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1. HOW TO MARKET
YOUR BOOK
WITHOUT THE
HARD SELL
Michelle Worthington

2. The Secret to Book Marketing
 Selling sucks
 Follow the Process
 Avoid O.O.P.S
 Ditch the Dinosaurs
 Be First Class
 Why I can’t keep secrets

3. Selling Sucks
 The secret to marketing your book…
when you tell stories, you never have to
sell

4. Follow the Process
 Redefine how you think about selling
 What is your purpose? My purpose is creating the
maximum amount of value exchange while having the
most amount of fun.
 What is your definition of wealth? My definition is that
wealth is created by putting the most amount of value
out into the world.
 The process is the why before the what and the how.

5. What is the process?
 Marketing your book without the hard sell
 Develop Your Story
 Develop Your Business Plan
 Develop Your Marketing Plan
 Develop Your Brand
 Develop Your Mindset

6. Develop Your Story
 Your story is your why
 Your story is your asset, but not your only one
 Your story is your responsibility
 Learn from people who know better than you
 When you see a problem in the world and you
have the asset to solve it – create a product

7. Develop Your Business Plan
 A book can take up to two years to produce
 The sales window after a book release is
approximately 4 months
 The marketing potential for each book is unlimited if it
is based on brand, not product
 Fall in love with your target market, not your book
 When you chase money first (concentrate only on
book sales) it can take 3 to 6 years to make a
profit
 What is your definition of Profit?
 Traditional calculation = Sales - Cost
 My definition of Profit is Volume x Margin
 (Margin is Income – Cost)

8. Develop Your Business Plan
 Types of business plans
 Low Volume and Low Margin = Traditional
Publishing
 High Volume and Low Margin = Independent
Publishing
 Low Volume and High Margin = Traditional
Publishers
 High Volume and High Margin = Author Business

9. Develop Your Business Plan
 Business analysts say we are 4 years into an
18 year cycle of value creation and growth…

10. Develop Your Business Plan
 The last growth period was from 1990 to 2007
and 1968 to 1984 and another ended in 1956.
 What happened during these periods of time?
 Economists are saying that the most valuable
product in the next 14 years will be:

11. Develop Your Marketing Plan

12. Develop Your Marketing Plan
What is the biggest
mistake authors make?
ONLY ONE PRODUCT TO SELL

13. Develop Your Marketing Plan
 Types of Platforms
 Social media
 Traditional Media
 Website
 Face to Face
 Types of Content
 Types of Product
 Types of Assets

14. Develop Your Marketing Plan
 Who is your target market?
 Why does your story make a connection with
them?
 Why are other markets not your target market?
 Where are your target market?
 Which platforms do they use?
 Which content do they respond the best to?

15. Develop Your Marketing Plan
Don’t Chase a Number
x amount of Instagram followers
y amount of Facebook fans
z number of Twitter followers
= Old School Thinking
- Not translatable into a reliable action. For example,
posting a picture purportedly viewable by your 1000
Facebook “fans” may generate little or no views,
engagement, or conversion events. Posts get “filtered,”
and expected reach is typically a small fraction of overall
fan count.

16. Develop Your Marketing Plan
 Ditch the Dinosaurs
 Facebook Fan Page is the new Yellow Pages
 Most research on Facebook Page reach arrives at the
same conclusion: reach has regularly been declining
for many years. Some studies look at the relative
number of views per post, while others project views
as low as <1%. The consensus is that brand ability to
reach their Facebook fans diminishes with time.
 A recent anomaly in the data has been a reported
consistency or increase in reach for video posts. This
may be a helpful insight if your marketing mix allows
for you to use more video content on social. But for
everything else, Page reach on Facebook has been
diminishing consistently.

17. Develop Your Marketing Plan
 Ditch the Dinosaurs
 Twitter is the new Daily Newspaper
 Twitter reach is tough to measure but is decidedly low
at less than 3% and an engagement rate less than
.1%. Twitter now has an algorithm that likely further
skews that impression and engagement rate.
 President Trump’s success using Twitter as a
communications platform perhaps skews people’s
perception of Twitter reaches. It’s important to
understand that most of the awareness of the
President’s Tweets come from press coverage of the
Tweets rather than from Twitter itself. This is an
organic amplification mechanism that cannot be
emulated by an author brand.

