If you’ve ever hesitated in promoting yourself or your book, you DEFINITELY need to listen to this interview excerpt with Jon Bard. Jon has been helping people market their children’s books for over 26 years and has some very sound advice that will turn ANYONE into a marketer.
Jon actually has two words he uses to reframe the idea of marketing to make it easy for anyone to do. The first one is in the excerpt below. You can find the second one and the full interview in the Elite Writer’s Lab (info below).
John’s Advice to Turn Yourself into a Fearless Marketer:
The first thing you have to do is forget about what you think marketing is. If you talk to a lot of writers, they use a phrase — “I’m not going to go out and hawk my wares.” If I had a dime for every time I heard that. When they say that you know immediately exactly what they think of marketing. It’s evil, it’s bad, it’s selling out. It’s giving up a piece of your soul. It’s bamboozling people. It’s all kind of stuff.
But of course in the world we live in everything is marketing. If you’re going to sell your book to a publisher you’re going to market to them. If you want to sell it to a reader you have to market it. If you want to meet someone and have them like you, you have to market to them. SELL YOUR BOOK. MEET SOMEONE and have them like you. The world is marketing. It’s not hawking your wares, it’s communication. So, there are two words that I work with writers to re-frame it.
Word #1 – Communication
Communication is one person talking to another person. One person is trying to add value to another person’s life. As writers we are communicators. It’s right in our wheelhouse we should be able to get our minds around that pretty readily.
Part of it is, understanding this notion of value. When you write something, no matter what it is, it could be serious, difficult subject or a funny joke book — it doesn’t matter — when you do your job right you are adding value to people’s lives. You should be proud of that. You should be out there talking about that.
You should be out there communicating to others about that. Most people have no problem — if I met you at a party and you had written a book and I asked you to tell me about your book — most people have no problem doing that.
That’s natural. They’re happy to do that. Somehow though, when the idea that more than one person is on the receiving end of this comes up people freeze. People forget that it’s communication and start thinking in terms of it being marketing or promotion.
There really is no difference. Just the medium you do it through.
That’s the first thing, get rid of this notion of marketing being selling out, or hawking your wares, or trying to fool somebody. Sure there is marketing that does that, but that’s not really relevant to what we’re talking about. Replace marketing with the word communication. I want to go out and talk to other people and tell them how the work I’ve done can make their lives better.
Get WORD #2 and Access to Jon’s Full Interview:
If you found this tip helpful, we have the full interview available, exclusively to our Elite Writer’s Lab members and the good news is, you can join and get instant access to a huge library of content, just for writers, by clicking here.
You’ll also have access to a huge library of other expert interviews, courses and resources for turning your writing skills into a living. You’ll love our Quick Start Success Kit that will you publish and market your first book or information product quickly!
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