On this week’s episode, Tim and Valerie talk about a trap authors commonly fall into, not having a clear idea of the audience that they are trying to build. When working on projects with different audiences, it is easy to feel as though there will be a natural overlap, and that an audience of one project will enjoy another, but this is not always the case. This is why being clear about the audience and creating the personas for each project will help work reach those who will enjoy it the most. Valerie shares some of her issues around this, as she has several different projects at once. Finding focus and clarifying your intentions for the outcome of the project can help clarifying the marketing strategy, as Tim shares. This will then help streamline your workflow and allow you to dedicate time to what’s most important. To learn about this and much more, join us today!
Key Points From This Episode:
- What Valerie’s upcoming books are about.
- The power in separating audiences.
- Desired outcomes are important when deciding on a marketing strategy.
- The trap writers commonly fall into.
- How to create and leverage audience overlaps.
- Editors and publishers are often short sighted in their marketing strategies.
- Having an audience of writers does not help with selling fiction.
- Why having personas is so important.
- And much more!
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/
Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl
Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/
Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis
The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/
Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557
Joanna Penn’s website — https://www.thecreativepenn.com/
Joanna Penn’s author website — https://jfpenn.com/
Book Launch Show website — www.booklaunchshow.com
Book Launch website — www.booklaunch.com
[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello, this is Tim Grahl, you are listening to another episode of the Book Launch Show. This week I felt like as Valerie and I talked, it was a little convoluted for a lot of it. Sometimes I feel like when I’m talking about these things, I’m not overly clear. It takes me a while to get clear on what I’m trying to say. But I think it’s a common trap that we can all fall into.
I think we fall into it because of our own ego sometimes, I think we fall into it because we just get distracted by new shiny objects, it’s always much more fun to start something new than actually follow through on something you’ve been working on for a long time. Also, we can just honestly get confused about what we’re doing.
The thing that we’re talking about this week, what it really comes down to is understanding the audience that you are trying to build. Making sure you’re extremely clear on who that is and making sure that all of your actions are focused on that thing. The kind of temptation for going off in a different direction came at Valerie, sideways this week, it came out in a very natural way that if you’re listening to this and you’ve written a book, I think it would catch you off-guard too.
Because at one point, I tell Valerie that she should not in any way market a book that she has written. Now, I don’t say those words very often but when I do, I have a really good reason for it. It’s a really important episode. Halfway through it, I’m like, this is not going to make any sense, nobody should ever listen to whatever I’m saying right now.
But by the end, I realized, what we’re talking about is a very complicated issue, that is a trap for a lot of authors so I think it’s really important to talk about. We have a really good discussion about it. I think we land in a really good place and I think it’s a really helpful episode.
For those of you listening, if you have never kind of gone through anything that I’ve taught or written, you might be lost if you’re dropping into the middle of this podcast or even if you’ve listened to a lot of it. I would recommend you go out and you buy two different books, it’s the first two books I wrote, it’s Your First 1000 Copies. That’s the basis of the kind of marketing, author platform that I teach and then Book Launch Bluepring is the methodology I bring to launching bestselling books.
If you’re kind of stuck with your marketing, if you’re listening to these episodes and you’re like, “god damn it, I wish they would just get to the point,” those books get to the point. We go really in depth on really kind of niche ideas and really small topics and really blow them apart on this podcast, but if you really just want an overview of how building an author platform works and launching a bestselling book, go pick up a copy of my book, it’s at Amazon, Your First 1000 Copies is the first book and Book Launch Blueprint is the second book.
Of course, you can just search my name, Tim Grahl, and find both of those. Definitely go check those out if you haven’t yet. Pick up a copy, buy one for a friend, an author friend of yours that is stuck as well. With that, we’re going to stop here and jump into the episode and get started with Valerie.
[0:03:18.9] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Book Lauch podcast. Helping authors launch and market their books.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:03:26.9] VF: Hello Tim, how are you doing?
[0:03:29.1] TG: Good, how are you Valerie?
[0:03:30.5] VF: I’m pretty good. I’ve been looking this week at what I’ve been doing so far in marketing and working with you. A lot of it was getting my ducks in a row at the beginning, that’s done. Now I’ve got a system, I’m getting the connection system is up and running.
A lot of it now is maintenance. Looking for new places to do outreach and reaching out to those podcasts or book clubs or what have you. While that’s going on in the background, I have something else I wanted to ask you about and it might take us a few podcasts to start to get through it all.
[0:04:09.2] TG: Okay.
