You must create your books with the understanding that your promotional efforts can only be as effective as the content of your books enables them to be.

Talent isn’t enough. You need motivation—and persistence, too.

—LEON URIS

8 Subsequent: You must base your promotion on the belief that real profits come subsequent to the sale.

The difference between guerrilla marketers and unenlightened authors is that the latter think promotion is over when someone buys their book. The reality is that 68 percent of lost business is lost because of apathy after the sale.

A sale is either part of a never-ending circle of business and communication with a reader, or it is a straight line heading out of your life in the direction of Chapter 11.

Guerrillas know that the sale of their books to new readers is only the end of the beginning. They understand the immense potential value of every reader, so their goal is to create customers for life. Guerrilla marketing is based on the belief that the customer is everything, the sale only chump change.

If readers like your first book, they may create an endless circle that they complete every time they buy something you offer. What your readers buy after reading the first book is what will produce the greatest profits for you.

9 Convenient: You must run your business so it is convenient for those you serve.

Convenience is an advantage you have over the CEOs of the Fortune 500. Thanks to technology, the CEO of your enterprise can be accessible to the people you need and who need you: your editor, your publicist, the media, speaking bureaus, and the rest of your professional networks—and most important, your fans.

You need all the allies you can find in your quest for success. To benefit from their help, you must make it convenient for them to reach you.

Knowing that they can always reach you fast will be an incentive for people to call you instead of competitors. When your business grows big enough, you will have someone filtering your communications, so you receive only those calls that only you can respond to.

10 Amazement: Put an element of amazement in your marketing.

Your marketing has to communicate what will most excite potential readers about you and your book. You can use what excites you about your books and what they can do for your readers.

Make the Amazement Factor one criterion for choosing ideas to write about. What can you use in promoting your books that will amaze book buyers? Guerrilla publicist Jill Lublin calls this “the Ooh-aah Factor.”

What amazes us about Guerrilla Marketing for Writers is that there are so many ways for you to promote your books, and most of them are either free or you can get paid for using them. You can get paid for promoting your books by giving seminars, you get paid again for selling your books at your seminars, and then you get paid royalties for the books you sell! Ah, the joys of working for yourself!

And the technology you need to build and run your business keeps getting more powerful and less expensive. If you use technology creatively and effectively, it’s like riding a rocket instead of a turtle to reach your goals.

11 Measurement: You must use measurement to judge the effectiveness of your weapons.

If you do a publicity tour, you can measure its effectiveness by how many media interviews you had, how important they were, the responses of your live audiences, and how your efforts affected sales.

When you are creating the promotion plans for your books, establish how you will measure the effectiveness of your weapons. At the end of the year, you will use this information to help you set up your promotion calendar. A preview: Eliminate what fails and double up on what works.

12 Involvement: Create and sustain involvement between you and your readers.

If readers love your first book, you have the opportunity to make them lifetime fans of your work and your related products and services. Guerrillas know that it costs six times more to attract new fans than it does to sell to satisfied readers. So when you add new readers to your network of fans, do whatever you can to enlist them in your publishing network for life.

The real payoff from readers only comes if you can make them lifetime fans who:

• Buy all of your books for themselves and their friends and tell everyone they know that they must read them
• Come to all of your talks and book signings
• Can’t wait to purchase whatever you create

You can’t pay someone to do that. It can only happen because of their passion for your books and their pleasure at being involved with you and your career. Your Web site is the perfect weapon for staying involved with your readers and for them to stay involved with you.

Every time new readers buy one of your books, they are investing in you. If they invest the time to read your book and like it, you have the opportunity to invest your time in them and start an enduring relationship.

Use your biography or a page in the back of the book to invite them to become involved with you as a member of your literary community by:

• Attending your talks
• Contacting you at your Web site
• Following you on Twitter
• Becoming a fan of your books on Facebook
• Writing you at the address in your books
• Calling you at the (preferably toll-free) phone number in your books

You can show your involvement with your fans by being cordial when you contact them, by being helpful to them, and by asking about them.

13 Dependent: Learn to be dependent on others and encourage them to be dependent on you.

It may seem impossible for you to be an independent entrepreneur but remain dependent on others for the success of your business. But you depend on your suppliers, including your publisher, as they depend on you for something to sell.

You and your readers depend on each other. They depend on you to provide them with good reading and the related products and services you offer. You depend on them for the profits they generate. Guerrillas thrive on the power of teamwork and win-win dependencies that enable everyone to achieve their goals.

