Book Marketing Breakthrough 08 - Where To From Here?

We've covered seven lessons before - examining the lives of many who have solved parts and pieces of Book Marketing problems. Now let's see what we've examined...

Now, you can take all this and do something with it. Change your life. Change the world. Make things better for you, your family, the people you know. And help the people who need what you know.

Let's review:

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Researching

One thing I learned well during my lifetime of studies was how to analyze, how to research, how to write up my findings.

First, you narrowly follow just your own bliss. You don't take up anything that doesn't fascinate you, that doesn't involve you emotionally.

While doing that, you amass anything and everything that might possibly have some solution to what you're trying to solve.

You realize one thing right off: Probably 97% of everything out there is useless crud. But the 3% you distill out of that is spun gold.

Another tool pops up: When the Student is Ready, the Teacher Appears. So be always open to that small still voice within. You'll get nudges to find some old book you read and dismissed years ago. You'll suddenly want to buy a used hardback remaindered out of a library and then dig down to a small section where only that author had researched an answer to your question – where you go through a small pile of post-its so you can find the missing spun gold the author didn't even know was there.

Research is persistence. It's faith in yourself. It's keeping your goal bright.

And it's also learning from the long, twisting, blind alleys you ran down into with all that energy. On your way back up to the main trail, you salvage what you can out of your notes – for later use, maybe.

I'd often found that I had the material around me, but didn't trust it until I'd tested it myself.

That's the third concept of effective research: Test everything. Keep only what's true. (Not surprisingly, I uncovered that as a paraphrase of a Bible verse.)

You're looking for commonalities – things that keep coming up.

Mostly models. People call these systems, patterns, hacks. You want to find outlier successes and then discover the model they were using. That is the exact basis of the bestseller “Think and Grow Rich”. It's the concept that Anthony Robbins and Jay Abraham used – they simply collected models from everyone they met.

Models will start repeating. They'll be stated in different forms, using different nomenclature or slang. But when you test a version for yourself, in your own words – and it works – then you add that to your portfolio of models and keep researching until your main question gets answered.

Of course, the next test is whether you can write it up in a format that others can readily understand.

Once you've turned all you learned over to someone else, only then you can take the next question off the stack and start a new process on that.

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Expectancies

While there is a great deal more to this subject available through Earl Nightingale's Strangest Secret recording and transcript, one of the books mentioned there is Wake Up and Live by Dorothea Brande.

Here we've extracted an approach to writing that will enable you to bypass any trained-in Will to Fail, and start creating the mental habit of expecting your inevitable success when you write.

Practically, you can trace any of the common frailties authors experience (such as “writer's block”) directly to ginned-in mental fears (also defined as False Evidence Assumed Real).

To vanquish fears, you need only Act As If It's Impossible to Fail.

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Writing

W. S. Campbell created and ran probably the most effective Professional Writing training course in history. And had the results to prove it.

Campbell discovered that there was a big gulf between the first published book by any author and their next. Decades worth.

In studying this, he found that students had no real manner of resolving this as there were no effective training routes or courses which worked to shorten them.

He uncovered that their main problem sorted out into four areas. They needed:

to write continually, regularly,

to study carefully the specific market where he wanted to write in order to gauge what that market would buy,

to study the works of the continuing top-selling masters in each market area, learning their techniques but not copying their writing style – and beyond all,

writing only about subjects which interested him greatly and involved him emotionally.

Both Campbell and Brande recommend ways to study the masterworks and learn writing devices and techniques that would translate into their own perennial-selling books.

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Marketing

Tim Grahl worked out what worked by studying the actions effective authors took. He narrowed these down to only what routinely worked.

This became the basis of his own marketing work, which resulted in his having five authors on the NYT bestseller list at the same time – a feat unknown by most book marketers, let alone someone working from a small town in rural Virginia.