[0:04:10.1] VF: I’m looking forward. Now, so I’m currently marketing The Love Story. That’s out, but I’m looking forward to future books and for example, I’ve got one coming out in October, this year, 2019.
[0:04:22.4] TG: Is this the thriller?
[0:04:24.6] VF: Well, this is the analysis of Dracula, the Story Grid analysis of Dracula and here is what I want to do. That one will come out this year, but the thriller that I’m working on stems from Dracula. It’s inspired by Dracula and that will come out in 2020.
What I actually want to start doing now is building interest, one for the book that comes out the fall, but then that will develop interest for the thriller that comes out the year following. Even thought his is an analysis of Dracula, which is a horror novel, it actually is of interest to wider groups of writers.
Horror writers, yes. Thriller writers? Anyone who is wondering why the force of antagonism is so important, why you have to come up with a great villain and writers who want to get a handle on point of view and understand why that is so important because Dracula is a master work for all of those things.
I know we talked about promoting me as a writer. The thing that I have to use as leverage is me as an editor and the writers that I would be targeting with the Dracula analysis are also thriller, writers who are thriller readers. I think there’s a connection to be made there because if I’m putting myself out there as someone who has analyzed Dracula. I have a certain level of expertise.
In this type of work, if I’m going to write a thriller now that is inspired by Bram Stoker but is sort of a Story Grid rewriting of Stoker’s work. Then I’m really going to have to prove that I know how to do my job, right? That I know how to use these Story Grid tools to create a really great novel.
I think even though with the analysis my primary target audience is writers, they’re going to be curious to see whether I can walk the talk, so they would be interested in looking at the novel when that comes out. Does that make sense?
[0:06:32.0] TG: Yeah.
[0:06:35.9] VF: How do I start – how and when I guess, do I start promoting the Dracula analysis and how do I catapult from that one to the thriller? How do you start promoting a book that’s not out yet, I guess is my question?
[0:06:51.9] TG: Okay. There is a couple of questions in there. Let’s talk first about the whole – those are two different audiences.
[0:06:59.9] VF: Okay.
[0:07:00.7] TG: There’s overlap, but there’s two different audiences. You’ll have to – I mean, we’ve talked about what we’ve talked about of like focusing on fiction, that kind of thing. But if you want to do kind of a campaign around the Dracula analysis book, then it will mean just shifting into that gear where it’s like “okay, I’m going to go after podcast for writers so that I can talk about my expertise as a horror author based on the Story Grid masterwork Dracula.”
You would do all the same things, but I would treat those as two different audiences and the best version of this that comes to mind is Joana Penn where she has her Penn, I forgot the name of her site, Penn writers or whatever.
[0:07:50.0] VF: thecreativepenn.com.
[0:07:52.2] TG: Yeah, thecreativepenn.com that is all about the business side and marketing side of writing and then she has her JF Penn website that is about her fiction and those – she’s building an email list of both, but they’re two separate email lists.
I think what you would do is I don’t know; we could talk about whether you need another website or just a section of your current site.
[0:08:15.8] VF: No.
[0:08:16.9] TG: Which is what I would lean towards is a section of your current site.
[0:08:21.0] VF: God no.
[0:08:22.8] TG: But like, or, we would have to talk about the best way to do this. But you would need a separate list of people that are interested of your analysis of Dracula. But then, you could promote to them, hey, I have this fiction over here, would you also like to be a part of that? And drag people over to that side.
When the thriller comes out, you could make a case of them of like “hey, you should buy this book so you can see what a Story Grid written book looks like. But that’s a harder sell. Because you could say that about any masterwork, you know what I mean?
[0:09:03.0] VF: No
[0:09:05.0] TG: If I’m a writer and I’m interested in learning about writing, I know that I can read any well written book by established author, both classic fiction and new fiction and get a glimpse into what good fiction is.
[0:09:19.5] VF: Okay.
[0:09:21.0] TG: I’m interested in this particular book because I’m going to learn something specific about writing.
[0:09:28.6] VF: Right, okay.
[0:09:31.3] TG: To leap from “hey, you’re interested in my book about writing to therefore you’re going to be interested in my fiction,” is to me a very big leap, that you need to just invite people into and most of them won’t take you up on it.
But those are two separate audiences and I think you need to talk to them differently, you need to send them to different places, you need to sell different things, I mean, that’s just a totally different audience.
