Romance Your Plan – Romance Your Brand

Available now from:

(other print retailers to come)

ebook Library: coming soon
Audio Retailers: coming soon
Audio Library: coming soon

If you are looking for the .pdf download copy of the marketing calendar template, it is here: https://romanceyourbrand.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/marketing-a-year-without-writing-much.pdf

About This Book

After writing a genre fiction series, what’s next? Writing another one, that will both please existing fans and find you new readers at the same time. Zoe York has been there a dozen times. In this follow up to Romance Your Brand, the USA Today bestselling author breaks down how to pick the right marketing plan for your brand, your books, and your readers.

Let’s talk about:

scheduling sales
planning releases
brand re-vamping
audience growth
fandom building
goal setting
weathering low points
kicking off a new series

Chapter One: A Bird’s Eye View of Book Marketing

When I started publishing books, I thought book marketing was:

getting a blog tour
distributing advance review copies of books
sharing teasers from the book on social media
eventually getting into paid advertising (I didn’t want to do this for my first book)
knowing I would make my first-in-series free once I had four books in the series
having an email newsletter from day one
having a Facebook reader group from day one

That’s a pretty decent seven-point plan, to be honest. All of that was based on advice from others and observing what successful authors seemed to do. (The last point is indie publishing specific, but if you replace it with a 99 cent loss leader promotion, it’s still a pretty universal list of Good Marketing Ideas.)

But that action list is not what book marketing really is. It’s the end result of a marketing plan that really works best on a frontlist release launched with momentum. We’re going to go all the way back to the start, to a bird’s eye view of marketing, to make sure that the end result is mapped to our goals and where we are at in the publishing marketplace.

In my first nonfiction book, Romance Your Brand, I wanted my takeaway message for writers to be, “your brand will improve if you tighten the focus of what you write.”

In this book I hope one of the takeaway messages is, “your business plan will improve if you tighten the focus on what you are marketing, and to whom you are marketing that product.”

Really rolls off the tongue. Let’s condense it down. “Your plan is both: what you are marketing and who you are marketing it to.”

Once you have those two elements tight and focused, then the how to market gets infinitely easier.

Who you are marketing to is your audience.
What you are marketing is your product.

That latter point—what you are marketing—is the entire focus of Romance Your Brand. So if you haven’t read that I recommend going back, starting there, and making sure the product that you are currently trying to promote is in fact the right product for your brand. A gut-level check is to ask yourself, how excited are you to promote this product?

Author enthusiasm is the single most important factor in building a successful business. If we don’t both believe in our product and think everyone should read it…how are we ever going to sustain a lasting marketing plan?

(And I know I keep saying product instead of book. That’s deliberate, because the focus of this book is marketing, and in order to think about that clearly, it’s better to think of your books as products and not the uniquely perfect artistic creations that we both know they are. Once you set them out onto the commercial market, that is not all they are, at least.)

But after author enthusiasm, the second most important factor in building a successful business is learning how to objectively assess your books. How to know when they’re hitting market expectations, and how to know when they’re missing (and why).

One tool to help in that analysis is what I call A Bird’s Eye View of Book Marketing.

Once we understand the pathway from writing books to promoting them (including an objective assessment of which products to promote, and to whom), then the terms warm and cold audiences make a heck of a lot more sense.

A warm audience is made up of the readers you retain after they have enjoyed one of your books; a cold or lukewarm audience are readers you target for reasons, who might like your books because they like similar books.

Three key takeaways from this view:

• Marketing begins with market research

• Brand only exists in the marketplace

• Advertising works when you know who you are targeting and why

Your job as your internal Marketing Director is to understand this market analysis; get that right, and tasks can be outsourced (to yourself or to others).

So as we move into the nitty-gritty of book marketing, let’s remember that every individual promotion effort sits in this larger connected web of actions. In the next chapter, I’m going to start with the absolute basics. It will be the first of many checklists in this book, and I will again encourage you to be soft with the items on that list. Some will be for you to implement immediately, others will take time—either to figure out the resources needed, or to wrap your head around the why of the item.

When you have concerns, come back to this chapter. Look at the Bird’s Eye View of Marketing schematic and think, where does this fit?

Homework: On a blank piece of paper, draw out your own bird’s eye view of marketing. (Feel free to copy my diagram exactly) This will be the template upon which you build your marketing plan.