Step Three: Know Your Goal
With all this marketing you're going to be doing for your book, what are you trying to achieve? What's the goal of your marketing plan?
My experience is that many authors have a vague goal… sort of a sense that "they want people to hear about my book somehow."
That's won't cut it. When you create your marketing plan, you should have some specific, measurable goals in mind. So don't just say, "I want to speak at conferences and retreats." Instead, say something like, "I want to be in front of 100,000 people total over the course of the next year," then start looking for venues that will add up to that number. Don't just say, "I'd like to do some radio." Instead, give yourself a number of interviews you'd like to do, a number of cities you'd like to reach, a number of listeners you'd like to be in front of. Then start working toward that goal. If you set a firm number on things, you'll discover you've turned your plan into something measurable, rather than something ethereal.
It's amazing how a number turns vague ideas into crystal clear plans. What are you trying to achieve through your marketing? If you can answer that question, you'll be much more focused. Of course, eventually marketing should lead to sales, so I encourage authors to also set a reasonable sales goal for their book. I think one reason so many authors struggle with anxiety over book sales is because they haven't defined "success." They don't really know what a successful book would be, or what a failed book would be. So what is success for your book, in terms of sales?
For more than a decade now, people in publishing have talked about "selling in the teens." If you could get your trade paper novel or nonfiction book to sell somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 copies, it would probably be considered a relative success. Not a runaway hit, but a reasonable success. Then if your book sold in the mid-twenties, the publisher was very happy, because you've probably beaten expectations. If you sold in the thirties or forties, they were ecstatic. But that's just a basic idea — expectations for mass market novels are much higher, expectations for book clubs are also higher, and expectations for most hardcover novels are higher.
The rule of thumb on advances has long been ONE copy for every ONE dollar in advance. So if you were paid a $40,000 advance, the publisher is generally expecting you'll sell about 40,000 copies. That's not exact, of course, but it's a pretty good estimate. And if that small house just offered you a $3000 advance, it tells you a bit about what their sales expectations are. That's not necessarily a bad thing — everybody starts somewhere. But this at least tells you they don't see the book as the second coming of Harry Potter. (And I should mention that the growth of e-book publishers is changing all the planning on advances. Still, for traditional publishers, this holds true.)
That means you'll want to think about what your sales goal is, and keep that in mind as you create your marketing plan. If your goal is to sell 30,000 copies, and all your marketing is to small groups of ten to twenty people, you're going to have a tough time achieving success. Authors, because they work by themselves and tend to not be around a lot of big groups, often think in terms of selling by tens. "I spoke at a conference and sold thirty books!" or "I did a signing and sold two dozen copies." But most smaller publishers are only interested in things that will sell books by the hundreds, and most mid-size and large publishers tend to think about selling books by the thousands. If you can come up with a plan that will move two or three THOUSAND copies, you'll get their attention. Moving a case of books at an event is nice, but hardly makes a dent in a publisher's goal of selling 15,000 copies.
So that's the next step… Write down the goals of your marketing plan. Be specific. Make them measurable. Keep your sales goal in mind. Know what "success" is.