[0:09:59.9] VF: Okay, on my website, I already have a list for this. Signup list for this. Now, the page could use some improvement because it’s a page I created when I was doing the whole overhead, overhaul of my site and so there’s sort of a holder text there on some of it. I already have that in place and it’s one of the pages under the four writers tab. That’s already in place. One of the ideas that I had, because this is another list, I need another reason for people to sign up to it, right?
If they sign up to my main mailing list, my book club mailing list, well, they can download the first part of Masquerade for free and they’re joining my book club and all that good stuff. Since this is another list, I need another download, right? Another – what do you call it, a magnet, something for that list, do I not?
[0:10:54.1] TG: Yes, yeah. I would say you do.
[0:10:58.2] VF: I do have an idea that I’m still thinking through and it’s a video blog, a vlog that would be potentially a weekly vlog where I would, as I’m saying this, I’m wondering if this really is for the analysis or for the thriller or both. Anyway, I’ll tell you what it is and then you tell me what you think.
It would be a weekly vlog where I would talk about basically what I’m doing. The lessons that I’ve learned from Dracula, what I’m incorporate – since the thriller is a rewrite of Dracula, what I’m rewriting, how I’m using Story Grid as the drafting tool.
[0:11:38.9] TG: Okay. Why did you write the Story Grid guide or masterwork of Dracula? What are you hopping to get out of it?
[0:11:46.2] VF: Well, I wanted to study the novel, I wanted to study the story and the structure of the story to see what makes it tick.
[0:11:54.5] TG: Okay, great, that’s the internal reason to do it, but why go through all the extra effort and pain of writing it all out and publishing it.
[0:12:03.8] VF: It gives me a platform, it gives me a level of expertise, hopefully, some money.
[0:12:09.7] TG: Okay, this is what I’m getting to. It gives you a platform, a level or expertise so you can get money. How are you going to get that money? Are you going to speak, are you going to get hired to be an editor, you willing to – because you know, this book’s not going to sell 10,000 copies in the first month.
You’re not going to make money off of book sales. Where are you thinking you’re going to make money as a result of writing this?
[0:12:33.6] VF: Well, primarily, it was to develop the knowledge so that I could carry that knowledge over to my fiction.
[0:12:40.3] TG: Okay, if that is the only reason you did it, then you should not do any marketing for the book whatsoever.
[0:12:49.0] VF: I don’t know what to say to that.
[0:12:52.8] TG: Okay, this is the path, right? Okay, you wrote this book, mainly so it’s almost like an accomplishment, but if you don’t want the things that come at the end of marketing this book, because it’s not going to be money, these books, we know are not going to sell enormous amounts of copies. Because of the nature of the book itself. Let’s say you do sell 10,000 copies in the first year. That’s still not going to be a huge significant amount of money that you can quit your job and just do that, right?
[0:13:28.3] VF: Right, yeah.
[0:13:30.7] TG: Right, the only reason to market the book, this book, is to get something else out of it. You want to be known as a thriller/horror editor, that’s what our – it will grow your name so that you can get more clients or get speaking gigs at conferences for that or whatever.
But if you don’t want those things, there’s no reason to market the book. Because you’re not going to get a bunch of money of the book, the only way you make money off of the book is by doing these other things, but if you don’t want those things, you’re walking down a path that ends in a place you know you don’t want to be.
[0:14:12.8] VF: Okay.
[0:14:14.0] TG: You’re building an audience, then, for something you don’t want. You see what I’m saying?
[0:14:19.9] VF: Yeah. I think I’m still back on – you don’t see any cross over between the two audiences. Because what I’m looking for readers, I will have to go through the same exercise that I just went through for the love stories, who are my personas, where do they hang out? I think there’s cross over between the personas that I’ve already created because even though it’s a thriller, it’s still about a woman, it’s still a woman’s story in the way that The Girl on the Train is about a woman.
You know, that kind of vein. There’s definitely crossover in the personas that I’ve already created for the love story and for the thriller. Great. I think there are women who read thrillers who don’t necessarily read love stories. Who are they and where do they hang out?
[0:15:09.1] TG: Now, those are the right questions, but that has nothing, people that read thrillers don’t give a shit about an editor’s take on Dracula. How many of Joana Penn’s fiction books have you read?
[0:15:22.6] VF: A couple, I haven’t read them all, I read a couple.
[0:15:26.5] TG: I would say you’re in the minority of her nonfiction audience.
[0:15:31.1] VF: Yeah, she’s mentioned, I don’t want to put words in her mouth and I think she’s mentioned that there hasn’t been a huge crossover, but she’s doing something very different.
