Targeting Your Promotion Strategies for Success

So as you’re promoting your product or book, do you know what is your metric? Obviously the key is sales, right? So, it’s good to know when you do something like a radio show or you’ve received a book review, what were the sales figures produced? 3L Publishing is different when it comes to royalties. In traditional publishing you don’t get to hear the sales figures on a regular basis, which can make it difficult to know if your methods are working. When you work with me my royalties are distributed about two months behind and you receive the sales figures.

Let me give you some examples. Douglas Stearns did a few radio show interviews. Not all of them “paid off” as well as the others. I was able to share his sales figures on the fly. So Doug knew what methods were working.

The question (and it’s the super secret sauce to the burger) is how do you identify what “might” (meaning nothing is certain) pay off? Here are some important tips.

Identify your niche. Now perhaps you have a general fiction book and you’re thinking, “I don’t really have a niche.” Every product, every book has a niche. You have to identify it. In Doug’s case his niche is science fiction, but much deeper than that his book’s theme address questions of alien life. He has drilled down to: science fiction and aliens. Then it addresses one more thing: spirituality. So, now he has three areas to pursue: science fiction, aliens and spirituality.

Make yourself the go-to expert. Now you just wrote a book on something like aliens, are you really an expert? Yes. The media will see you as an expert. You researched that topic enough to write a book about it, right? Don’t shy away from holding the title of “subject matter expert” because you feel your expertise lacks in the area. As a SME (what they call you in the industry) you can be frequently called upon by media as a go-to source of information, which gives you an opportunity to continually be interviewed on the same subject and even on the same show. Have you ever seen “regulars” who are constantly being invited on media shows? They got asked to return because they’ve become SMEs on their subject.

Identify media that targeted toward your niche. So, I am pitching Habits and Attitudes by Lance Casazza. It’s a spiritual, self-help, and motivational and inspirational book. I identified potential media sources to pitch. I’ll be looking for queries for sources looking for life coaches, relationship experts, business success experts, sources for entrepreneurs and others. I know the niche and then I need to find media interested in the niche. General media and news sources will have need for particular topics while magazines like Psychology Today would make an ideal source.

So the key take aways from this article:

Identify niche + become an expert + identify niche media = Press Coverage = Sales!!!