Grassroots Marketing to Activate Your Network

What: As an author, you most likely have many connections in various fields. Here is a simple guide to activating your network to get the people you know excited about your book and giving them tools to tell others about it.

Why: Your contacts are a major component of getting the word out about your book. For your book to succeed you need to get organized about how you are going to connect with those contacts, let them know about your new book, and ask for their help with the sales and promotion of it. If you think about it, you probably know a lot of influential people in a number of different industries and fields that can help promote your book. This is a strategy that worked to make Van Jones’s The Green Collar Economy a New York Times bestseller with a relatively low level of marketing investment in terms of dollars and cents. It's also been a very effective part of the marketing campaign for Agenda for a New Economy.

How: It’s easier to organize your marketing efforts if you divide the into phases, starting at least six months before your book is published.

Pre-work (six months or more before the publication of your book):

Build your base.

  • Speak extensively to groups (associations, organizations, churches, corporations, etc.) that are your target audience. Through speaking you will establish a diverse platform and establish relationships with key “connectors”—influential contacts who can help you connect with other key contacts and organizations.
  • Establish relationships with key organizations that you want to get the word out about your book. This can come in the form of retaining new clients, writing for a newsletter, speaking at events, sponsoring events, mutually referring clients/customers to each other, linking websites, and so on.
  • Create formal partnerships with other organizations. Ask these questions about any partnership:
  • What do you want from this partnership?
  • What does the organization want from this partnership?
  • What can both of you do collectively?
  • What does it do better than you do, or what audience does it reach better than you do?
  • What do you do better than it does that you can offer?

Consider these criteria for a good partner:

  • A mission match exists. (The organization operates under similar principles and are attempting to accomplish similar goals, for example, Creating a World That Works for All.)
  • It has contacts that have paid to be part of it (membership dues, subscriptions, etc.).
  • It has a large enough base to make sense to create a formal partnership.

List building (three to six months before the publication date)

Compile your list of contacts at least three months ahead of the book’s publication date. In addition to your professional contacts, you will want to include as many contacts from your personal life as possible and ask everyone in your organization to submit all of their own personal contacts (friends, family members, etc.).

Depending on the number of contacts and your ambitions for doing outreach, you may need to enlist the support of someone to specifically research and compile this list. We think finding someone to do this is well worth the effort and expense because we are seeing more sales results from this kind of organizational outreach strategy than from other marketing avenues. It may be worth investigating in your community to see if anyone has the appropriate skills to do this outreach. You may want to consider hiring a campaign manager to oversee this campaign if you don’t already have staff, interns, colleagues, or others who can handle this task.

You will need to compile three types of lists:

  • Key organizations to pitch early on to see if they will activate their own networks
  • Key contacts that you want to receive a copy of the book as soon as it ships
  • All your contacts that you want to receive an email blast at publication date

Pre-pitch (three months to one month before the publication date)

Next you’ll want to get in touch with your organizational contacts to enlist their help in getting the word out about your book. Make your pitch very direct and create a sense of urgency: “Will you send this message on this date to your entire list and put the book on your website’s home page?” Once you get commitments, you need to follow up and hold those partners to their commitments. You can also offer to help them in the future. Don’t view this outreach as marketing; instead, see it as relationship building. We also recommend a philosophy of abundance, meaning looking at what is possible in the relationship and what the two parties can do together to further each other’s missions.

Here are some examples of what you can ask for in your pitch, depending on the organization:

  • Purchase copies of the book on this date. (You can choose to direct the sales to your favorite bookseller, our website www.bkconnection.com, or your own site. Please note that Amazon.com sales rankings are based on the number of transactions, not overall sales. This means that whether a customer buys one copy or twenty copies during one visit, Amazon counts it as one sale for its sales rankings. Its overall sales do get reported to bestseller lists though. You should also think about building your own contact list and consider offering something free if people come to your website and give you their email address—a free excerpt or ancillary product, for example.)
  • Tell your community about the book. Send an alert to your email list, promote it in your enewsletter, and/or promote it through your social networks on this date.
  • Blog about the ideas in the book.
  • Set up a page or link to the book on your website by this date.
  • Write a review of the book on Amazon.com or in other forums (newsletters, magazines, newspapers, etc.) by this date.
  • Tell your friends and family about the book by this date!

Here is an example of a message that worked to help promote Agenda for a New Economy through an organization. Click to view.

For the campaign for The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones’s organization had a pitch that worked well. It asked organizations to send out a message that said, “Make Van Jones the first African-American environmentalist to crack the New York Times bestseller list by ordering a copy of his book on this date.”

It is good to keep it simple but also good to customize the message to a particular group so that it does not come off as insincere or spam. Keep in mind that sincere, direct requests with specific dates will be the most likely to get executed. Wishy-washy requests are easy to dismiss. Put yourself in the position of the people receiving the email, and make it easy for them to help you. Make them want to help you by being honest, authentic, and thankful.

Mailing of review copies mailing to key contacts (two weeks before the publication date)

About two weeks after the ship date of the book, you will receive your free copies for promotional use. You should be ready to send these out immediately to key contacts that are part of your network, thanking them for their contribution to this work and asking for their help in getting the word out per the above suggestions. Some authors have found it very effective to gift wrap the books and write a very personal message. They have gotten great feedback that the recipients felt the gift was more meaningful and stood out. If appropriate, you can also promote the Berrett-Koehler bulk discounts for your book, and our sales staff would be happy to follow up with these contacts to see if they are interested in placing bulk orders with us. Just send us a list with email addresses and phone numbers after your mailing goes out and we will do the follow-up.

Blast-off (on the publication date)

The publication date is the time to follow up your pre-pitches to your organizational contacts to make sure they are following through on the commitments they made. It is also the time to do your outreach to your individual contacts in the form of an email blast.

Here is an example of an individual email blast. Click to view.

Again, the email blasts themselves should also be simple and direct. Don’t worry that one individual might receive multiple messages about the book in one day. With all the noise of daily life, it is hard to get people’s attention. In Van Jones’s campaign, many people got multiple messages about his book from diverse contacts, and that worked well to get attention for the book. It is easy to ignore one message but hard to forget many. When the same message comes across your path multiple times, you start to think, “ Hmm, this must be something that is worth knowing about, talking about, or supporting.” That’s marketing for you!

Follow-up (within one month of the publication date)

Send personal thank-you letters to organizations and individuals that helped in some way and offer your support to them.

Overall

Get organized and get out there to leverage your contacts. Be direct. Keep it simple. Create urgency. Be transparent. Think big and be motivated and passionate about your new baby!

Doing this kind of outreach is a great way to sell books and build relationships that will serve you for many years to come.

How Much: If you do this all yourself, then there isn’t any additional cost, except your time for compiling the names and your cost of mailing the books. However, as we said above, it can be well worth your while to hire someone to help you get your contacts in order.

Help: Though we have worked with campaign organizers for varied campaigns of this nature recently, we have only a couple recommendations because often the skills needed to execute the campaign are unique to the relationships built around a certain book or author's community. That said, we recommend:

Please contact Kristen Frantz or Jeremy Sullivan for further recommendations. We also recommend a BK book on building the kinds of networks that help you acheive your goals:

Look forward to next month's Tip Sheet on Amazon: Your Billboard to the World. See you then.

Berrett-Koehler Publishers

www.bkconnection.com

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