[0:15:39.9] TG: I’m telling you, teaching people about writing and talking to writers is a really bad way to sell fiction.
[0:15:47.9] VF: Yes.
[0:15:48.5] TG: Every writer falls into this trap because it’s an easy thing to build a platform on. I mean, I’ve ran into this. I mean, it’s not the same thing, but it’s like my audience that I built around book marketing is not interested in Running Down a Dream. They’re just not. Every time I do something with Running Down a Dream, it has the lowest conversion rates of anything else that I do around book marketing.
[0:16:14.8] VF: How do I start marketing the thriller? Is it too early, when does the long launch start, all that kind of stuff?
[0:16:24.4] TG: When are you planning on coming out with it?
[0:16:26.4] VF: Next year.
[0:16:28.5] TG: Ballpark, spring, summer, fall?
[0:16:30.2] VF: Well, I’m thinking October because it’s a Dracula related – it’s sort of a Halloween type book.
[0:16:35.6] TG: You’re roughly a year and a half away from it coming out?
[0:16:38.4] VF: Yeah.
[0:16:38.7] TG: I wouldn’t start marketing it until you’re six to nine months out and even then, when it ramp up if you’d follow like my nine month plan for launching a book, all of it would be behind the scenes until the final month, anyway. So, I am saying if you want an audience to overlaps, continue building the audience you’re building now because they already read fiction and so getting them to read a – you would frame this new book that you know as a thriller, you would frame it as women’s fiction, that’s also a thriller.
[0:17:16.7] VF: Right, totally which is why in my book club, the types of stories that I am talking about each month, they’re not all love stories. They all feature a woman and some aspect of a woman’s story, but the readers don’t care, right? They are not thinking about genre the way I am thinking about genre. So, they don’t care how I classify it in my Story Grid head. They just want a great story that they can get lost in.
[0:17:43.6] TG: Right, so what I am telling you is all the stuff that you are doing now to build your audience for Masquerade is also setting you up to sell your thriller in a year and a half and I don’t think – if you tell me, “Tim this is the only thing I care about. I don’t want to do anything; my editing business is fine. I don’t need to do anything to grow that and I don’t want to be known in that way. I am going all in on fiction.” I would tell you; you should do zero external marketing for the Dracula master work.
Just let this story Grid Machine do it for you, do the work within Story Grid to talk about it or whatever, but do not go out in the world and become known because you are now splitting your time, you are splitting your audience. All the same reasons we decided you shouldn’t do that several months ago, you still should not do that.
[0:18:37.1] VF: Okay, so keep doing the outreach that I am working on.
[0:18:41.6] TG: Exactly, I feel like that is setting you more over to success, even if you are writing something completely different like a male led sci-fi novel, that’s an action. You know, I am trying to think of something opposite of what you are building. You are still building a better audience for that by building an audience of fiction readers then you are building an audience of writers.
[0:19:08.6] VF: So, unless I am trying to build my editing business, leave it alone.
[0:19:15.1] TG: Leave it alone. You just always have to think about what are you hoping to get. So, here is the thing, so okay I deal with this with authors a lot that are traditionally published. So, everybody in the process with this author, their agent in most cases. There’s some really good agents that think long term for their authors, but most agents, most editors, most publishers, they are only thinking about this book and they are actually only thinking about the first one to four weeks of sales in this book. That is all they care about.
So, the author gets stuck in this trap of doing all this other stuff based on the publisher and the editors, which are the same and the agents and the publicists too. If there is a publicist involved, they start only focusing on that first month. For most authors of business books, which is what I work with a lot, wrote a business book almost as like a long-term marketing plan. You know it is a new way to market their business.
So, they know they are not going to hit the New York Times list, they are not trying to do that. They really just want to get the book out into the world to bring in more business and establish themselves as an expert.
[0:20:31.4] VF: To use as a calling card.
[0:20:33.1] TG: Yeah, but because everybody else in this situation freaking out, you know you got to make the first week, first week, first week, you got to push, you got to push, you got to push. They start doing that when that is actually undercutting what they actually wrote the book for, right? So, it skews their priorities. So, you’ve worked hard on this book. It is coming out. You probably feel like one, “I have a book coming out therefore I promote it,” that is a normal thing.
You also probably feel some sort of like, “well, you know I should be helping Story Grid get the word out about this book.” You feel these pulls but you have to understand what you are going to get at the end of that. What you are going to get at the end of that is a bunch of stuff you don’t actually want, which is to be known in this space as an editor, more clients known as a nonfiction author not a fiction author because again, it is really hard to split your time between two things.
