A List for Effective Marketing

For most of us, marketing is a crazy-confused thicket of contradictory advice.  The best way to market oneself, in my opinion, is to follow the golden rule, or do as you would have done to you.  And again, for many of us, that boils down to: don’t cheat. Splashy eye-candy that doesn’t provide value is cheating. Biased “information” that doesn’t provide the truth and/or is a thinly-veiled advertisement is cheating. Sock-puppetry? Cheating. Comment-stuffing? Cheating. Spam? Oh yeah; that’s cheating.

Below the cut are some inexpensive (but often time-consuming) ideas you might want to implement if you need to market yourself and don’t want to cheat. Because I work with authors a lot, it’s written with them in mind, but even if you’re not an author, it probably applies to you.

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Author, Author!

Think about the last book you picked up. Chances are, somewhere on the front of it, especially if the author was relatively unknown, someone famous wrote something nice about the story you were holding in your hand.

“Brilliant! The next great American Vampire novel!” Famous Author

After you dismiss the rumor about how Famous Author is paid to do that, shed the bad advice you’ve most likely read somewhere. That is, “You should never pay for a blurb.”

How in heaven’s name did the unknown author get the famous author to say that? It would mean the famous author read it! (Absolutely, entirely, right now, dismiss from your mind any rumor you may have heard about how Famous Author really doesn’t read the book; he or she is just paid to say that. That’s unprofessional behavior and unlikely; a rumor probably started by those sour grapes people who can’t get a blurb.)

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