Congrats Michelle on all your hard work paying off. Thanks, Tom for sharing her story.I would like to share that marketing your book is very hard, I think harder than starting a business, because it is a business, but so is the marketing. You can never stop marketing. Sometimes it will seem like you are wasting your time, postage, ink and paper. One day, I had a call from NPR. When I asked how they had heard of me, they said that someone in the office had an old copy of Ladies Home Journal and they saw my story in it. That was two-and-a-half years later. So keep on.
Mass marketing tries to reach everyone all at once with a deluge of messages. PyroMarketing believes marketing begins by speaking to a passionate few and creating the conditions by which that message can grow and spread. The authors I work with often resist this.WOW! What a great thought process about target marketing. What a brilliant way to understand that going for the bullseye - the very best segment of your target market - is the best first step in marketing.
They fear that an audience narrowly defined is too small to support decent sales. To demonstrate that, because there are six billion people on the planet, even a narrowly defined audience can be quite large, I began using the example of left handed quilters.
An author who wrote a book on quilting would not want to limit its promotion to quilters. Instead they would want to "broaden the audience" by advertising to needle pointers, or perhaps anyone that sews. Instead I would tell them that if we promoted their book to 1/10th of one percent of left-handed quilters in America, and those people all bought the book in a single month through reporting stores, then their book would be a bestseller.
Here are the numbers: 15 million people enjoy quilting as a hobby in the United States. Ten percent of the population is left-handed so it is reasonable to conclude that 1.5 million quilters are too. One tenth of one percent of 1.5 million is 1500. At the time the Christian Book Bestseller's List counted the top 20 books and the average monthly sales of the book at the 20th position was only 1200 units per month. Therefore, 1500 meant you made the list with 300 to spare.