So, if you don’t want the things that are at the end of promoting this book, you should not be promoting the book. If you really truly just wrote it as an exercise, then just put it out into the world and let it go and again, I can’t express enough that you building up a following of writers will not self-fiction, it just doesn’t. I’ve just seen it too many times.
[0:21:57.8] VF: Okay.
[0:21:58.8] TG: You do not like this answer?
[0:22:00.9] VF: No, I believe you. I don’t think you’re telling me; I don’t think you are lying to me or anything like that. It just wasn’t the answer I wanted but that doesn’t mean –
[0:22:09.2] TG: Well that is what I meant like why don’t you like the answer because to me, I am letting you off the hook.
[0:22:15.5] VF: You are, you are totally letting me off the hook, which is a bit of a shock.
[0:22:19.6] TG: I know, why are you fighting me so hard on letting me off the hook?
[0:22:23.7] VF: I would just really love to have this as a way to create interest in the thriller. Is there something I can do with it? Well I can talk about it, talk about it in reference to the thriller that is coming out. I mean I can do that.
[0:22:41.8] TG: Here is how you answer this question, find some ideal readers for the thriller. So do a little bit, don’t do the whole spreadsheet like you did before but just do a little bit of thinking. Okay, who is a good person for the thriller that will come out in a year and a half? Get them on the phone and tell them about the Dracula project and then start seeing if they are interested. It would even be better if you could do it in person because you know, it’s like when I try to talk to somebody about jujitsu.
And I immediately see their face go blank and I’m like, “I should stop, they’re not interested.” Right? You know that. See if you can get them interested. Try a lot, try some different angles of talking about it, but the thing is like the typical fiction reader does not give two shits why the fiction book works. They just want to read a book that they enjoy and they don’t know why they enjoy it. They don’t care why they enjoy it. They just know that they loved it or they know that they hated it.
[0:23:48.4] VF: Right that is not their job to know why it works or doesn’t work. That is our job.
[0:23:53.7] TG: Yeah, a book dissecting a novel I cannot – I have trouble coming up with an angle that a typical fiction writer would be interested in. Again, when I say I want to be clear here, I am not saying there is no overlap. I am saying it is very low overlap. Again, coming back, when I send out an email promoting my book, it is not like nobody buys it, but it is a very low number of people buy it compared to when I talk about anything having to do with marketing because that is the audience I built.
So, what I am telling you is that if you build an audience of writers who are interested in learning about writing, when the times comes for them to buy your thriller novel, a really small percentage of them. if you did that same amount of work to build an audience of fiction readers, that would convert better.
[0:24:43.2] VF: Okay.
[0:24:44.9] TG: So, if you can buy coffee for three different people that are big readers and find something that got them interested, like you tell them a little bit about the book and see if they ask you any questions. See if that sparks any kind of interest and if you can find an angle maybe there is something there. I can’t think of anything.
[0:25:04.4] VF: Maybe that is the trick, right? Find the angle, if there is one.
[0:25:08.4] TG: That is what I’m saying. I mean we have proven that I don’t always like when we get really specific what I think is not necessarily the right thing. Like when we are talking about your author updates. So, I am having a lot of trouble. So, I am basing my opinion on two things. One, my anecdotal experience working with authors that have tried to build an audience of writers and then sell them fiction and it just doesn’t work.
And then my view of I can’t come up with an angle that a typical fiction reader would actually be interested in. So, you need a fiction reader that reads somewhere in the ballpark of what you are writing that is not a writer and is not interested in becoming a writer. And then if you can get them interested in what you are doing with Dracula, you’ve got to be like the angle. You need an angle and you can’t be interested because they like Valerie and they want to hear about what she’s working on.
There is a difference between that and this is – I just don’t see how you convert. I am interested in dissecting every scene of Dracula to I want to really read your fiction.
[0:26:23.4] VF: I think it is the findings that I came up with from Dracula. I think that might be, because there is a woman story in Dracula that is there, but no one sees it. So, I think if I just on the fly that is as much as I can come up with, but if I give that some thought if there is a hook, if there is an angle, if there is a spark there that I can interest people with that might be it. If I could flesh that out.
[0:26:51.0] TG: Yeah and I think that would make that great fodder for your fiction audience say, “hey I have been working on this thing over here. You probably won’t be interested in reading it, but here is some stuff that I learned that I think you’ll like.”
