Monday, June 20, 2011

Branding and Marketing a Book

This post is going to be a work in progress.  I'm finishing writing my first book and I am very excited about it.  But now that I have a book, my product if you will, how do I get people to read it?  Well let me tell you.  The first thing I did before I started writing my book was look at my target market.  Who would buy my book?  Does this target market actually buy books regarding this?  How big is this target market?  I even went as far as to consider hot topics right now.  My book is social commentary which is an incredibly hot topic right now.  I figured that if you put up something that was entertaining, controversial then it would possibly sell. 

Writing is a huge undertaking.  I managed to hit the 50K word level which is probably just about where I want to be.  A good read but a quick one.  Knowing what I have in terms of a product and who I want to sell to I next started considering the opportunities to gain publicity.  Talking heads can be annoying but they are also the biggest proponents of my type of book.  I also am going to contact local radio stations to set up inteviews about my book and my opinions.

I need to establish credibility so I'm going to book speaking engagements and also see if I can submit a couple of articles to news papers.  The end goal?  It's to pick up some credibility, spread my thoughts and honestly, just see how far a guy can get with a product!  It's almost an experiment of sorts.  I want to produce a commercial for it and see if it goes viral on Youtube.  I'm going to have a website for it also.  I really just want to see how big I can grow it.  I believe in my book and my thoughts.  I think that I have reasonable credibility and would love to write more.  I'm not doing it as a Morgan Spurlock type thing, it is a real book with real opinions, but combine that with my marketing ability it'll be interesting to see what I get.

As for the release date... TBD, the name... I have one but I want to make sure that it is what I want it to be.  I'll keep you updated.

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