Who do you Market?

After an interesting discussion with a local bookstore owner, I started to wonder a bit more about MARKETING.  Who or what are we MARKETING.  The books we write or our author names.  Think about it for a moment.  Big business sell their product because the consumer likes their name. It attracts attention. Next they do mouth-watering  adverts to entice you inside.

MacDonald’s anyone?  Golden Arches, Ronald McDonald…We all know this business with their huge logo which is totally in your face.  KFC, Nestle etc. You name it and they all have huge signs grabbing your attention prior to trying to show you how good they are and yep we know some aren’t good at all…Though looking at the second stage of marketing, – what they sell and how they sell it.

SELL YOUR NAME AS AN AUTHOR

How can we sell our author names to the public. How do we grow our reach, get out names out there showing how good our books are?

One way I help authors is by doing a SPOTLIGHT AUTHOR each month in my FREE Magazine. The Indie Publishing News goes worldwide, though still needs more contributions and a bigger reach to be totally effective like the bigger magazines out there – National Geographic, which is an amazing magazine.  Each author gets a cover page with their names on, along with about five – six pages filled with an interview, recipe, reviews etc.

As an author, it is a different matter.  It is up to me to sell my name unless I employ someone to do this for me. We all know this would be a tad expensive for most Indie Authors. So what can I do?  I don’t have a logo (except for my business).  What was suggested was having my author name bigger on my book covers like many top-selling authors do through traditional publishing houses.  LEE CHILD, JAMES PATTERSON...both do this. You see their name before you see the title of the book they are selling.  The story is secondary in many ways. It is the name which pulls you in.

SO WHY DON’T WE DO THE SAME?

I asked one author friend and she said it made a person look big-headed as if they are the bees knees. Isn’t that what we want though? To be thought to be the best so we can sell our work to the consumer? Shouldn’t this be part of a strategy from the start? Making a big splash with our name, after all it is what represents us the most.

BOOK COVERS

So which one appeals to you? Which one would you focus on if you were going to buy the story to read?  You can see the process which we went through. The light purple one was made by the bookstore owner to show me what he meant about MARKETING your name. If you were the author – which one would you use, remembering you are MARKETING your name and then your story.

PLEASE COMMENT AND LET ME KNOW – THANKS

FEATURE IMAGE IS FROM A POST I REBLOGGED –

I THOUGHT IT FIT NICELY WITH THE CONTENTS OF THIS POST

THANK YOU TO THE ARTIST WHO PUT IT TOGETHER.