Have You Prepared Your Books Marketing Plan - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career

Have You Prepared Your Books Marketing Plan - Personal Branding Blog - Stand Out In Your Career Much has been written about book proposals. But, less has been written about book marketing plans. This is wrong! What happens after your book is published has a great deal to do with whether you become published and profitableor just published. Proposal versus marketing plan A book proposal is a direct-marketing document intended to persuade publishers to edit, print, and distribute, your book. It’s a sales piece intended to communicate the inevitability of your book’s success. Your book’s marketing plan, however, is intended for an audience of oneYOU! It’s not intended for your publisher. Rather, it’s intended to help you identify the revenue streams that you will develop after your book is published. The necessity for planning your books back-end profits Your marketing plan should describe profits you will earn above and beyond royalties from sales of your book. It should describe in detail your market, the products and services you will offer it, and the steps you will take to earn this income. The reason to prepare your marketing plan now, before you sign a publishing contract or write your book, is that the success of your marketing plan depends on the way your book publishing contract is negotiated. Consulting and coaching Let’s assume, for example, that you plan to use your book as a way of enhancing your visibility and credibility among your target market. At the simplest level, you will want to include your web site address at several points in the book. Knowing this goal, you can insist that the publisher agrees in writing to include your web site address in specific locations in your book. Remember: in publishing, promises don’t make it! Let’s take a worst case scenario. You and your acquisition editor agree that you can include five mentions of your web site address in the book. However, as often occurs, the acquisition editor, after signing the contractfades out of the picture. The new development editor then informs you that author’s URL’s can only appear in one place, in the author biography hidden toward the rear of the book. When this happens, what happens to your coaching and consulting plans? Likewise, you may have planned to buy books in case lot quantities for resale and/or distribution to your prospects and clients. Understanding this before you sign the contract, you can specify the right to purchase books for resale at normal trade discounts in your contract, ensuring your “profit pipeline” won’t get turned off. If you know that you want to offer telephone coaching for $75.00 a call, for example, you can negotiate written permission to promote this service within the body of your book. In publishing as in so many other areas, it never hurts to get it in writing, and the time to do it is at the contract stage. Planning your other back-end profit and promotion opportunities Other back-end profit opportunities based on your book’s title might include: Articles, columns, newsletters Yearly updates Special Reports Teleclasses and seminars Speeches, training, workshops Audio/video recordings Choosing a web site address based on your book’s title Free downloads of sample chapters from your web site Fee-based web site services Templates and worksheets based on your books title The possibilities are endless, but nothing can happen ifafter signing a contract that doesnt fully protect your intereststhe publisher limits your ability to promote your business and your web site in your book! I was heartbroken when I found out I couldnt present Looking Good in Print-branded seminars and workshops, but had to choose a more generic title. Its not that the publisher was evil, its more that I didnt understand then what I now understand (which is why I created Published Profitable to keep others from making the assumptions and mistakes that cost me so heavily at a time when I should have been on top of the world). Lessons from my experience It’s imperative that you prepare a marketing plan that analyzes post-publication profit opportunities and describes the steps needed to make them happen. You need a savvy literary agent to represent you and negotiate for the rights you need to make your book publishing project profitable for you in the ways you want it to be profitable. You need a bulletproof book proposal and sample chapters that are so compelling that publishers couldnt afford to let you get away and go to one of their competitors. When publishers make a book offer, their initial boilerplate contract may be totally inappropriate for your needs. The stronger your book proposal packageand the more experienced your agentthe more likely you’ll get what you want (need) in the final contract. Jay Conrad Levinsons example of the importance of back-end book profits Jay Conrad Levinson often recounts that the first volume of his Guerrilla Marketing series earned him thirty million dollars. But, he goes on, only about $35,000.00 of that thirty million dollars came from the book itself. All of the rest came from back-end profits! Get a head start on your journey to becoming both published and profitable by filling out my free online Book Proposal Planner. Remember: its relatively easy to get published, but its much harder to become both published and profitable! Author: Roger C. Parker, as a “writer who understands design,” and a “designer who understands copy,” can help you create a marketing program based on these skills. Roger has a 20 year record of helping others successfully master and apply the latest technology to marketing challenges.