Geek's Guide to Publishing a Book Part 7...

...Marketing budget.

Unless your manuscript is picked-up by a publisher who is willing to shell-out marketing funds for your tome, you have to be prepared to come up with some type of marketing plan so that you can inform the buying public that your work is available and, most importantly, why they should buy a copy.

A recent poll shows that one in four people did not read a book in 2006, and that those who did the typical number of books they read was seven. And I have seen numbers that indicate that people who do so an average of about 70 hours a week. And they say that aliteracy is a fallacy.

So, you need to tell these people that your book exists and that they should buy it (and maybe even read it!) This is the heart of marketing and you need to do it if you want to sell your book.

Now, if we were talking about something like a skateboard, we would be figuring out all of this stuff before we made anything because we would first figure out who we are marketing the board to and then we would tailor the board to that market. An example would be to tailored a board for people for people who are into a certain comic book or graphic novel character. The idea is to come up with a customer demographic, then come up with a product.

Writers, in general, do not work this way. All of the ones I know come up with an idea, then write the book, then try to figure out how to sell it.

If you are in the latter camp then you have to first think about who you are going to sell your finished tome to. Next, you have to figure out how many tomes you are going to sell, which when combined with the profit you make per copy, gives you an idea of how much money you can theoretically make, which then tells you how much money you can spend on marketing (in some cases you may have to spend your own marketing funds even if you are traditionally published.)

Assume for the moment that you make $2.00 per book and you you have calculated that you have a potential customer base of 10,000 people who may be persuaded to buy your book. This gives you a potential profit of $20,000 if you sell one book to each of those 10,000 souls. The question is how much can you spend (gamble) on marketing materials? Another way to look at this is: "how much do you trust your potential sales number?" Remember: until you sell the books, the money you spend will come out of your own pocket.

Once you establish a budget you then need to establish a marketing plan, which is the subject of my next post.

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