After several years of unsuccessfully hiring book marketing experts, I realized I had two choices. The first was to not do any book promotion. The other was to do it myself. With great reticence, I decided to do it myself. I did this knowing it would detract from my writing and reduce my output. I […]
Hiring someone to market our books seems like a logical decision. After all, we hire professionals to edit our books and design our covers, so why not book marketing too? This is exactly what I thought and precisely what I did. Over the years I’ve hired a book launch expert, a publicist, a book marketing […]
Some publishers strongly suggested that authors use their advance for marketing their book. Though this sounds reasonable, my advice is not to do it unless you have a long-term reason for it. First, let’s talk about advances. An advance for a book was originally intended as money for the author to live on as they […]
Know Your Options to Craft an Informed Promotion Strategy By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD We’ve never had more marketing options available to us than we do now. It’s an exciting time to be a marketer. It’s also a confusing time. There are so many options it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Each channel provides an opportunity […]
The Call Center Should Be the First to Know, Not the Last By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Too many call center agents learn about the launch of their healthcare organization’s product, incentive, or promotion from callers, not management. I hope your operation is different, but I fear you, too, have found yourself in this unenviable […]
The success some authors have in marketing their books can overwhelm writers or even cause them to give up Last week we talked about how to deal with writer envy, of how to avoid having the abilities of other writers overwhelm us. While the threat of writer envy does assault me from time to time, […]
Platform building gurus recommend monetizing our author websites—that is, to sell ads and place affiliate links. They also say to start sooner rather than later. They suggest this for two reasons. First, selling ads will generate some revenue. Maybe it’s only enough to pay for hosting, but every bit helps. Second, at some point, we […]
A few weeks ago, when I finished my series on blogging, I invited readers to post a link to their blog. No one did. I know many of you have blogs, so I’m not sure what went wrong. Perhaps the offer got lost in the post or maybe the series dragged on too long. Anyway, […]
When I started blogging in 2008 my readers came from two sources: friends who knew about my blog (that is, I told them about it) and people who discovered it online. I had more readers who I didn’t know than people I did. The power of blogging became apparent when, after two weeks of blogging, […]
I once attended a lecture by a writer I admired and followed. He said he’d hang out afterward, during the break. I bought his latest book and returned to have him sign it; I hoped we might talk a bit. He was gone. I waited. Nothing. Then I roamed the building but couldn’t find him. […]