Monday, June 15, 2020

Authors Aren’t Silenced Even When Public Speaking Remains Off Limits

Speaking for Fun and Profit and Selling Books | Barnett Marketing ...

What do you do if you are the type of person who does well when in a group or seeing people in person, where your style of delivery, your touching, and your personality serve you well? In the age of corona, it means you adjust or perish. For authors, how well they handle our changed times could be the defining moment in their careers.

To market a book successfully, one must master at least some of these areas:

·         Social Media
·         Traditional Media
·         Digital Marketing
·         Advertising
·         Public Speaking
·         Networking
·         Direct Marketing/Bulk Sales
·         Affiliate Sales

Certainly, if you don’t like to do something, or you are not good at it, or you don’t have the time/funds to do it, you simply will not do it. But that just means you need to excel in other areas. If you fail across the board, your book dies. Pretty simple math there, right?

So, what do authors do who normally attend physical events to speak, hawk books, and shake hands with crowds?

Well, you can do the following:

·         Organize smaller outdoor gatherings, as permitted by various localities. Mask and all, you can begin to address people in person.

·         Rest up, enjoy the break from the road and having to always be on for others. When things do open up, post-corona, you will be roaring ready!

·         Use this down time to secure future speaking gigs. Spend time marketing yourself and introducing yourself to those you need to network with and impress.

·         Where possible, morph to the online world. You can charge for zoom webinars and you can make videos for sale. You can develop an online course and you can be interviewed on people’s podcasts. Get out there – right from your own home.

·         Skip all of the speaking and online seminars and just put your time, effort, and money into other things. Build up a better website. Expand your social media footprint. Use the phone more and connect with those you haven’t been able to see in person.

·         Use this time to produce more product and content so that when things get back to normal you are armed and ready to go!

There’s no corona playbook to refer to. We all make this up as we go. But the principles of marketing and the fundamentals of publicity rule – do more of what you can do; ignore what you can’t or won’t do. The world changes every day and we can’t sit back and just wait or hope for things to return as they were. Our lives are upended, the way cabbies got dislocated by uber, the way malls got upended by amazon, and the way Netflix has reshaped the movie theatre landscape.

Authors have to be flexible and forward-thinking. They must take advantage of the tools available to them and to opportunistically seek out their own moments to succeed. Their voices do not need to be silenced just because public speaking in 2020 is banned.

The weapon all authors have is words. My advice: Use them, whether written or spoken, whether online, in person, by phone, or though some other means. Just as the form of books has expanded and evolved to audio streaming and e-books, so should the marketing efforts of authors. Diversify and you shall prosper.


PLEASE CONSULT THESE TIMELY RESOURCES

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Brian Feinblum’s insightful views, provocative opinions, and interesting ideas expressed in this terrific blog are his alone and not that of his employer or anyone else. You can – and should -- follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels much more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2020. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s Independent.  This was named one of the best book marketing blogs by Book Baby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and recognized by Feedspot in 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. Also named by WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” He recently hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo 

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