He worked it down to four actionable elements in a system:

1) Permission: Set up a website where you can send people to find out more about you, and ensure that they have plenty of opportunities to opt into your mailing list. (As well, you should have ads pointing to these in the backmatter of your book, as well as in the footers to your emails.

And set up your emails to ensure new subscribers are welcomed and oriented, so they stay.

2) Content: Create routine writing, video, and/or audio that enable people to find out more about you. This will attract audience and enable them to self-select – subscribing to your list because you're both a good fit for each other.

3) Outreach: Borrow audience of podcasters so that they can hear you and identify with you and then go to your website to subscribe.

Similarly, attend conferences with other authors and begin collaborating with them. Again, so you can get recommended by them to their own list and audience – while you do the same for them open-handedly.

4) Sell: You have to ask your readers to buy. Meaning: you have to build offers for your subscribers and make them available.

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At the end of this chapter, we see that Grahl's system is applicable to other examples given, and also align to W. S. Campbell's version of the Greek 3-act structure:

1) Hey! 2) You! 3) See? 4) So...

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Interest – Get their attention.

Engage – Ensure they know you're there only to help them.

Enjoin – Persuade them to become part of your community of like-minded people.

Enact – Give them something to do, a call-to-action (i e Buy your offer or become an affiliate emissary.).

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Entrepreneuring

Earl Nightingale's amusing anecdote of how he became a millionaire at age 35 had Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich as it's underlying basic.

Nightingale's story is one of a person taking an interest, developing this into a talent, and then leveraging that ability into a life-long entrepreneurial pursuit.

You'll also see as a writer that he was employing the elements and systems we described earlier.

All from his own initiative and follow through.

Dissect that story for yourself:

1) Offer: Nightingale built a word-of-mouth-ready recording, and created a record and transcript-booklet ready to consume.

2) Audience: He also had an established audience through his radio shows.

3) Promotion: His manager then gave a copy of that record to his radio station that played it.

4) Fulfillment: His manager then fulfilled that offer at a premium price to all who called in, using his salespeople for fulfillment.

5) Entrepreneurship: The demand built and was met – such that he was later able to build an additional business out of it.

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Writing That Goes Viral

44 years after Nightingale's seminal success, another writer got bitten by the question of how word of mouth actually works.

The point of Malcolm Gladwell's perennial-selling classic, The “Tipping Point”, was to explore how word of mouth spread messages through a viral basis.

About two decades later, his work inspired two other texts, each based on scientific studies to explore the two main approaches to creating viral works: being memorable and being remarkable.

The Heaths' Made to Stick gave us a set of traits found in all sticky messages:

Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, Stories.

They also found a set of three common plots found in the bulk of inspirational stories:

Challenge, Connection, Creativity.

Jonah Berger's Contagious was based on the methods which spread sticky messages. He found these principles present:

Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories.

Each set are themselves aligned around mnemonic devices.

Our use of them is to make our book marketing more effective. The approach in writing is to include the sticky traits and also contagious principles as we can. If we are aiming for inspirational works, we'd also align their plots to one or more of the three mentioned above.

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Building a Community

We are all interconnected.

The exchange necessary for communities is openhanded giving and help.

Its formula seems to be as simple as Amanda Palmer’s “Give-Ask-Accept.”

Its only rule is that the gift has to keep moving.

The Kelly True Fans model then says you can earn support from a much smaller community of patrons who support your work, rather than a huge number of anonymous readers purchasing undervalued and discounted books.

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How This Can Help You

This course evolved while I was wrapping up the first three books in this series - and became part of the fourth book (see below.)

In that fourth book are three mini-courses — this is just the second lesson of the first course in there. The reason for this last book is to give you actionable material to get you started simply. And speed your own progress.

Meanwhile, comment below or email/DM me with any questions you have. Or get this full book as available below.

And you can always buy me a coffee…

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TOC for these Lessons:

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The rest of these lessons are available in this beta-edition book.

From my recently released anthology (in beta)

Now available - get your copy now..

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