Recently I found a recipe for homemade oatmeal cookies that looked good. I like to do some occasional baking so I gave it a try. After setting the oven, mixing the ingredients and putting them in the oven for the prescribed 13 minutes, I pulled them out and took a bite.
“These are gross. They taste like weird biscuits.”
Then it hit me… I had left out the sugar!
One simple ingredient was the difference between great tasting cookies and weird biscuits.
The same goes for your book. There are ways to build the marketing into the manuscript that, if left out, could be the difference between selling through your print run and ending up on 80% off table at Barnes and Noble.
The following are three examples of how authors baked the marketing right into their books.
Drive by Dan Pink
Dan included a “Type I Toolkit” at the end to help you implement the ideas in his book. At the back of this toolkit is a 140 character Twitter summary and a 100 word “Cocktail Summary” that you can share in less than a minute.
By providing pre-written ways to share the ideas in his book, Dan made it very easy for people to spread the word.
Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
Josh split his entire book up into short, 1-3 page chapters. It makes this very heavy book easy to consume, and interestingly, easy to share. At the end of each chapter is a link to a corresponding page on his website. That page hosts a video of Josh talking about the idea in the chapter along with the key points listed below. This is a fantastic way to use online content to support a book. It also makes it easy to share. For instance, check out the chapters on Permission Marketing, Free and Reputation.
4 Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss
“It looks like it was constructed from 20 years of Men’s Health and Cosmopolitan titles.”
This is what a friend of mine said after reading through the table of contents of 4 Hour Body. Of course it was not meant as a compliment, but it struck me as brilliant! Magazines spend an exorbitant amount of time, money and effort figuring out the right combination of words to get people to buy their latest issue.
Tim knew he would be releasing his table of contents across the web to drive pre-sales of his book so he used phrases like “How to lose 20 pounds in 30 days without exercise” and “Going from 5K to 50K in 12 weeks” to grab people’s attention.
How can you do this?
These are just three examples of how authors sculpted the content in their book to catch people’s attention and make it easy to share. How can you create a recipe that bakes your book marketing right into the manuscript?
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