Guest Post: Marketing Your Writing

Part I of III: Build Your Brand

This post is part of the Guest Post Giveaway at the blog Unready and Willing. If you think articles about writing or personal development (or personal development for writers) sounds like a good fit for your blog, please take a look at the Guest Post Giveaway page and see if any of the articles spark your interest.

Marketing your writing is essential if you want your work to be read by a wide audience.

For many, marketing is an alien word that may conjure up images of people in suits sitting at round tables analyzing market trends, consulting with focus groups, and pouring millions of dollars into nationwide ad campaigns. It's big company stuff that individuals don't have the time, money, or skills to get involved in.

Because of this image, many writers have considered the job of marketing their writing as something that publishing houses or literary agents should do for them. The reality is, however, that although the big publishing houses may do a great job in promoting the next bestseller, they'll seldom take the risk to market the work of an unknown author. If you want to take advantage of the marketing might of the publishing houses, you must first learn how to market your writing on your own, to get your writing read by enough people that you get on a publisher's radar, and make it worth their while to consider promoting what you've written.

The goals of marketing your writing are simple: you want to raise awareness of your writing, get more people to read it, and to keep them reading. If you're persistent and committed to your marketing effort, it's only a matter of time before that book offer arrives in your mailbox.

Self-marketing, unlike what a large corporation would have to go through, is much simpler than focus groups and market trend research, and can be broken down into these three steps:

1.         Build Your Brand - Your personal brand is the combination of you and your product. You must establish your mission and identity as a writer, and this should be reflected by the writing that you produce.

2.         Make Connections - Marketing is all about making connections. It's not just about making connections with the right people, but also making connections with the wrong people who know the right people.

3.         Build Relationships- You must make strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends. You must build trust and affinity with your personal brand.

Build Your Brand

Just as Apple has Steve Jobs, and Virgin has Richard Branson. Your writing must have you.

Although you may have not consciously worked to build it, you already have a personal brand. A personal brand is all the thoughts and feelings that are associated with you and your work. A strong brand will capture people's imagination and will make people remember you, your name, and your writing. A weak brand, however, can make it very difficult to promote yourself, no matter how much time and energy you spend on marketing efforts.

Stephen King has an incredibly strong personal brand. His name has become almost synonymous with horror, and just by picking up one of his books, without even reading word one, you can feel the uncanny weight of all his monstrous creations. Even if the book you read wasn't one of his best, your reading experience would still be enhanced by its association with the Stephen King brand, with all the other books of his that you've enjoyed.

Michael Jordan has a strong personal brand, a brand which speaks athletic prowess and determination. When great athletes like him wear Nike merchandise, the power of the swoosh becomes amplified by association with their athletic talent. Because they wear Nike, you're likely to associate their athletic skill with Nike merchandise, and you'll probably even feel like a better athlete when you wear Nike because, on a real subconscious level, the athletic skill of these athletes have been transferred directly to you.

As you can see, a strong brand can have a powerful effect on how we view a product, movie, or book. If you can work to build your brand, to strengthen it and harness its power, it can be a tremendous asset to your marketing effort. So how can you work to start building an incredible brand? How can you make your readers tremble in anticipation even before opening your book?

As a writer, your personal brand has three elements:

1.         Your Story

2.         Your Mission

3.         Your Writing

If you work to develop these elements of your brand, you'll find that the other two steps of marketing: making connections and building relationships, can be much easier, and sometimes will even take care of themselves.

Your Story

When you build your personal brand, make sure that people know where you came from and why you decided to be a writer. The important thing is not to make yourself look good, but make your self look human and good. Stephen King worked in an industrial laundry while writing his first novels. Quentin Tarantino worked in a video store discussing movies with people in the film business before a producer convinced him to write his first screenplay. Tony Robbins worked as a janitor before becoming the incredibly successful self-help guru he is now. These fascinating stories are not only memorable, but naturally color the way we view the work of these people.

A good personal story is not always about sharing your triumphs. It's also about admitting your pain, your faults, and your past mistakes. Steve Pavlina, for example, arguably the most popular blogger on the internet for the topic of personal-development, revealed a past where his out of control kleptomania landed him in a jail cell when he was 19-years-old. We sympathize with the pain of his past as well as admire the steps he took to improve himself and achieve an amazing level of success. These strong emotions of sympathy and admiration will naturally affect the way we read and value what he's written.

Your story must be fascinating, but it also must be truthful. It's not merely listing your age, sex, occupation, and the town you grew up in, and it's not just a chance to boast of your accomplishments. What it is is sharing with other people a story that reveals your humanity. You want to paint a picture of yourself that would make your reader want to have a beer with you.

