Perhaps the biggest barrier I faced with the publication of A Warrior’s Soul was a lack of brand identity and a clear marketing platform. I couldn’t sell books if no one knew about me or the book. More problematically, A Warrior’s Soul is a niche novel, a bully drama with a martial arts theme (think Ninja!) targeted toward middle-grade readers (grades 4-8). How would I know if my plan would be successful? Of course, I couldn’t, but my experience provides some encouraging evidence of success and a lesson or two for new authors. Importantly, none of these specific strategies were explicitly designed to sell books. The main purpose of any marketing campaign is to raise awareness of a product; actual sales are an indirect, tangible but secondary outcome. For example, the pre-publication sale campaign for A Warrior’s Soul was designed to sell books only as a secondary objective, not a primary one. The main purpose was to use the launch event to raise awareness for the book overall (which of course would hopefully result in sales down the road.) The third point is probably most interesting. With each facebook post that included a link to the book on my website, page requests increased. For example, here on the weeks and page requests at www.srstaley.com leading up to the launch event along with Phase One marketing milestones: Three insights are worth noting. First, each major publicity event goosed web traffic. Second, web traffic has consistently been higher after the launch event compared to the weeks before the event. Finally, most of this traffic was created by my promotional efforts. Web traffic is overwhelming driven by direct links embedded in various promotions such as Facebook and Youtube. Almost none of the traffic has been driven by the major search engines such as Google or Bing.
Leading up to the official release of A Warrior’s Soul, I put together a two-phase marketing plan. The first phase, ending when the novel would officially launch, was specifically targeted to raise awareness of the book and brand me as an author. The fundamental elements of Phase One included:
I learned in my other “day” jobs that marketing doesn’t always work. In fact, one marketing professional told me in an offhand comment that “90 percent of all marketing campaigns don’t work.” I took this to mean the campaigns don’t generate revenue. While it’s too early to tell whether my marketing campaign has turned into signicant revenue (the official launch event was July 29th), I think I have a few interesting results that suggest, at a minimum, the goal of raising awareness worked. For example:
Although it’s too early to tell if these efforts have driven sales, I think the evidence is pretty substantial that specific marketing strategies can, in fact, raise awareness about authors and books. This lesson is particularly important for new authors or authors working in a new genre without an established platform or brand identity.
