Marketing – Courtesy Pixabay user geralt

As an expert, I believe you should always make the commitment to write your book, but only when the timing is right for you. You need time to not only write the book, but to market it too. Marketing should happen very early on in the writing stage, not after the book is completed!

If you are still in the process of growing your expert business, it’s not time for you to write a book quite yet – go out and get some clients and make some money first. It always shocks me when I hear someone say they are taking off for one to two years to write their book. Now that’s absolutely crazy! And what’s even crazier is that most of them have no idea how to market the book once it’s completed and have no database to market it to. If they had any idea of what they were doing, they could have knocked that book out with a marketing plan in place in a matter of months – even working on it part time.

Marketing is where you should put your efforts as you write the book. Your marketing plan should include both offline and online promotion. You’ll need strong joint venture partners in place to help you market and sell your book when it launches. Well in advance of your book’s completion, it should have its own well-crafted website.

Writing your book will certainly expand your level of expertise and allow you to be seen as an authority on your chosen topic. But keep in mind that your book is going to basically be a marketing tool that helps you gain more business. Writing your book is just the beginning; it’s the marketing that makes it sell. The most successful best-selling books got there because they had a great marketing plan in place.

The most important part of writing a book is MARKETING a book!
~ Debbie Allen

A great example of how important marketing can be is the bestselling book Everything Men Know About Women. This book is completely EMPTY inside (no words). This book has been successfully marketed and selling since 1985. The marketing campaign is what made this EMPTY book a bestseller. If that doesn’t convince you how important marketing your book is, then I’m not sure what will.

A successful marketing plan is what separates successful authors from authors who sell only a few hundred books. Why take all the time to do the work for a few hundred book sales? It’s not worth it! And even if you do find a major publisher for your book, they are not going to be the main source of your marketing. They have lots of books to market. You will always be the ONE who’s responsible to promote, market and sell your books!