Cypress House



Cypress House

155 Cypress Street

Fort Bragg, CA 95437

800-773-7782

fax: 707-964-7531



e-mail: cynthia@

Contact: Cynthia Frank

Creating a Marketing Plan for Your Novel

San Francisco Writers Conference, February 2015

13 Ways to Improve Your Bottom Line and Long-term Sales

1. Create from your passion while imagining the people who will buy, display, refer, choose, and read your novel. Once you’ve finished your first draft, review your manuscript for potential sales hooks. Possibilities include locale, industry or sport, news tie-ins, a character’s problem, expertise, or solution. If you’re writing in an “ephemeral” genre, or you’re a facile and quick writer, check out Google’s Zeitgeist and Trends for ideas on what the future might bring.

2. Prepare your publication and marketing plan early. Part of your marketing plan will be garnering endorsements before publication, perhaps while your book is still in manuscript. Plan your personal publicity for 3-6 months before the book comes out, and continue for 3-6 months afterwards. If you’re a royalty author, even if your publisher assigns you a publicist, you can (and perhaps should) hire your own and have the two people coordinate their plans.

3. Understand Your Distribution Network. Will your book be handled only by non-exclusive wholesalers (Ingram and Baker & Taylor, for instance), or will there be sales reps actively marketing your book? Make sure you understand how bookstores and libraries place their orders.

4. Educate yourself. Become familiar with Publisher’s Weekly, Bookselling This Week, Shelf Awareness, Publishers Lunch, and yes, blogs, so that you are informed as to who is buying what. And who’s writing what! What titles will your book be rubbing shoulders with on the physical and virtual shelves?

5. Go for prepublication excerpts and notice of your work. Submit all or parts of your work to magazines, journals, awards competitions and contests in general; use Poets & Writers, The Writer, Literary Marketplace, Writer’s Market, Poet’s Market, and Writers Digest for reference. Pre-publication sales (author’s personal lists, in-house and perhaps even rented lists) can add to your bottom line. Consider subscription sales for limited editions. Can you create a limited edition alongside (or before) the trade edition? Get your book in the hands of anyone who can offer reviews, endorsements. Again, what titles will your book be rubbing shoulders with on the physical and virtual shelves? Consider inviting those authors to blurb your book.

6. Visit bookstores in person and online to get a sense of where books are placed, the kinds of books in your category (and the categories next to them), who’s reviewed them, who’s blurbed them and endorsed them.

7. Talk to booksellers about their favorite titles in your genre and how they sell them to get a better understanding of frontline bookselling. Handselling is one of the most effective ways to spread the word. Know several ways to handsell your book. Be prepared to learn from frontline booksellers and to share notes with them, too.

8. Get your name in front of the public in every venue you can — newspapers, magazines, radio shows, appearances, any place you can tout your book. Don’t just think national publications and big splashes. Local interviews and feature stories about the author, not the book, can move sales, too. Don’t forget youth groups, senior centers, literacy groups, and Friends of the Library.

9. Track your sales, reviews, and commentary so that you can maximize new sales, and keep your fingers on the pulse of the marketplace. Use Amazon’s Author Central, , and Google Alerts, for instance. If you’re a publisher, use these tools, and online inventory checks with Baker & Taylor’s PubAlley and TS360, Ingram, Bookscan (the B&N component is free) and other vendors.

10. Watch for non-bookstore venues. Check out your local reading series, school presentations, creative writing classes, English composition classes, California Poets in the Schools classes, radio (both commercial stations and local/national public radio), “occasional” poetry opportunities. Is there a Writer-in-Residence or Poet Laureate program in your local city or county? Go beyond the old author signing and create engaging events. Consider panels with nonfiction authors or experts whose field relates to your novel’s setting, historical period, or key topics.

11. Premium and other types of bulk sales ARE possible for both fiction and poetry.

12. Polish Your Presentations. Get media training if you need it. Record and film yourself, too, as part of your ongoing learning curve.

13. Use Those Recordings and Videos. These can be great for podcasts, pitches to media, downloads, promo for webinars, and sellable information products.

Cynthia Frank is president of QED Press, Cypress House, and Lost Coast Press. She has more than twenty-eight years experience in writing, publishing, editing, and teaching. Cypress House is a full-service book production and promotion company as well as royalty house. Cypress House books have won awards and grants from the Before Columbus Foundation, WESTAF, PMA, ForeWord Magazine, IAPHC, the Society of Automotive Historians, the Antique Automobile Club of America, the Camoes Institute, the IBL and the Gulbenkian Foundation. Cynthia is on the Education Committee for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, and has presented workshops for PMA University, University of Denver Publishing Institute, Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, American Society of Journalists and Authors, the National Association of Science Writers, California Poets in the Schools, and the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association. She is the recipient of an “IPPY Award” as one of Ten Outstanding Women of Independent Publishing.

© Cynthia Frank, Cypress House

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