Do You Need A National Sales Strategy?

Even if you don’t follow baseball, play along with my analogy to book publishing.

Major League Baseball has 30 teams but it doesn’t have a team in the majority of the 50 states.  In fact, a number of states have multiple teams, while 33 states have none.  Eight states have 19 teams. (CA-5; TX-2; IL-2; MO-2; NY-2; OH-2; FL-2; PA-2).  Some big states lack a team, including New Jersey, but bankrupt cities like Detroit have one.  Even Canada has a team.  So does a please that’s not a state – The  Nationals of Washington, D.C. 

Should your book sales and PR strategy follow suit?

Baseball, the national pastime, has missed 66% of the United States when it comes to the number of states it is in.  But it wisely has teams in some of the bigger cities and it has Minor League teams in a lot of the underserved areas.  Maybe you should sell and promote your book in a local or regionalized way, rather than attempting to cover the entire nation.

Think about the demographic of your anticipated readers.  Go where such people congregate and make a targeted effort to reach your likely reader, both in your marketing and publicity.

Sometimes you can be more successful by concentrating your efforts on a few places, rather than stretching yourself thin across the country.  Look to saturate a number of key cities and ignore the rest.  Once you build up traction in a handful of cities you can think about expanding.

If the strategy of targeted regionalism works for baseball, it can work for you.

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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 is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2013