If you choose to engage a PR firm to assist you with book promotion, this two-way street also applies.   Willy Spizman, CEO of The Spizman Agency, a media and public relations company that specializes in book promotion – (SpizmanAgency.com) – says that you should have a similar relationship with your public relations agency.  You should depend on the agency to aggressively promote your book through  insightful and targeted media campaigns, while the agency depends on you to deliver a unique product and platform worthy of national press.  Ultimately, when everyone pushes and pulls in the same direction, magical things can happen.

14 Armament: You must have the armament of guerrillas—the technology and the skills needed to promote your work.

The growing sophistication of laptops, smart phones (hello, iPhone), toll-free numbers, fax machines, and the Web enables you to take your office with you, so you can work and communicate around the globe. With global wireless services nearly perfected, you are able to reach anyone, anywhere. And now with Google Voice, it doesn’t make a difference where in the world you are.

The electronic miracles that keep tumbling out of our high-tech centers will continue to provide you with the arsenal of a twenty-first-century guerrilla.

15 Consent: You must gain the consent of those to whom you want to market.

A guerrilla who operates a camp in New York runs small ads in camp directories and in the classified sections of many magazines. She also takes booths at trade shows. She doesn’t sell anything; she just offers a free video. The video doesn’t sell anything either; it just asks for a personal visit.

It’s at the visit that she sells the camp to the parents, not only for their children, but for relatives and classmates. Gaining consent minimizes her marketing costs and maximizes her profits.

By being a source of information or entertainment through your books, talks, and Web site, you are gaining consent to market to your readers and audiences.

David Hancock is the Founder of Morgan James Publishing and The Ethan Awards, and has co-authored nine books including Guerrilla Marketing for Writers and The Entrepreneurial Author. David also sits on the Executive Board of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula. NASDAQ cites David as one of the world’s most prestigious business leaders and reported to be the future of publishing.

Visit David on FiledBy

You must create your books with the understanding that your promotional efforts can only be as effective as the content of your books enables them to be.

I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers.

—MICKEY SPILLANE

1 Content: Publishers waste millions of dollars a year buying and promoting books that fail.

No amount of money or marketing can overcome a book that doesn’t deliver. So your first challenge is to write a book that your networks assure you is as good as you want it to be. The content of your books will determine how you sell them to publishers and promote them to book buyers. Content precedes commerce.

2 Commitment: You must make a commitment to your marketing program.

Once you decide on the best promotion plan for your books, and your networks agree with you, make the commitment to stick with it.

The only time you can safely stop promoting your books is when you’re ready to stop writing them. Before then, commit yourself to the Rule of Five: do five things every day to market your books. Think of it this way: A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.

3 Investment: You must think of marketing as an investment in your future.

Most best-selling authors don’t strike gold with their first book. Their sales grow with a succession of books until they write the breakout book that catapults them onto the best-seller list, where they stay for the rest of their careers.

Until your promotional efforts pay off and you become a successful author, consider the money you spend on promotion as an investment that will pay for itself many times over.

4 Consistent: Your marketing must be consistent.

You must make your promotion consistent so that, over time, the media and your readers become more receptive to you and your books. One of the weapons in chapter 18 is the marketing calendar that you will create and tweak as needed every year. But once you’re convinced about the most effective way to promote your books, don’t change your approach. Make your promotion, like your books, consistently first rate.

Also be consistent about the frequency with which you write your books and when they are published. One book a year is the usual pace.

5 Confident: You must make potential readers confident in you.

Consistency creates familiarity, familiarity builds confidence, and confidence is the most important factor in determining what makes consumers buy. It’s more important than quality, selection, price, and service.

6 Patient: You must be patient with your marketing.

If you’re doing all you can for your books, take two more steps:

• Follow up on your efforts.

• Have patience with your promotion plan, the sales of your books, and the development of your career.

7 Assortment: You must use an assortment of weapons to ensure the success of your marketing.

Small businesses shouldn’t try to use all the weapons in their arsenals at once, but should unleash them over time with a well-thought-out plan. Unfortunately, this is a luxury writers don’t have. Unless publishers make a commitment to a book, they test-market it with the first printing. To sustain your publisher’s belief in your book’s future, you have to create maximum promotional firepower for it during the crucial four- to six-week launch window when it’s published.

Firing as many weapons as you can integrate effectively into your plan is the best way to accomplish this. If your book doesn’t gain momentum fast enough, your publisher will give up on it and go on to other books.

Make it your goal to use at least sixty weapons. The wider the assortment of weapons you use, the wider the grin on your face will be when your royalty check arrives. However, if you can’t use a weapon effectively, don’t use it at all.

A Web site alone will not make your books successful, nor will a media kit. Regard every weapon as 1 percent of your promotion plan. The best way to guarantee the success of your books is to use as many weapons as you can.

