Marketing: How to Write A Damn Good Book
This post is a resource for all the lessons I've written on the choices you need to make before you write anything for any book. That's where a Damn Good Book starts...
The phrase “Damn Good Book” I first encountered on J. A. Konraths’ 2010 blog post. All he said there that writing one was that was the first step to selling an ebook. Elsewhere on his blog, he just points out that this takes a lot of study and practice, and rejections.
But unbeknownst to him was a 1938 book by Walter S. Campbell called “Professional Writing”. (Now sadly out of print.) Campbell ran a training course for writers for nearly 20 years, widely reputed to be the best of all time, anywhere. All while he himself continued to crank out fiction and nonfiction of all lengths and formats. And also held a professor position with the University of Oklahoma.
In that book, he says that your first 7 steps to take before you write anything are choices which determine how your upcoming project will turn out.
This, then, is the first step of your next book, which is actually marketing. Yes, you start your marketing before you write a single word, or outline anything.
These are video lessons from my Writerpreneur OS course, and should be open to anyone - but I have to go back and make them free, so… (And of course, check at the very end where you can enroll in a short course which will help you set up your own home-based income stream from your writing.)
(Block quotes below are from Walter S. Campbell.)
Lesson 0301 Choose Your Subject
What do you choose to write about?
Does your choice of a subject influence how well you will write - and what readers will resonate with you?
We’ve been told to write what we know best. And editors recommend we write about “interesting people” - meaning criminals, chorus girls, millionaires...
Victor Hugo said long ago that there are no good or bad subjects - the quality of the story depended on that author’s skill and execution.
Lesson 0302 Choose Your Reader
“Books are written to be read.” That is true of any story or article, printed or digital.
The successful writer always has a reader in mind, even though that may be just one person - or even the writer himself.
Many of our well-known classics and modern works were written to please a single person only. Some of our best lyric poems were intended for a single reader - like love letters.
The writer is not like other professionals. In most of these, they only have to compete with local rivals. Unless he can rival the best writers in his field throughout the nation, or the whole English-speaking world, he may very well starve to death.
Some are too shy to compete with the best men in his field, so he chooses some fifth-rate author as his model, and so adding his own mistakes to the model’s.
Other than a cultivated minority of readers, the buying public imagines it is getting subject matter when it buys a book. But the author is actually selling only skill. That is all he can bring to the world — everything else he uses was here before he came.
Lesson 0304 Choose Your Effect on the Reader
Of all early American writers, Edgar Allan Poe was perhaps the most original. He was also the most professional, as one might expect him to be. Without professional technique, originality has small chance of expressing itself.
His little essay entitled “The Philosophy of Composition” is a fascinating read. Like most creative writers who attempt criticism, Poe discusses the problems which arose in his own work.
In this essay he takes a thoroughly professional point of view, and advocates planning to produce a certain effect upon the reader, and rigorously eliminating everything which does not aid in producing it.
Style, for our use, is best defined as the means where we use a subject, within the limits of our model, to produce the desired effect upon a certain reader, and so make our chosen market.
If your model choice is extremely successful—as it should be—you may have to diverge widely enough to catch a neighboring body of readers.
And in this matter, we find writers fall into three groups. There are (a) the independent experimenters, (b) the die-hard conservatives, and (c) the middle group, which uses old methods for new purposes. It puts its new wine into old bottles. Or, it may be, its old wine into new bottles.
Lesson 0306 Choose Your Market
An old saying goes that the life of an author consists of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
As Writing is not only an art but also a business.
Before books and magazines can be read, they must be printed. Printing is expensive, and someone must foot the bill.
The writer must divide his time between his study and the marketplace.
Lesson 0307 Choose Your Project
In the six preceding lessons, you have become familiar with the professional point of view, and have considered the fundamental choices which every writer must make before undertaking any literary project.
You should now have some idea what you yourself wish to do.
Your next step is the choice of your project, and you have to begin by making the six choices discussed in the earlier lessons.
The question you must ask yourself now is: WHAT IS IT I WISH TO Do? And another, equally important: WHAT METHODS OF WORK WILL HELP ME DO IT?
If you can’t answer those two questions by now, again review those lessons above. Lay their questions and answers out longhand. Then align those according to their priority. You’ll find your answers to the two questions above during that process.
I’ve just concluded a long study of what is good book marketing. Eventually, I threw it all away - since if you are wanting to write perennial-selling books, you need to write so well that you don’t need to run ads or promote in order to get them to continue to selling well. Not that you don’t promote - but aren’t despeerate to do so in order to have income rolling in every month.
The Damn Good Book, again, starts with these seven choices before you consider anything else. Once you have these internalized as a habit, then you have ingrained success into your life. Just that simple.
Again, marketing starts before you write anything - it’s in your choices.