What is a perfect marketing?

What is the perfect marketing mix for books?

• When marketing a book with an average budget (say $10,000), how would you promote that book?

• Answer:

  The budget rarely matters. Well it does, but usually book budgets spiral to a quarter of a million dollars, if you want to really plug the book. So you'd have to rely less on money and more on goodwill. And the goodwill is going to come from strategic alliances. Strategic alliances will have lists of their own. And they do courses with their clients and their clients are always pestering them with questions like "which book do I read?" Well, at that point your book should be on that list. The question is: How do you build alliances with these folks? Same as you build friendships with people. You do it slowly. If your relationship is based on revenue alone, then these folks will disappear once the revenue dries up. If it's based on friendship, then they'll promote your book purely because of the value of the book. You may not see how this may work, but be aware that even 10 small lists of 500 subscribers each, amounts to 5000 people. And these aren't just people. These are dedicated followers. But it's not uncommon to see lists of 20,000 and 50,000 or more. And it's also tempting to want to work with those big shots. And that's technically a mistake. You want to start small and work your way up. I frankly don't know what you'd do with $10,000. In the grand scheme of book marketing, that's a very small figure and you're better off putting that in the bank. You're better off slowly generating interest for your book over time. Be aware that your book can become an ebook, an audio book, a course etc. Just one of our e-books for instance, have made us US$500,000+ over the years. And that's just one book. But the book hasn't been the end of the road. That book has led to customers coming back for consulting and training and workshops and other courses. In all, we've been able to run an extremely profitable business with close to no overheads and no staff, just by working through the process of marketing the book and then systematically getting clients to move to other books or courses/workshops. And clients do this willingly, because it's natural for us as humans to want to progress through a sequence. We do this over dinner, every time we go to a restaurant. We start with the hors d'ouevres and work our way to dessert. And then we go for a second and third and fourth meal to the same restaurant. So I digressed. Your question was about what to do with $10,000. My answer is that money is rarely going to solve your problem, because in book marketing at least, it's too little money. So put in the hard work and get some alliances. And work from there. You'd be better off—and who knows, maybe you could use that money to have a competition where the prize is $5000 in cash. And that would generate a lot of interest—once you've got enough folks interested. So there you go: 1) Keep the money away. 2) Make friends and alliances. It will take time. There's no rush. 3) Be aware that your book is just a starting point. You'll generate more revenue from courses/training/consulting etc. than you'll ever generate from the sale of a single book. Resources: The book mentioned above is The Brain Audit. You can find it here at http://www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit