Marketing Books—Successes & Failures IV

Trying Risky Strategies—

One thing I'm sure of is that you can't really know in advance which marketing ploy will work—or how well. There just aren't any surefire gimicks in business because if there were everybody would be using them.

As I have mentioned, I thought I was armed with all the marketing experience I needed to make a success of selling my book Kisses from a Distance. I talked about finding market niches in the last post, and having observed first-hand how markets continually divide and specialize, I realized that although the book was having success among various ethnicities, there was an opportunity to go after one ethnic group in particular. The book chronicles the experiences of three families who happen to be Lebanese belonging to the Maronite religion. Surely I would be remiss if I didn't try to address that group in my marketing strategy.

I did a little research and found a person who was the director of the National Apostolate of Maronites (NAM), and whom I contacted. I told him what I was about and asked if he'd like a book. We were in touch after he received the book and he thought this was a good thing to mention to his organization. He sent me the mailing list for all 80 Maronite Churches in the US and I decided to make a bold investment and send a complimentary copy to the pastors of each church. In a personalized letter, I asked if each church might mention my book in the their Sunday bulletin.

For a lot of authors this might be a prohibitive expense—the postage and padded envelopes alone totaled nearly $300. When you add in the cost of the books, it comes to a tidy sum that would take quite a few sales to cover.

What I thought was a brilliant strategy fell with a thud when I received only three letters thanking me for the book. I was a bit downcast to say the least. A couple of months later I got a surprise phone call from a lady in Birmingham, AL, who said she had read the book notice in her church's Sunday bulletin and had asked her priest about it. He hadn't read the book but loaned it to her. She said she loved it, and would I consider coming to Birmingham to be the speaker at their annual banquet, to be attended by 350 people. Long story short, they put me up, paid me a very nice stipend, and I sold 100 books to boot. That weekend recovered my entire cost for the promotion three times over!

But that wasn't all! One of the priests who read the book, wrote a nice review that was published in the organization's national publication. In addition, I was invited to the NAM convention two years in a row and to another speaking gig in Austin, TX— where a total of 140 more books were sold! There were also many uncounted orders from the word of mouth buzz that those sales generated.

So, what I thought was an abject failure turned into a big success.

To be continued--