I was lucky enough to start working on Ooligan Press’s forthcoming memoir at the very beginning of the process. Therefore, my “start to finish” for this term will go through the very first step of the process: the marketing plan. The marketing plan is the foundation of the entire book publishing strategy: copy for marketing, publicity and social are all pulled from it, and decisions about how the book is shelved and promoted are based on the way the book is framed in the marketing plan.
The marketing plan process begins with the persona exercise, which is a common exercise in marketing to flesh out your audience. In this exercise, you come up with a persona to represent your primary and secondary audience. Then you add details about their personal history, their hobbies, and their worldview until each persona feels like a real person you can market to. This helps hone your marketing strategy because it’s easier to talk to a “real” person and target the communications channels and events that person would be interested in. This is a really fun exercise that we do as a team, where everyone gets to use their creativity to build a fully realized character. The persona exercise is the foundation of the marketing plan. (So the foundation has a foundation?) We try to keep our personas in mind while writing the rest of the marketing plan, so that our strategy stays based on something that will realistically appeal to our audience.
The next part of the marketing plan is to write your copy (copy is specific wording for marketing materials) that will accompany the book on its press kit, back cover, and online retailer descriptions. This copy is the main source of information that non-industry (consumers and media) will see when they are deciding whether to read or promote your book. For my project, this involved everyone on our team writing their own hook and description for the book, and then we went through and chose our favorite parts of each team member’s piece of writing. After grafting it all together, our marketing manager, Rory, and I went back and forth for a week or two to get the wording juuuuuust right. It’s then approved by our publisher, the author, and the copy chief before it can be added to any other documents, like the press kit.
The final part of the marketing plan is to think about how your book will be found, both in physical stores and online. For physical stores, decisions about where a book will be shelved are primarily based on BISAC codes (in North America) and Thema codes (internationally). The team chooses three (or so) codes from a set list that best describe the book, with the most specific at the top. For online sales, having appropriate keywords is really important for readers to find your book organically. We aim for keywords that approximate the types of searches readers might make when they’re looking for a book like ours.
Marketing plans are a foundational document that make sure the entire process of publishing a book is cohesive, intentional, and appropriate to the audience and the goals of the book. The marketing plan is referenced in almost every other stage of the publishing process, so we have to be careful and put a lot of thought into the decisions we make because mistakes could cascade throughout the process and cause problems later. It was great to be able to start my experience as a project manager with the marketing plan, because I know the strategy of this marketing campaign inside and out, and I feel confident that I have helped to set us up well!
Blog written by Rachael Phillips.