Before marketers can identify their customers for new products they must first fully understand the value of what they have created. In book marketing, nobody understands the value of a book more thoroughly than its author.
I’m heartened by the recent success of Rebecca Skloot’s debut title, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In 2001, when the book’s original publisher was acquired by Henry Holt, Skloot’s manuscript ended up at Times Books, an imprint of Holt. Skloot found that her new publisher wanted to dramatically change the elements of the story; which she refused, outright. Skloot spent a year escaping the contract, and in 2003, signed with Crown, who published The Immortal Life in the form she had intended. The Immortal Life sold out the first day it went to sale.
Crown’s traditional marketing alone, backed by a masterfully written, hot-topic book, would have brought both author and publisher a tidy return on their invested time and effort. But it was through Skloot’s own self-publicity efforts—notably through her blog, and her Facebook and Twitter accounts—working in harmony with the traditional marketing campaign of Crown, that drove The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to No. 4 on Amazon’s best-seller list two weeks ago.
When a capable author knows she has created a book that can succeed—a book that, by merit alone, has all of the makings of a bestseller—she need only the right platform for building meaningful connections, and the willing proponent necessary to mount that platform and make those connections. And what better proponent to convey the value of a book than the author herself?
