A conversation with Ed Teja often turns educational. I wrote something about “marketing” and Ed responded very much like this:
Writers are supposed to be wordsmiths, so let’s start with some definitions.
- Marketing activities are things we do to sell books.
- Promotional activities are things to help with discovery of a product (yes, even a book.)
- Publicity is work done to gain mind share…to ensure readers are aware of and think about the writer—the person.
We tend to blur these together, resulting in a great deal of confusion. They are quite different. Note that you can squish a bit of this or that from one category to another. I won’t quibble over specifics. The important thing is that an effective business plan must address all three aspects. Although they overlap, they do different things.
Knowing the difference
Continue reading “Marketing, Promotion, and Publicity (Guest Post by Ed Teja)”
Short version: unless greater benefits roll in over time, I didn’t get anything from Story Cartel which I couldn’t have done just as well myself, without spending $25.
it altered how I think about the process of living. Though it is as far from a business book as you can get, it is one reason I make a good living doing things I love.
. A youngster, plagued by problems, sets out for Solla Sollew, “where they never have troubles, at least, very few.” The lesson he learns, again, triggered new thinking and new actions, a different path in life.
and haven’t made it past the first few chapters of book one (the engagingly entitled Fundamental Algorithms, which I assure is dead sexy to Knuth’s target audience.)
and 
) and Tim is the goods, the real deal, the guy who does it right. Which is what his book is about.
The common perception is that a low price is hard to raise. It’s just not true. 
A new question is coming up with some regularity.
I’ve been a web developer for almost 25 years, so this is not simply from the perspective of an author, though I have published 18 books so far and show no signs of stopping.
Authors tell me they don’t want to learn marketing, find an editor, arrange a cover design, fuss with technology.
A longer diatribe about marketing your self-published book. This is a year-long class, which I’d be glad to give if y’all are interested. 
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