At the BNC/ABPBC Defining Success: Online Marketing for Book Publishing conference last week, one of our speakers, Monique Trottier of Boxcar Marketing, did an excellent presentation of what I’ve come to think of as pre-marketing. It goes a little something like this…
Let’s say you have a book coming out for which you think there’s a lot of online buzz potential. For no reason at all, let’s say the book is about paper-making and you’ve got a really cool video where the author teaches, um, Mr. T how to make paper. I pity the fool who thinks that’s not an opportunity to go viral.
Now, if you’re like me, you’re probably not currently subscribing to any paper-making afficionado blogs…so how do you find them? Monique’s process includes googling your key words, finding blogs and sites, looking up ranks and qualitatively judging content.
ReadWriteWeb also has a great comparison of six blog search methods (including Google Reader and Technorati) and a crash course in how to use them. The point is, you don’t have to know anything about the blog scene to find the people you need. If you have a process in place, the journey to taking Mr. T’s new creations across the internet just starts by doing what you already know how to do.
The content of the new book is irrelevant…as Monique says, Internet marketing is not hard. Doing something you’ve never done before is hard. Happily, that means doing something you’re familiar with is easier and as with anything, no one is born an expert. The journey of a thousand clicks begins with a single search.
And if you don’t believe me…