So what's your story? What has led you to decide to pick up the pen and write? Declare it with bravery and honesty, and you'll be amazed at the kind of reception you'll get.

Your Mission

There was a student who sat next to me in a political science class nearly ten years ago who seemed to know more about political science than anyone else in the class. When I asked him why he was so interested in political science he looked at me straight in the eye and said, "I want to become the President of the United States."

From the look on his face I knew he wasn't joking, and even though we probably only had a five minute chat, to this day I still remember that student's name.

If that student said something less ambitious and generic, like: "I'm thinking about getting into politics," I probably would have forgotten about him as soon as the class was over. It was the boldness of his stated mission and the energy and certainty with which he said it, that had its effect on me. His mission and the way he said it conveyed a sense of power, self-confidence, and determination. It made me believe that even though he may not become president, he would certainly go far in a political career.

Whether it's writing, politics or ostrich farming, determining your mission and letting everyone know about it is essential to building a powerful personal brand. Your mission should convey your ambition, as well as be original enough to distinguish yourself from others.

The purpose of having an ambitious mission is simple. People remember people who have high and lofty goals and can give evidence that they're taking real actions to achieve them. It doesn't matter how far away you are from achieving the goals, but you must convey a sense that you're committed to achieving them no matter what. When people see this kind of dedication, especially for a goal that seems particularly difficult, they'll naturally want to do their small part to help you out, to make the achievement of your goals a little easier.

Originality is just as important as ambition. What is it that differentiates you from everyone else out there? If you write comedies, you should do more than tell people that you want write a bestselling funny book. You should give them specifics. Tell them that you want to write about duck boogers in a way that no writer has before. Not only will you catch them off guard, but you have given them a short advertisement for your upcoming duck booger book. If you write science fiction, tell them you're currently working on designing alien spaceships. If you write horror novels, tell them that you're working to scare the pants off the English speaking world. The point is to be remembered, and you have to be original if you want to be remembered.

Your mission is an important part of your personal brand. It not only distinguishes you from the rest of the crowd, but it can also help you be recognized by those who matter. The mission for your writing can change from time to time, but it should resonate with your overarching life goals. If, for example, your overall life mission is to help people overcome depression, you could do this by writing inspirational novels, or by writing a self-help book. Indeed, you could write both the novel and the self-help book, and as long as they both serve the same mission, the power of your personal brand can only increase.

Your Writing

Your writing is without a doubt the biggest part of your personal brand. It's the chief representative of your values as a writer. It's important that you write in a way that's consistent with your story and your mission. When you do so, you integrate all three elements of your personal brand.

In order to use your writing to strengthen your brand, you must of course produce good writing. Good writing itself, however, is often not good enough. In order to really take advantage of the marketing power of your writing you must not only be true to your story and your mission, but you must clearly convey your ideas, themes, and subject matter in a way that'll make people want to talk about it and quote it.

It's important for your writing to be timeless, to cover universal subjects that'll never grow old, but it should also contain some element of the timely. Timelessness in writing is good because you can be sure that your writing will have some staying power. It's the reason why people still read classic novels that are a hundred years old. Timeliness, on the other hand, is the stuff of the bestseller. It's relevant to what people are talking and thinking about right now. If there's relevance, then you can be sure that people will be talking about your book. This is the reason why books about investing money are released during a period of economic growth and books about saving money are released during a recession. If you endeavor to capture both the timely and timeless, it won't be long before you have a winner on your hands.

Even timely topics and ideas, however, can sometimes fail to catch on. One way to prevent this is by implementing Idea Chain Management. Idea Chain Management is essentially the packaging of ideas for easier distribution. It's the distillation of a complex idea into a three-word-or-less phrase or buzzword that's still true to the original idea. Although non-fiction works have taken the credit for many buzzwords, fiction too has supplied us with a good share of words and phrases that we use in everyday conversation. The words "Big Brother," for example, have become synonymous with an overbearing government infringing on people's privacy. This term will forever be associated with George Orwell's 1984. You can be assured that the more people that hear or read the word "Big Brother," whether on the news or on the blogs, the more people will buy his book.

In order to make your writing an effective marketing tool it can be helpful to implement the above tricks. The most important thing, however, is that you be true to your story and your mission. Make sure you do so whenever you put your name to your writing.

Kenji Crosland is a creative writing major who, scared of becoming a starving artist, became a corporate headhunter in Tokyo. Since then he's regained his sanity, quit his job, and now blogs about creating an ideal career at unreadyandwilling.com. He is also developing a web application that just might change the internet. Follow him on Twitter: @KenjiCrosland.