John Wanamaker, the Gilded Age department store pioneer who was also something of a marketing genius made a famous observation about the money he spent on advertising. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
I would argue that while his observation is mostly still true today, we have many more tools to figure out which half was the wasted half.
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We always get asked, “When is the ideal time to start a publicity campaign?” And we really only have one answer to that: “Yesterday.” As nerve-wracking as it sounds, it’s the way of the world today. There is always something you could be doing to make sure that your book launch will be a success, whether it’s blogging, increasing your visibility on social media, or building buzz for your forthcoming book online. But surprisingly, there are really smart, experienced publishers who believe everything should wait until the book goes on sale.
When we worked for big publishers there were a few rules that seemed to be handed down over generations to publicists. One of them was that you never want any publicity to hit before books are available “in stores”. In fact, I was just in a meeting at a large publishing house the other day where I heard this repeated to me by a marketing director.
But these days a large and growing number of books are not purchased in stores, they’re purchased online. In our last post, we talked about the incredible market power of Amazon where books are purchased in a matter of clicks WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE EVEN IN STORES YET. It’s called pre-ordering and it’s a beautiful thing.
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Amazon is the largest e-commerce site in the United States, racking up 90 million visitors per month. Of course, now you can buy almost anything on Amazon, but they started out with books. Amazon and traditional publishers have an uneasy relationship because Amazon has so much market power. They routinely undercut other retailers on prices and have more customer data than any other retailer. They know exactly what you like because they keep track of everything you buy. As an author, it’s a dream to think you could tap into that data to market your own book.
At least it was a dream. Amazon has been slowly offering access to authors to it’s platform and its sales data. It is now an outlet for authors to act as their own publisher (á la Seth Godin, the first author to use Amazon’s new “Powered by Amazon” publishing program), track their own sales, and interact with and grow a dedicated fan base of readers, who are just clicks away from becoming consumers.
Whether you’re ready to try your hand at self-publishing or you’re happy sticking to the traditional publishing model, here’s a list of the 5 things every author needs to start doing on Amazon today.
