#1 What is Book Marketing Anyway?

If you reduce marketing to its simplest form, it’s nothing more than connecting with people who like the same things you do. And the most important word in that sentence is the word ‘connecting’.

Most authors and creative people love the work they do, but they want to be left alone to do it. How many times have you, as an author, thought:

• “Can’t everyone just leave me alone so that I can write?”
• “I have to get a traditional book contract because I don’t want to have to sell my book,”
• “I’ve decided to self-publish but I’m dreading the marketing side of things.”

I get it. No one wants to run around asking people to buy their book or to talk about how wonderful it is (even if it is). It’s uncomfortable and embarrassing. And it makes us think of salespeople who won’t take no for an answer. The type of salesperson who hounds you until you buy what they’re selling just so they’ll leave you alone.

This hard sell makes marketing feel like it’s a dirty word. Like it’s something shameful that shady authors do in back alleyways. Or, to be less dramatic, it might just feel boring, administrative or overwhelming to you. But that’s not what I’m talking about when I mention marketing to my authors. At the end of the day, all marketing is, is connecting with people like the human being you are so you can share the thing you love or created with them. You’re not selling them anything, you’re simply sharing a message so that your readers can decide for themselves if they want what you have or not.

Now that may sound simple, but you’re probably wondering, “OK, Lou, but how do I do that?”

Connecting with your readers

The good news for you is that you already know how to do it because you naturally know how to connect. You’re a human being and that’s what humans are hard-wired to do. In fact, you do it every day, and you’ve been doing it since you were born. Human beings are social creatures who build relationships through communication and who make sense of the world through storytelling. So, you can make marketing work for you as an author if you take an authentic human approach to marketing and build a relationship with the humans on the other side of the screen, or wherever you’re speaking about your book, so that they can decide if they want it by the time you’re ready to sell it.

The difference between marketing and selling

This can help you shift your mindset from seeing marketing your work as something negative to seeing it for what it is: a basic human connection which is enjoyable and fun and fulfilling. But to make this shift, you have to be able to make the difference between marketing and selling. Marketing is all about creating connections and making friends with people based on mutual interests while selling is about serving those same people by giving them something they want in exchange for something you want.

So, now you’re probably thinking, “Ah! So selling is the shameful thing that shady authors do in back alleyways!” And to that I’ll answer, “No, no one is doing anything shady and shameful anywhere in this podcast!”

Selling is actually something that is crucial to our survival and our happiness as a species. It has helped us evolve, raised our living standards and enhanced our quality of life. And here’s something really interesting to think about – selling isn’t an unnatural adaptation humans have gone through in response to the merciless world of commerce, it’s actually a fundamental human trait. No one is good at everything. If we had to depend on ourselves alone to get food, grow crops, make clothes and do all the things necessary to stay alive, life would be hard. And it wouldn’t be much fun. But if I’m good at raising cows and milking them daily and you’re good at growing wheat, the expression ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? I give you milk and you give me wheat and we both get to sit back and relax for a bit instead of working ourselves rugged.

Now, you’re probably wondering what all this talk of milk and wheat has to do with you and your children’s or YA  books? Well, I’m simply trying to make the point that selling is good customer service and good for both sellers and buyers. You’re an author and you’ve written a book, magazine article or poem. Who have you written it for? If it’s just for you, then you don’t have to market anything, but if you’ve written something you want people to enjoy, you’re going to have to connect with those people so they know it exists. That’s the whole point of you having written something in the first place. So, marketing and selling are good things as long as what you’re selling is useful for and wanted by the people who are buying it. So, you can see that this has nothing to do with pushy salespeople and the hard sell.

What purpose are your books serving?

For you to make the transition from starving-in-the-garret author who is unenthusiastic about marketing to someone who is excited and actually enjoys marketing themselves and their work, ask yourself these two questions:

• Will the lives of the children who read your books improve once they’ve read them? Will they have learnt something, have grown up a little, made sense of the world around them or just enjoyed themselves during the delicious time spent reading your books?
•  Will the world be a better place with your book in it than without it?

If you answered no to either of those questions, then you need to go back and revise your work! But I’m guessing that most of you are answering yes, so why wouldn’t you want your book to get out there and change people’s lives? And how do you think it’s going to get out there to do that? And last, how will you be able to continue creating if you can’t feed yourself?

Now, if we go back to the beginning and look at the types of things authors might say about marketing, they were:

• “Can’t everyone just leave me alone so that I can write?”
• “I have to get a traditional book contract because I don’t want to have to sell my book.”
• “I’ve decided to self-publish but I’m dreading the marketing side of things.”

But thinking this way isn’t serving you or your readers. Writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you want people to read what you’ve written, you need to ask yourself the question: How can I help YOU?  And by YOU, I mean your readers. If you shift your mindset to think about how marketing can help the children who read your books find them and enjoy them, then marketing doesn’t seem like such a chore or something shameful anymore, does it?

(And incidentally, I just want to take a minute to say that even traditionally published authors need to market their work today because publishing houses are moving away from providing this service automatically within a contract. They may do some marketing but not the way they used to and a lot of the responsibility of getting the message about a new book out there falls to the authors)

How to market yourself as a children’s author

To end off today’s episode, I’d like to send you on a marketing mission. But don’t worry it’s a fun one – all the missions I give you are optional but they’re fun, practical and will help you build the business of marketing your books more easily than you think is possible.

I’d like you to visit Meg Medina’s Instagram page. Her handle is @megmedinabooks in one word (I’ll put that information in the show notes you can find it easily). For those of you who don’t know who Meg Medina is – she’s a Newberry medallist and New York Times bestselling author for children of all ages. Meg is also the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2023-2024.

So, as you can see, Meg probably doesn’t need to market herself as much as a lot of other children’s authors but she does. She regularly posts reels about behind-the-scenes information on her life, her publishing journey, what it’s like being an author and the people she interacts with as an author. Her warm and authentic personality shines through in her reels and, while she looks comfortable behind the camera, she probably wasn’t always that way. I don’t know Meg but I feel like I do. And if I hadn’t already been a fan of her writing, I would be one now! She’s warm and intelligent and she has a great sense of humour. I want to buy all her books!

Sharing information with readers on Instagram the way she does is Meg’s marketing strategy. It can be that simple. And it can be that fun. Yours can be too. This is what marketing as a kidlit author looks like. Are you up to the challenge? I think you are!

Links

• https://www.instagram.com/megmedinabooks/
• Kidlit Marketing Made Easy(er) podcast