Thoughts on a marketing class I attended today

I signed up for a continuing education class at the community college today.  The topic was "How to market your book."

I knew from the course description that it would have a large focus on marketing your self-published book.  Even though I don't have a book to market and am not currently considering self-publishing (at least for fiction), I still figured there would be enough useful information to justify the cost of admission.

And I was right.  This was a small, informal session full of good information.

One really good tip was related to selling an e-book.  Say your novel is only available electronically.  You go to conventions and hand out business cards, but let's face it, what's the percent of people who are going to rush home and download your e-book?  One?  Less than that?  Probably.

A solution was to buy a number of download codes and then put them on cards.  Then you sell the cards.  I love this idea.  Since the book is already sold (to get the download code for the card) anything the author charges above that initial fee is profit.  The best part is that it doesn't even matter if the buyer goes and downloads the book, even though it's in everyone's best interest if he does.

Another thing they talked about from a marketing point of view is related to the pitch.  Media people are lazy.  Have a 10-word summary ready.  If a press agent asks what your book is about, get straight to the point.  They don't care where or how you grew up or why you wrote the book.

We talked about elevator pitches.  They said mine is great as long as I can get it out without stammering and stuttering like a teenager asking a girl out for the first time.  Okay, I made that last part up, but let's just say I need a lot of practice.

We saw plenty of examples of good and bad press releases for non-fiction books and talked about what a writer needs to be ready for the press and how to prep for his first interview.

There was also talk about all of the usual writer's platform stuff like Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, etc.  While this part may have not contained a lot of new info from my point of view, it was good to have it reinforced that I'm on the right track.

So the point of this post was just to share quick thoughts about the class.  I'll have a lot more to say about marketing in the coming weeks as I go through my notes and just do some thinking about everything.

Until then, I've got to keep writing.  No point in marketing if there's nothing to market, right?