Don't fool yourself. Positioning your work and your brand to find readers is not easy. You may have pushed through the top trending five steps to success and wonder why you're not swimming in readers. You've done what the experts have told you to do but wonder why success hasn't been bestowed upon you yet. What are you doing wrong?
Most likely, you're doing everything right. The only tweak needed is to become relentless.
Applying concepts from business development and marketing is not easy for many writers and authors. You've swallowed the castor oil of identifying your core identity (brand), crafting a message, targeting an audience and reaching out via your different platforms. Then you wipe the sweat from your brow and sit back, waiting for the readers to come. When they don't flock in the numbers you want, you think the process was flawed and you thrash about finding and experimenting with another recipe for the magic sauce.
Stop thrashing and adopt an athlete's focus. Success comes from doing the same sprint or lifting the same weight over and over again. The mindset needed is not much different from what we writers do when crafting a paragraph. We go over it repeatedly. We are relentless in our craft. We just have to apply that to our marketing efforts.
Failure or the word "No" are things that most writers shrink from but business development professionals take in stride. We writers can be a fragile bunch with all of our yearning to be read and liked, but BD folks know that you learn a lot from rejection and a failure. Failures don't stop them in their tracks. Instead, the reasons why something failed are examined and a new or modified approach is taken. BD folks don't let the Big Account get away just because one pitch on one particular day did not succeed. They circle back, reassess and re-approach with a refined pitch.
Once you've committed to writing, you must commit to the fact that it takes time to build a following. Don't stop. Keep going. Go back to the well again and again. Be relentless.
More on A2R (Author to Reader) Marketing can be found here.
Oh, wait. Do I see something ahead?
