As authors and publishers, selling books is always a good thing. It means money in your pocket and justification to continue your craft as a professional.
But what is the cost of all that time and energy? Are you marketing your books just to get sales, or are you building an audience of true fans with every unit sold?
Too often we forget that most readers go to the book store with a couple of authors in mind. They check for new works from their favorites, then browse the shelves for a bit, grab a coffee, and leave.
Martin McConnell is going to show you why it’s better to collect fans than dollars. One fan is worth a lifetime of sales, while one sale by itself will net you a couple of bucks. The difference between building that fan base and peddling your wares is actually quite simple. It comes down to three parts: attention, engagement, and feedback.
True fans are so much more than cash machines. They’re friends, beta readers, editors, and their own marketing team. Each one that you find will get you one step closer to ensuring that every book has a better launch than the last, and launching becomes fun rather than nerve wrecking.
At the mini workshop on June 12th at the Richmond Heights Community Center. Doors open at 6:30PM and the event runs from 7 until 8:30. It’s $10 to attend as a guest, or free to members of the St. Louis Publishers Association. Martin will demonstrate the back-end tactics to find, friend, and market to the only readers you should really concern yourself with, the ones who love your work.
At the same time, these strategies can be used to build and segment your email list. Marketing also becomes a lot of fun, rather than the normal slough of paying someone else to broadcast your work to crickets. Some of his strategies are off the wall, but they have delivered him a twitter following of over 7000 people, and a lot of good friends who support him through the hard times and buy every single book he puts out.
While this workshop will focus on book promotion, the ideas and topics of discussion can be applied to virtually any form of business, from a corner coffee shop to a billion-dollar corporation. Hope to see you there.
Martin McConnell holds a Physics degree from SIUE, and when he isn't writing speculative fiction, he's motivating other authors, stargazing, reading, or playing Kerbal Space Program. He avidly encourages everyone he meets to seize control of their dreams by driving their own plot. https://writefarmlive.com/published-work-2/
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