Marketing Books

The M word. That thing we authors must do if we want to sell any of our books.

My original plan for selling thousands of copies of Farm Girl was to get Costco to buy a whole bunch from WiDo, and I would do signings at the many local warehouses in Utah. My family knows most of the warehouse managers. One in particular loved my book and said, "I can see it on our tables." So could I. So could I.

There's a self-published author in my area named Mike Ramsdell who wrote a book called Train to Potevka. In 2007, he got it into one of the local Costco warehouses and in less than a year had sold over 100,000 copies while doing signings at Costco stores in the Western states. Now granted, Farm Girl isn't a memoir about a U.S. spy in Russia, but I figured if we did one-tenth of his sales, that would be decent.

Sometimes dreams do NOT come true. That can be a good thing. If it had gone according to plan, I would never have done the Nebraska book tour with my mom. Which turned out to be one of her dreams come true. Look how happy she is. At the age of 94, she went on a book tour across her home state of Nebraska.

 WiDo would not have gotten Farm Girl in independent bookstores from Vermont to California, because who needs little orders from little bookstores when you have Costco? And the WiDo sales guy wouldn't have made friends and developed relationships with booksellers who are still buying WiDo books and not just Farm Girl.

I wouldn't have gone after newspaper reviews because who needs reviews when you have Costco, right? I would never have started blogging or done anything online, because who needs social media when you have Costco? I would never have realized the need for an alternative online bookstore-- something cozy, exclusive, supportive to authors with generous profit margins for them. Who needs Celery Tree when you have Costco?

I don't like failure. It makes me depressed, angry, sometimes bitter, and always craving something with chocolate, butter and sugar, maybe with some peanut butter and/or walnuts thrown in for good measure. But once I get over all that and calm down, I'm thankful for the lessons of failure.

When marketing books, failure is important to show what works and what doesn't. Don't hate failure, don't hate marketing. It's all part of the game of selling books.

(This post was taken from a series I on planning a successful book tour that appeared on the Celery Tree blog.)