Marketing Manifestos To Shake You Out Of Your Rut (don’t be a lemming)

by Diane Holmes, Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book, founder of Pitch University.

I want to shake up your thinking.  Rattle the bones of what you think you know about marking yourself and your writing.

Most of what you think you know is wrong, anyway.

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Don’t Do This

So, you’re out there hawking your writing (which gives you the minty prostitution breath). You hate it.  But all the other writers say you have to do it..

And that’s not all.

You have to do exactly these specific things (all of them), because that’s what works.  Everyone hates it, but you want to be a success, don’t cha?

Except they’re wrong. And you already know this deep-down inside, which is what makes the marketing crapola feel even more like being played.

I’m saved!

A couple weeks ago, we had a little “marketing confession session,” and I proposed a new rule:

NEW RULE:  When it comes to Author Marketing, do only what makes you feel jazzed and helpful.

But, you secretly think I’m pulling a bait and switch, like I’ll tell you why you should feel jazzed and darn helpful to do all the things you actually hate.

Nope.  I’m your trusted advisor. And trusted advisors are not that smarmy. 😉

The Brain-Rattle Reset

Let me introduce you to some key manifestos that will shake you loose from your stale marketing beliefs.

What follows are calls to action, written by some smart, smart people.  And these folks are challenging you to market through passion, create happy solutions, and find the authentic methods that you and your audience actually enjoy.

Create partnerships.

Create quality.

Ride your passion to wild success.

TribalAuthor

Jonathan Fields, creator of TribalAuthor.com, wrote a manifesto called “The Truth About Book Marketing.”  You can get it free by subscribing on his site.

truth-about-book-marketing-

Inside, he talks about all the ways traditional marketing fails and how creating your own tribe, a group of people who share your passion and interests, is much more powerful.  As he says:

First, if you’re really engaged by the topic, building a tribe of passionate likeminded people is just plain fun.

But, that’s not the real awakening. Fact is, ninety-five percent of all other authors and aspiring authors reading this will also loathe the idea of putting in the level of work that’s necessary to pull this off. Which makes the 5% that do the work exponentially more capable of rising above the crowd and creating bookselling magic.

Guerrilla Marketing

From gmarketing.com via ChangeThis.com: “93 (yes, 93) examples of unusual, quirky, and downright effective ways you can catch people’s attention.”

GuerrillaMarketing

Seth Godin

Seth Godin’s Manifesto, “How to Sell a Book (or Any New Idea) (step 1 is the hard part),” is probably the biggest key to success you’ll read anywhere, because he knows what we all used to know and have just forgotten:  It’s all about spontaneous word-of-mouth.

50.01.Tribes

Step 1 says: If you don’t have a book that can galvanize a tribe, if you don’t have a product that will spread, if you don’t have a service that will generate passion among a group of people, you must stop what you’re doing and start over.

Are you creating awesomeness?  Will your writing galvanize a tribe of readers?

Good, because awesomeness is the centerpiece of being jazzed as an author and a reader.  It’s the place from which all things flow.

How do they flow?  From doing the same ol’ thing that everyone else is doing to little success?  Nope.

As Seth says:

What’s hard now is breaking the rules.
Successful people are the ones who are good at this.

Let that swirl around in your noggin.  Marketing success doesn’t come from embracing your inner-mythical-lemming and following the others over the cliff.  It comes from breaking the rules.

Don’t be a lemming.  Reinvent the wheel.

And in case you’ve forgotten the point of this article, you’re creating a marketing wheel you love.

In This Series So Far:

  1. Step Inside the Marketing Confessional
  2. Does Marketing Your Writing Feel Like Prostitution

Upcoming Articles:

  • Doing It For Money: Free Opinion  vs. Self Interest
  • The Use of Deadly Force: Helping vs. Cramming it Down Their Throats
  • Engraved Invitations: Genuinely Interested vs. the Unsolicited Cold Call.
  • The Big Gulf: Friends vs. Strangers
  • The Crass Factor: Humility vs. Shameful Ego
  • It Doesn’t  Even Work: Receiving Validation vs The Stink Eye
  • You’re Lying; Selling Your Writing is Different: Opinion as a Consumer  vs. The Muddle of .
  • I’m Not Ron Popeil or Billy Mays: “I don’t know what to say” vs. Skilled Patter
  • I’m Not Even that Good: Confidence vs. Insecurity Runs Rampant

PLUS we’ll look

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Diane Holmes Crop 1
Diane writes two columns for Freelance-Zone: Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

She’s the Founder and Chief Alchemist of Pitch University