Publishers sign celebrities because they already have an audience ready and willing to buy their books. But authors who are not yet known need to build that audience in order to develop a market for their work.
You do this through a series of transitions from book to platform and back again. A strong website gives you the opportunity to influence and shape people’s perceptions and to transform the curious into the committed. Everyone today – from publishers to people at bookstores – look at how you handle social media and audience engagement. They want an author who’s there for them beyond the book.
Without an established group of followers who are eager to buy and consume the next thing from you, your book is basically an unknown entity. You have to bridge that gap to sell books.
Building a strong platform is the single most-effective form of branding and positioning that an author and businessperson can do. Platform-building is also the single best book-promotion strategy possible — something that can be done in preparation for the publishing and promotion of your book or something done in tandem with, or as part of, your book promotional efforts. Either way, it brings huge benefits to your book and your business.
We can tailor a package to your individual needs, whether you’re beginning or established. You want to be perceived as the expert, and the one people will turn to. We’re the experts to turn to when you want others to notice your own expertise.
Transition from Book to Business
When it comes to a Bestseller Campaign—especially a Major List Bestseller Campaign—the same factors remain crucial to your success. Yes, you’ll want to Market Test Your Big Idea to make sure you’re writing about a topic with a decent-sized audience.
But what really counts is the strength of your network, which you’ll want to evaluate to determine:
- The amount of people who know about, like, and trust you
- Your ability to communicate with this audience, and
- Your network of allies who can help you promote your book
To make your Best Seller Campaign work, you’ll need to generate thousands of strategically-timed sales. And you’ll need to tap into both your network and your (previously-built) audience to do it.
If you don’t have an audience, we can help you attract and grow one with an Audience Engagement campaign.
But if you have no network of allies, you’re in for a tougher challenge, and probably a slower journey onto the Best Seller Lists.
Getting down to the nitty gritty of actually selling real books to real people by capitalizing on your audience and allies isn’t as fun as talking about sophisticated persuasion strategies, but it’s one of the hard parts of taking over the world as a celebrity expert.
And embracing and overcoming the harder realities is actually a hallmark of how Promote A Book operates.
The problem with most author advice “experts” and websites—including many of the most popular—is that the end goal of their advice lies in finding a publisher or getting published.
They don’t ask nonfiction authors the hard questions around taking stock of their platform and network and audience. They don’t think its part of the process. But whatever publisher you find will think it’s an essential part of the process.
And, if you’re on this site, you don’t just want to be published; you want to have your book’s success boost your business’s success!
That’s the reason to take stock of your network, and it’s also the essential difference between Promote A Book and the “just get a publisher” crowd.