This is a book review of Tim Grahl’s Your First 1000 Copies: The Step-by-Step Guide to Marketing Your Book.
Your First 1000 Copies is the one book about marketing and promotion I wish I would have had sooner. Another way of saying this is that Grahl wrote the book I would write now after a couple years of experience only he wrote it earlier and probably better.
Why do I recommend this book to anyone who has published or is considering publishing a book?
1. No wasted space
The book is 130 pages. Every page gives you advice on exactly what you should do. There is zero filler.
2. A different approach
Most people think marketing is evil. This is because some marketing is evil. Bad marketing attempts to manipulate you.
Bad marketing is that used car salesman who knows he’ll probably never see you again. Bad marketing is the commercials on TV that tell you how sexy and wonderful you’ll be if you just eat another bag of Doritos. Bad marketing is when a product doesn’t deliver on the promise.
Good marketing on the other hand is about helping people and them helping you in return. In Grahl’s words:
Marketing is two things: (1) creating lasting connections with people through (2) a focus on being relentlessly helpful.
What does this mean?
I’ve worked with good salespeople. You want good salespeople. Why? Because good salespeople have your best interests at heart. Good salespeople will refuse to sell you something that they don’t believe in because they know it will damage their relationship with you. Good sales people don’t market to you. They don’t manipulate you. They help you.
This is the marketing that Grahl writes about how to do and do successfully.
When I wrote my book, I was fortunate to have come from a training and teaching background and to have this belief. I wasn’t able to verbalize it well, however, until I read Your First 1000 Copies.
3. Systems free you to write more
The system Grahl suggest will free you up to write more content. Most writers like to write, myself included. As Grahl writes:
If you create the right processes and checklists, they will free you up to write more quality content and connect more frequently with your readers, all while your trustworthy system does your marketing for you.
Yes! I want to write more, market less.
4. Direct relationships with your audience
Audience at a Frontier Fiesta show in the 1950s.
The book talks about how to establish direct relationships with your audience and why this is important.
It’s important because you don’t want to be a flash-in-the-pan. If you have a connection for your audience and can help them in some way, they will help you. Not only will they follow you, but they will communicate with you and they will recommend your book.
This is probably my favorite part of writing.
I love when people write me. Especially if they tell me they learned something or enjoyed something about my writing. But I also love if they tell me something I didn’t know or something I could have done better or even how I #@&#’d up.
What this means is there’s a connection.
The beauty of Grahl’s book is that he helps you understand how you can use modern technology to build these relationships.
Everyone knows about social media. Everyone knows about websites. Everyone knows about radio and TV interviews. Most people know about e-mail lists and speaking events.
Grahl talks about when and how to use all of these things to create the kinds of connections you want.
5. Marketing should precede your book
I don’t think anyone does this with their first book as much as they ultimately realize they should have.
I was way behind the curve. To be honest, here was my marketing plan:
I blog. Sometimes my blog posts do well. If I had a book, I could put a blurb at the bottom of my blog posts that says “David Akadjian is the author of …”
No joke. This was my marketing plan. How I’m still writing is sometimes a thing of amazement to me.
6. The importance of permission
This can’t be stated enough and is again something I only recently learned.
People hate marketing. We have “no call” lists so that people won’t call us. And rightly so. Nothing is more annoying than an unsolicited pitch.
At the same time, people buy things all the time and want to know about these things that they buy. So you shouldn’t feel bad about telling someone about what it is that you do and how it can help them.
If you have their permission. How do you get permission?
Grahl talks about a number of ways in the book. The simplest is to give something away in exchange for permission. People following you on Facebook or Twitter is also another form of permission. You haven’t asked them to follow you. They just have. Take this as a compliment and keep providing more of what they followed you for in the first place.
Summary
The reason I recommend Tim Grahl’s book Your First 1000 Copies is that it took me a long time after I released my first book to build my “system” (as Grahl calls it). I should have started this much sooner. I’m really still building it but at least at this point I feel like I have a good chunk of it in place. Enough of a chunk anyways that I feel much more comfortable about releasing a second book.
What is your “system”? What has helped you with marketing and promotion?
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