18. Develop Your Marketing Plan
 Ditch the Dinosaurs
 Instagram is the new Glossy Magazine
 Instagram has one of the best engagement rates
of any social network and is second only to
Facebook in total users. This is the good news.
What may be challenging about Instagram is the
difficulty in placing a call to action in your posts.
Think of it as giving away free gifts.

19. Develop Your Marketing Plan
 LinkedIn has one of the most impressive
demographics of any network and is easy to
niche
 23% of registered users use LinkedIn monthly
but engagement and interaction tend to be
driven by a small group of power users and job
seekers.
 Compounding this for author brands is a new
algorithm that defaults to displaying top posts
in the LinkedIn feed, and some ambiguity
about notifications and display to your organic

20. Develop Your Marketing Plan
 Email isn’t social media, but offers some
distinct advantages over social:
- Delivered reliably (save spam filters) to every
connection.
- Open rate and engagement rates are often
much higher than those seen with social
platforms.
Disdvantages: Who has more than one email
address?

21. Develop Your Marketing Plan
 Don’t pay for promotion
- Perhaps the most valuable insight into social media is to understand
how rapidly it is changing. Everything from platform features to
reach to targeting data change quickly, especially with competition
the likes of Snapchat, Pinterest, and other established networks.
- With social platforms, including Google, in constant flux, it is
important to reassess your measurement and implementation
strategy regularly. Since many of these companies are publicly
traded, they release new algorithms quarterly.
- Because of content filtering and content resonance, the value of
earned social media is never constant. What works today may not
work tomorrow. They are businesses who are trying to make money.
Your money in better spent elsewhere.
- Your goal should be connection to a target audience via organic
reach and look out for new platforms that offer a pay per post format
that pays YOU for your content.

22. Develop Your Marketing Plan
 The Formula for Social Media Marketing
A consumer needs to see on average
7 hour of content
over 11 different times
on 4 different platforms
Before they follow a call to action

23. Develop Your Brand
 What do you want to be known for?
 Your are more than just one book.
 It makes more sense to market your brand than
market your individual products.
 What are your assets?
 What is your backstory?
 Telling people about your brand gives you the
content you need to market your book without
the hard sell.

24. Develop Your Brand
 Openness and Honesty
 Be First Class
 Share
Top 7 Mistakes that lead to doing a hard sell
1. Being needy or sooky
2. Posting too much without purpose
3. Not differentiating yourself
4. Confusing people with jargon
5. Not sticking to the process
6. Only marketing to other authors
7. Waiting until you have a book
Your new full time job is to become a brand

25. Develop Your Mindset
 What is the definition of a small business owner?
 In Australia, a small business is defined by the
Fair Work Act 2009 as having an ABN and with
fewer than fifteen employees.
 Many small businesses can be started at a low
cost and on a part-time basis, while a person
continues a regular job with an employer or
provides care for family members in the home.
 The small business owner can leverage a strong
brand name while keeping their own investment
affordable.

26. Develop Your Mindset
 Small businesses typically find themselves
strapped for time to do marketing, as they
have to run the day-to-day aspects of the
business.
 To create a continual stream of new business
and find new clients and customers, they must
work on marketing their business continuously.
 Low sales (result of poor marketing) is one of
the major reasons of small business failure

27. Develop Your Mindset
 Having an author business is like trying to
solve a Rubix Cube
 Each of the sides represent a facet of your
business
Products
Promotion
Writing
Money
Health
Relationships

28. Develop Your Mindset
 Give Back
 Your ability to share is an asset
 Don’t keep it a secret
 B1G1
 Boss Lady Club

29. What next?
 Come to the book launch – Date TBA
 Join the Free 30 Day Social Media for
Creatives Challenge
 Join our tribe on Facebook
 Become a student at our Share Your Story
School
 Become a member of the Boss Lady Club
 Book in a strategy session

30. QUESTIONS?
www.sharingyourstory.com.au