Becoming a bestselling author starts well before the book is finished.
The secret? Well, there isn’t any, really.
What it takes is a marketing plan, a social-media strategy, a way of engaging an audience of people who will become your fans, readers, consumers and clients.
This is a lot, but you can do it little by little and arrive at bestsellerdom.
The publishing world has changed tremendously in even the last few years, and more and more books are being published each year, many by entrepreneurial minded authors who take on publishing themselves. But even for them, gaining an audience involves knowing how to market to an audience – and finding readers.
You can promote your book to bestseller – fiction or nonfiction (though here we’ll be speaking mainly of nonfiction) – but you need to build your audience. Over the next few months we’ll be looking at how several authors have built their bestseller career – and how you can too.
Consider Roy H. Williams. He’s a noted marketing and advertising executive, and the founder of the unconventional business school, The Wizard Academy, in Austin, Texas. He’s also a bestselling author.
But becoming a bestselling author didn’t start with his book.
It began with a simple newsletter.
And this simple newsletter began even before the days of internet marketing. (Of course, he now is a master at that too, and his newsletter is eagerly clicked on in the inbox of thousands of eager fans.)
Roy knew from heading his own advertising and marketing firm that repetition and the combination of sight and sound were key to memory and brand recognition. He also knew that the personal touch kept his clients happy. But Ray realized that if he spent the many hours needed to call and chat with everyone one of his clients, he’d have little time to do actual work on their behalf. So, he figured that chatty, personal – and insightful – newsletter, written in his own distinctive voice (no anodyne business-speak here), would be a way for him to stay in touch with his client base and also to spread the word about his business
The “Monday Morning Memo” thus began. At first it was a fax sent to his network of clients and became the pre-internet equivalent of a viral success. People who received his newsletter photocopied, re-faxed and passed it on to colleagues, other radio advertisers and business people around the country. Its popularity soon led the industry publication Radio Ink to sign Roy to write a column. In which he expanded on some of the insights that appeared in the “Monday Morning Memo,” which he continued to distribute to an ever-expanding base of subscribers.
The success of the memo and his magazine column gave him a toehold for his first book, “The Wizard of Ads.”
We’ll look at how that book came about in my next post.