You don’t have much time to make a mark on readers once your book is published. Even after bookstores stock your book, they usually give the book fewer than 90 days (if that) to prove that you have the marketing platform and the public relations to drive sales. Good will means nothing here: good sales do.
Since people need to hear about you and your book several times a week for months before they feel motivated to purchase your book, you need to begin generating interest in your book well before it arrives in bookstores. Ideally, you want people to anticipate your book. You want them even to ask for it at bookstores, or reserve it online.
Then there’s the matter of bestseller lists. Your book may have respectable sales over the course of a year – especially if you’ve created a strong marketing plan – and never appear on any bestseller lists. That’s because bestseller lists at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today base their figures on sales for the past week, not for entire months or years, and Amazon bases its list on currently updated information – orders tracked immediately.
This means that for your book to reach a bestseller list, the majority of your target market has to purchase your book within a specific week. And since it is easiest to get noticed in the press in the first few weeks after publication you need to have a large number of people ready and waiting to purchase your book as soon as it hits bookstores. The more early sales you have, the more success you will have selling your book over the months to come
But first you’ve got to get those first- and second-week buyers motivated to pick up your book as soon as it’s available. And that takes a concentrated effort, which you should build into your marketing plan, if you can.
In our next post, we’ll continue to look at planning your book marketing.