I have discovered, probably like millions of other writers, that marketing is far more painful than writing. I heard all this stuff before, but was still blindsided by reality when the book came out and just lay there. In spite of all the talk about what a struggle it will be, deep down, we still cling to the fantasy that, once published, we will have become a success.

One personal problem for me is that my potential market is probably narrower than many others. My book ‘Once Proud Nation’ is aimed at people who are upset by the direction our country is going, people who pace the floor over dissolving freedom. It narrows even more because it deals with a desperate struggle results in full blown war. (Not everybody’s cup of tea.)

I will check back for updated articles…I can use all the help I can get. Oh, and if I can figure out how to do it, I will link your site to FreedomWalker Publishing. (New at this stuff.)

best regards – Ann

So, in essence, wherever we go there are readers. So we can go anywhere.

But we’re not looking for readers who are looking for us (well, for any value of ‘us’ :-P). Those readers will take care of themselves. It might be said that we should be looking for the readers who _aren’t_ looking for us, and to a degree that’s true, but I’d rather say ‘we’re looking for readers who don’t know they’re looking for us. Yet.’ And we can try to find them, and we can try to tell them they’ve really looking for us, but I think even that’s wrong to a degree. That is, I’d rather find one of their friends, and convince them. Not only because people believe their friends more easily and more impulsively, but that one friend might tell ten people.

If I’m even close to right, I’d rather impress one person who might never buy me, but will tell ten people who will, than one person who will buy me. And the advantage of Social Marketing is that, if I can start with good Product (and for a writer, as WANA will tell you, the Product is as much the writer as the books, if not more), I can market that Product to people I don’t even know are listening.

Er.. was that any close, Lady Kristen? :-P.

Um….there are FAR more people active on social media than those people who have abandoned their sites, and just because they aren’t active on their site, doesn’t mean that they won’t be influenced still by peers who ARE active. They have friends, family and coworkers who are what is called a positional influencer. Maybe some guy hates Facebook, but his wife loves it or the gal in the cubicle next to him. They talk about a book and that is how word of mouth sparks sales.

Since non-readers aren’t going to go to bookstores, author blogs, book review sites, and they aren’t going to be influenced by traditional marketing like mailers, bookmarks or book trailers, it seems to me that social media is the best bet. If you added the populations of active users of the top three sites, you have the population of the third largest country in the world, bested only by India and China. This number is increasing exponentially. So instead of focusing on a handful of statistical outliers who aren’t using social media–and who likely will not be swayed by ANY traditional marketing tactic–the winning plan it to focus on the billions who will.

Social media is the new way of human communication and highly unlikely to go away. There is an old saying in sales. “Fish where the fish are.” Bookstores are all going belly-up, so marketing in an industry that is getting hammered is probably unwise. The fish are schooling on social media.

Marketing thru social media is an important way to reach non-readers, but it certainly can’t be considered the only way. No?

Don’t you see a trend by many users to get bored with social media? I have many, many inactive friends on Facebook. They used to be active, previously responded to my updates and posts. Now their walls are like ghost towns.

I agree there are many who wouldn’t define themselves as readers, but there are many who are getting fed up with social media and we must find new, creative ways to reach them.