It’s time to talk marketing plans!

And specifically, the marketing plan you’ll need to include in your proposal when you get ready to submit it to an agent or editor. I’ve seen marketing plans anywhere from a few paragraphs to a few pages. I tend to be in the two-page range myself. I think it’s important that we show agents and editors we understand the importance of building a platform and marketing our books.

For the next couple months in these “One Thing Marketing” posts, we’re going to look at the components of a marketing plan. By the time we’re done, if you follow along you should have a good start on your own marketing plan. Let’s get started…

Intro paragraph

Not all authors will do this in their proposal marketing plan, but I wanted to let my prospective publisher know that I understood how critical my role was in the marketing of my book. So I took a few sentences to do that. I happen to work in fundraising and community relations for my day job, so I talked about my marketing experiences there. If you’ve got outside skills you can mention, this is a good place to do it. Here’s the wording I used in my first novel’s proposal:

I am excited about the opportunity to promote my book. I plan to capitalize on already existing networks and strategic relationships as well as dive into new-to-me marketing domain. My day-job as part of a development and community relations team has afforded me plentiful experience in the area of publicity and marketing, so I will incorporate those experiences into my marketing strategies.

Then, you can dive right in to your plan! I used sub-heads to divide up the various pieces of my marketing plan. The first component I launched into was publications.

Publications

Now many publishers will have a wonderful marketing team who will do a great job sending press releases to various publications. But one of the things you can do as an author at more of a grassroots level is to send story pitches or releases to local publications or publications where you have connections. So I took the time to make a list of these publications (I listed around a dozen) and their circulation numbers. Examples:

Des Moines Register. Circulation: 120,000 (daily), 200,000 (Sunday edition)

Juice, Des Moines Register. (Targeted at 25- to 34-year-old demographic)

Daily Freeman Journal (hometown newspaper), Webster City, Iowa.

Northwestern College Classic (alma mater publication). Circulation: 15,000

In this section, I also came up with a list of both online and print reader-oriented publications where I would submit story ideas.

Next up: Media Appearances. We’ll pick up there two weeks from now. 🙂