You’ve been working on your book for as long as you can remember and you’ve started thinking about publishing and marketing it to a waiting world. While some experts in the book writing field suggest we should start thinking about marketing our books the second we decide to write one, it’s been my experience that most people have a lot on their plate and the actual writing of a book takes up just about their entire “excess” bandwidth.

Plus, the task of optimizing book sales is a big challenge for many authors: we’re told it’s important, and we know it’s important…and who doesn’t want to be a bestselling author? But, unless we have someone take us by the hand and share everything they know about book sales, we can sometimes find ourselves floundering.

Sometimes?!

Book marketing is not something most of us learn at our parents’ knees, and it’s typically not taught in schools. But it does involve a process that can be learned and conquered. Plus there are experts out there who we can hire to help us along the way.

One of the areas that is sometimes overlooked in this arena is the importance of our relationships, and, in fact, my fifth book was a co-authored effort with Paula Hope, a referral marketing consultant. Your Personal Marketing Playbook looked at the common ground between content marketing (one of my areas of expertise) and relationship marketing.

While our target audience at the time primarily included professional service providers seeking to increase their business, the fact is that a lot of what we covered in our book can apply equally well to authors.

Considering Your Relationships and Target Audience

The common ground both content marketing and referral marketing share is the fact that your activity, in each, is all about relationships. Creating them, nurturing them, solidifying them, and profiting from them.

Profit from a relationship? Isn’t that a cold and calculating thing to do? No—not if the intention is to generate mutual benefit!

There is a key distinction to be made here between relationships that are strictly transactional, or even slightly predatory, and those that are based in mutual respect, understanding, and goodwill.

This is true in your social world, as well, by the way—have you ever been in a relationship with someone who is always keeping score, in an “I-did-this-for-you-now-you-have-to-do-that-for-me” kind of way? It’s unpleasant, isn’t it? The same is true in business.

You want to build healthy relationships with the members of your network, ones where you can both flourish and shine.

So, if you are hoping to sell lots of copies of your new book, take heart.

In my upcoming blogs I will be  sharing some solid suggestions for creating a marketing approach  that supports you and your book. Bear in mind that I don’t consider myself a “book marketing consultant” –but with several decades of front line experience as a marketing expert, and five traditionally published books under my belt, I’ve learned a thing or two about the topic and I’d love to share some of that with you in this space.

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