The World of Marketing: Some Diagrams

Here are a series of diagrams to illustrate what I am talking about when it comes to marketing your book.

You probably often feel like the first diagram: your book seems small and excluded from a vast marketplace, full of overwhelming activity. Perhaps you have fallen for the misconception common to many, and try to match the speed and motion in that vast marketplace, wasting hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds on trying to get noticed. Or you may just feel pathetic and resigned about ever ‘getting a break’. Your book, you might think, is doomed to be ostracised from wherever the action is — it will soon disappear and die, you suppose.

Or you might choose to recognise that somewhere in all of that ocean of action is a subset of people who are already ‘warm’ to what you are offering, as is shown in the second diagram. These people, through their already established reading patterns and tastes, would probably like your book — they just don’t know about it.

The third diagram isolates these people. Now the marketplace seems less overwhelming and more of a place of open communication, where something like a sale might even be feasible.

It’s in diagram 4 that the magic happens.

Here, you isolate what it is about your own book that is similar to the books your potential readers like and are already reading. This automatically and immediately throws a spotlight onto what makes your books unique and different.

Similarity and difference: the magic rhythm of storytelling and of marketing. You can use both, in harmony, to attract your readers.

Stay tuned.