresh eyes and the new project in mind. You will take away different ideas and aspects than you have this time around.
But no matter what you write, some key takeaways remain the same:
As an author, your primary job description is to write books. You are not a publicist, and therefore, book promotion should not make up for the majority of your day. It’s easy to get caught up in all the things you have to do and become overwhelmed with all the marketing possibilities available to you. The purpose of this book is to outline and explain all the promotional tools you have at your disposal, and let you decide, based on your availability and target audience, which ones are most important to utilize. You do not need to do everything, nor do I think you should. It is far better to execute a few campaigns well than to focus on too many and execute them poorly.
Ultimately, this book is meant to empower you with information. Too many authors see marketing and publicity as something foreign and difficult to understand. In turn, these authors usually opt to not do anything to promote their books, or they attempt to ape other authors without any real goal or strategy in mind. Now that you have read this book and completed the exercises within, you have an overall understanding of the promotional process and what it takes to make your book a success.
I didn’t go to school for communications, or work at a PR agency, or intern at a publisher. I learned how to effectively promote books through research and trial and error. If I can learn it, so can you. You’ve already taken the first step by reading this book: research. Now, the only thing left to do is try.