The more weapons you unleash on publication and the more completely you integrate them, the more powerful each of them becomes. Unity and variety are two of the keys to victory in the publishing wars. The bigger your arsenal, the greater your victories.

A bookseller who was chosen to receive the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year Award was using seventy-four guerrilla marketing weapons (and he was still trying to figure out how to use the other twenty-six!).

Stay tuned! The remaining Secrets coming soon…

David Hancock is the Founder of Morgan James Publishing and The Ethan Awards, and has co-authored nine books including Guerrilla Marketing for Writers and The Entrepreneurial Author. David also sits on the Executive Board of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula. NASDAQ cites David as one of the world’s most prestigious business leaders and reported to be the future of publishing.

Visit David on FiledBy

Every book you write is a separate enterprise with its own fate and its own reckoning that balances income against expenditures. For guerrillas, the only business criterion that counts is profits.

Marketing is anything done to sell a product or service and maintain relationships with the people who make the business possible. Fortune 500 companies spend millions to market their products.

But like most entrepreneurs, authors don’t have millions to spend. They have to be guerrilla marketers. They have to use unconventional weapons and tactics that substitute time, energy, and imagination for money. That is the essence of guerrilla marketing.

The book didn’t sell because I didn’t promote it.

—THE MOST VISIBLE HUMAN BEING ON THE PLANET (President Bill Clinton, author of Between Hope and History. Meeting America’s Challenges for the 21st Century)

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GORILLAS AND GUERRILLAS

What are the characteristics of guerrilla marketing as opposed to traditional marketing? Guerrilla marketing differs in twelve ways:

1. Traditional marketing uses as big a budget as possible; guerrilla marketing substitutes time, energy, and imagination for money.
2. Traditional marketing is geared to big businesses; guerrilla marketing, to owners of small businesses with a big dream but not a big bankroll.
3. Traditional marketing measures effectiveness with sales; guerrilla marketing, with profits.
4. Traditional marketing is based on experience and then judgment that involves guesswork. Guerrilla marketing is based on psychology—the laws of human behavior that determine buying patterns.
5. Traditional marketing recommends that businesses increase their production and then diversify by offering allied products and services. Guerrilla marketing recommends that you maintain your standard of excellence by focusing on writing your books, and diversify only if you can create synergy that helps sell your books without lowering their quality.
6. Traditional marketing encourages linear growth by adding new customers. Guerrilla marketing also encourages attracting new customers but recommends that you grow your business exponentially by using service and follow-up to create more transactions, larger transactions, and referrals from your present customers.
7. Traditional marketing advocates destroying competition; guerrilla marketing urges you to cooperate with competitors and create win-win opportunities with other authors.
8. Traditional marketing believes that one marketing weapon alone can work; guerrilla marketing believes in the synergy created by a combination of weapons.
9. Traditional marketing urges businesses to count their monthly receipts to see how many sales they’ve made; guerrilla marketing recommends that you count how many relationships you make each month because each relationship can generate many receipts.
10. In the past, traditional marketing didn’t encourage using technology because it was too complicated, expensive, and limited; guerrilla marketing has always embraced technology because it’s simple to use, reasonably priced, and limitless in its potential.
11. Traditional marketing identifies a handful of marketing weapons that are relatively costly; guerrilla marketing begins with a base of one hundred weapons, more than half of which are free, and urges you to create others.
12. Traditional marketing intimidates small-business owners because it is enshrouded in mystique and complexity; guerrilla marketing removes the mystique and puts you in control.

David Hancock is the Founder of Morgan James Publishing and The Ethan Awards, and has co-authored nine books including Guerrilla Marketing for Writers and The Entrepreneurial Author. David also sits on the Executive Board of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula. NASDAQ cites David as one of the world’s most prestigious business leaders and reported to be the future of publishing.

Visit David on FiledBy

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

—RICHARD BACH

ON OUR PREMISES

This Guerrilla Marketing for Writers blog series is based on the following premises:

• You want to build a successful career as an author.
• You want to sell your books to or be published by a major publisher.
• You know little or nothing about publishing and promotion.
• You want the recognition and rewards you will earn by becoming a successful author.
• You are writing adult fiction or nonfiction or children’s books.

Guerrilla marketing is not new. Authors have been using the techniques for years, but this is the first time these weapons have been assembled and integrated into a comprehensive approach to selling books both to publishers and to book buyers.

We believe that more than one hundred weapons can be adapted to help authors promote any kind of book, from poetry to textbooks. It will also benefit speakers, consultants, and other service-based entrepreneurs.

A WHAT-TO

You will find practical advice throughout the series. But Guerrilla Marketing for Writers isn’t a how-to, it’s a what-to.

