Sometimes It’s Hard To Keep Up With Yourself

The thing about book marketing and book publicity is that it comes down to a numbers game. The more e-mails you send out, the more calls you make, the more doors you knock on – the more likely you succeed. Another axiom is garbage out, garbage in. If you contact people that are not good sales prospects or media placements you’ll end up communicating with dead ends or people who will waste your time. Nevertheless, when the volume of your outreach increases, you’ll need more time to respond to those who answer you back.

As a marketer of book marketing services, I am constantly reaching out to others. Some days I am reaching out to thousands of people directly and other times it’s more indirectly through social media. I always look forward to winning new business and developing new clients, but what I struggle with is keeping up with all of the queries or responses sent my way. Sometimes I have several hundred e-mails to respond to.

What does one do?

·         You can’t ignore them.

·         You don’t want a delayed response.

·         You don’t want to respond with a canned message.

I try to prioritize which e-mails I respond to but I first have to size up each one to assess who needs what. Then I tackle spam or junk mail.  Just deleting it makes me feel accomplished. Then I try to respond to easy ones – e-mails that don’t require a long or thoughtful response. But eventually, it comes down to important e-mails that are competing for my time to answer them with lots of thought and detail. Sometimes the best thing is to schedule a call with them – feel them out, see what they really want or need, and then use e-mail to fill in the details of what we spoke of.

If you are at all good at book marketing it means you are aggressive and go after media and book buyers. You can’t wait for them to come to you. This means lots of outreach, and thus, lots of follow-up. But when you see the results of your work you feel a bit more happy and confident about your approach.

And it likely inspires you to do more outreach and of course, more responding. It’s a good cycle, even if it feels hard to keep up with yourself.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This blog is copyrighted material by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2013