[00:00:00] Hi everyone. This is Steven Booth with Genius Book Publishing and Genius Publishing Studio. I’ve talked a lot about funnels and marketing and ideas of how authors can reach out to different segments of their market.
And all of that is still valid and all of that is still true. But I had a revelation recently and I thought I would share it with you, which is that I want to move to a deeper level, move upstream of the marketing funnel that I’ve talked about so much, and talk about what makes a book word of mouth worthy. what makes it unforgettable. And a book needs a promise.
It needs an emotional payoff, whether that’s in fiction or in nonfiction, or a memoir or whatever it is that you are writing. There must be a promise and there must be a [00:01:00] payoff. Leah, when she’s talking about stories and that she’s considering publishing will talk about an airplane ride.
It has to take off, it has to stay in the air, and it has to land, and that journey is what I am talking about. That journey is the minimal unmistakable truth or identity of that story.
The reason this is important is because a reader expects a payoff. That’s the landing part of the airplane ride. They expect a payoff. they expect a transformation of themselves, if not the characters that they’re reading about.
And this is true again, in nonfiction as it is in fiction. So what I am going to be talking about going forward is foundational marketing. What makes a [00:02:00] book word of mouth worthy.
Because at the end of the day, if you know the funnel, I talk about the funnel all the time. There’s people who’ve never heard of you. There’s people who have heard of you and are interested in your book. There are people who are ready to buy. The question is, how do we get people into the top of the funnel or really the middle?
And the answer is. It’s one thing to find somebody cold, like on meta, Facebook and Instagram. Get them in cold. Get them interested. Get them to buy. That’s a very difficult proposition. It’s very expensive. Costs a lot of money to get somebody from absolutely no idea who you are to buy in the book.
What works better and is less expensive is the
reader who’s already read your book, telling their friends, family, coworkers, whatever, about the book that they just read. And it doesn’t matter how well written [00:03:00] the book is if the reader doesn’t care about what they’re reading.
I was talking to a guy about a book that I wrote in 2010. It was just an early project that I worked on and I published it. It’s called The Orchard, if you’ve read it, good. And he said to me he liked the writing. The craft was there, everything was wonderful, but he just didn’t care about the characters.
And that’s the situation that we’re trying to avoid here, because he’s not going to tell anybody about this book.
And therefore, every single person that we need to get to by this book has gotta be started off cold. There’s no warming up, there’s no referral. If you can have a book where somebody buys it, they read it, they love it, they tell the next person buys, they tell the next 10 people and the next 10 people buy.
That matters when it comes to this foundational marketing. This, why [00:04:00] is word of mouth worthy? And so I’m going to get into the details of this as we go, but I wanted to let you all know that this is the direction that we’re gonna be going from this point forward.
I’ve already talked about external marketing. Let, we’re gonna be talking about foundational or internal marketing. What makes a book worthy of being referred. So that’s what we’re gonna be talking about going forward. Thank you very much for your attention and I will see you in the next video.