The goals of this series are to

• Make you aware of how important promotion is to your books and your career
• Show you the range of free and low-cost weapons you can use to be a guerrilla marketer and, in turn, make your books successful
• Be an enjoyable reading experience

Guerrilla Marketing for Writers will help you promote your first book, but its value will grow with every book you write. The more books you write and the more weapons you use, the more powerful guerrilla marketing becomes.

This is why we use the phrase “your books.” You’ll see the word “your” often because the books you write are yours no matter who publishes them, and we want you to feel pride of ownership for them and accept responsibility for what happens to them.

The best editor, publisher, and contract can make an enormous difference in what happens to your books. But ultimately, how well you conceive, write, and promote them will be the most important factors determining their fate—long before and forever after the pub date.

DOLLARS AND SENSE

One of our goals is to make sense of your role in promoting your books and to show you how to save money and make it in the process.

• Sixty-three weapons in the are free.
• Twenty are low cost, meaning that they either cost less than one hundred dollars or cost only as much as you can afford to spend on them before you use a substitute. For example, over time, printing and mailing your media kit will cost more than one hundred dollars. However, you can spend only what your budget allows and E-mail just your news releases when you exhaust your budget.
• Eight weapons are expensive, so you will have to use your “guerrilla greenbacks”, your ingenuity, or your patience until you can afford them.
• Twelve weapons can help you earn a living. If, for example, you can build your speaking career well enough, you won’t have to worry about royalties.

THINKING LIKE A GUERRILLA

We’ll discuss “minting” a new form of currency, guerrilla greenbacks, to help you minimize expenses. But until you write your breakout book, you will have to take Theodore Roosevelt’s advice to “do what you can with what you have where you are.”

Even if your promotional budget is limitless, you still don’t want to waste money, and you still want your promotional campaign to have maximum impact. Whatever the size of your budget, we will help you get the biggest bang for your buck.

One goal of your promotion plan is to convince potential publishers of your commitment to your books. But you also need to prove that you’re a professional who knows what you’re doing.

The most important thing we can do for you is hidden between the lines: inspiring you to think like an entrepreneur. Don’t think like a writer who has something to say; think like an author who has a lifetime of books, products, and services to sell—an author who knows what it takes to make books sell and will be totally committed to doing it. Then you will be a guerrilla marketer and an entrepreneurial author.

Hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs around the world, who started businesses of all kinds with more hope, commitment, and ability than experience, have adapted these weapons to make their businesses succeed.

We are confident that if you follow our advice with all of your books, using more weapons as you go along, your profits will soar. We’re counting on you to prove we’re right. Welcome to the guerrilla family.

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David Hancock is the Founder of Morgan James Publishing and The Ethan Awards, and has co-authored nine books including Guerrilla Marketing for Writers and The Entrepreneurial Author. David also sits on the Executive Board of Habitat for Humanity Peninsula. NASDAQ cites David as one of the world’s most prestigious business leaders and reported to be the future of publishing.

Visit David on FiledBy

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that you are relatively familiar with Twitter – that is to say, even if you don’t actively use it, you know that Twitter is a unique form of social network comprised of millions of people posting “microblogs,” or very brief updates about their activities, interests, and whatever comes to mind. If you are not familiar with Twitter, I recommend reading the excellent Wikipedia article on Twitter, which covers much of its utility, its history, and its significance as a communication medium.

Twitter’s greatest power comes from its openness. Anybody can read anything written by anyone. Anybody can take something someone else has written and forward it on. This means that any given message, thought, Tweet – whatever you want to call it – has the potential to reach an audience exponentially larger than the one it was initially sent to, if people find the tweet interesting, relevant, and worthwhile of passing on to their online community.

So. What can you use it for? Well, the possibilities are fairly limitless, but here are a few ideas:

• Events: Make sure to Tweet about upcoming events (book signings, speaker engagements, etc.). Better still, Tweet from the events. Anything interesting? Tweet it.
• Promotions: Give away free copies of a book, or free tickets to an event, to the first person who Tweets back the correct answer to a given trivia question, or similar. You’d be surprised at how quickly giveaways like this can get Re-tweeted by your followers. (Just make sure, if you’re doing trivia, that a quick Google search doesn’t immediately reveal the answer!)
• Opinions: Your readers follow you on Twitter because they think you are interesting. Harness that interest. Is there something in the news of the day that is similar to the focus of your work? Tweet a quick opinion. Make it interesting.

Those are just three ideas, all playing to one theme: be interesting, relevant, and worthwhile of engagement. Your goal is not only to keep your existing readers interested but to make your Tweets sufficiently interesting so your readers will engage and Retweet them out to their online community. The viral nature of Twitter is only one of the best ways to begin building the foundation of an exponentially growing audience.