[0:27:05.2] VF: The Dracula analysis, I wouldn’t expect them to buy that because that is a total story nerd thing that I am all over and the other editors are all over because we just eat this stuff up and storytellers would be interested in this right? Anyone who is looking to develop their craft because that’s a craft thing, but we just said, the readers don’t care. They just want a book that works.
[0:27:30.1] TG: Exactly.
[0:27:31.0] VF: Unless they decide that they want to write a book someday and then they move over to the other group of people anyhow.
[0:27:36.2] TG: Yeah.
[0:27:37.4] VF: So, no, I wouldn’t expect them to be interested in what the turning point of a scene is. But the fact that this is why I said that the people who would be interested in it would be people who want to know why point of view is so important is because it is actually written from a woman’s point of view.
[0:27:53.9] TG: But let’s say I read Dracula and loved it I would never even cross my mind to care what the point of view was, unless I am somebody who is interested in storytelling.
[0:28:07.1] VF: Unless you are interested in the way women are represented in the book and the women’s stories that are told in the book.
[0:28:14.4] TG: You are still – that is the angle that will get your women’s audience. That is great information for your women audience. That still doesn’t answer how. So maybe it should be the opposite of like I am still saying, let us say you build up a list of a thousand writers that loved your analysis of Dracula, even love the women’s angle on it. That does not necessarily mean that any of them are going to be interested in reading your fiction.
[0:28:44.8] VF: No, I mean talking about the women’s angle and Dracula to my fiction readers.
[0:28:49.1] TG: Yeah that’s great. Absolutely, but that is not marketing the Dracula book.
[0:28:55.4] VF: No but it is leveraging the Dracula book to start to generate some sort of curiosity about the thriller, right?
[0:29:04.0] TG: Yes, I agree but I feel like we are talking around the same thing. You are still trying to attract fiction readers. You are not trying to attract writers.
[0:29:14.1] VF: Right, I just wanted to figure out how I could leverage this for that.
[0:29:19.4] TG: Right. So, you can leverage almost anything. You are leveraging your everyday life by writing your monthly author updates. This is why the personas are so important. What I was trying to convince you was to not try to add in writers as a persona.
[0:29:34.6] VF: Oh, I see, okay.
[0:29:35.9] TG: Right, you keep the same persona and then just twist everything you do to talk to those personas.
[0:29:43.9] VF: Okay. That’s what I am looking for. That is what I have to do.
[0:29:47.2] TG: Yeah, like the only way I have been able to talk about Running Down a Dream to my audience is to twist it to be about book marketing.
[0:29:55.7] VF: Okay.
[0:29:57.2] TG: Yeah, like I have to have a book marketing angle or they are just not interested because that is what they signed up for. I could go down a whole other path. I just don’t want you to get tantalized by, “okay I am going to go out and get on a bunch of writers podcasts and talk about this book and build an audience and hopefully some of those people will be interested in my fiction.” That is a loser’s game. The winner’s game is I got my personas and I am going after them and I am going to talk everything I do.
I could turn my trip to Whole Foods into a whole blog post about marketing, right? I have my personas locked in and I could take anything I do like my view is that everything is marketing. So, I could write anything, I could take anything that happened to me and twist it into learning about marketing because I want to talk to my persona. So sure, take this book and twist it into being about women and fiction and that’s great content, but it’s for the same people.
[0:31:02.8] VF: Tim? Are you starting to feel like a broken record?
[0:31:08.7] TG: Well I often feel like I say things over and over anyway. So, like you know because you are like on this podcast. You are playing as the stand in for all of the listeners and I think this is a really easy trap for people to get into, which is, “oh here is this group over here that would be easier to talk to and find. I am going to talk to them and start building them up as my audience.” But they’re not going to be interested in the actual books that you are trying to write and sell.
Does that make sense? Because I feel like I talked around a lot, but I don’t know if I ever actually brought it home.
[0:31:46.0] VF: Yes, and I think we needed to talk around it to figure out one, if it could be leveraged in anyway and two, if so, how right? So that is good.
[0:31:57.6] TG: Okay.
[0:31:58.2] VF: Good, awesome. Okay I will let you go now.
[0:32:01.6] TG: All right.
[0:32:02.2] VF: Well, see you next week Tim. Thank you so much.
[0:32:04.2] TG: Thanks Valerie.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:32:05.2] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the shownotes or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website, booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you’d like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you next week.
[END]
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