Austin S. Camacho on Evidence-Based Marketing for Your Novel

July 7, 2008

Note: This guest post from Austin S. Camacho is a stop on his virtual blog tour promoting his new book for small press and self-published authors: Successfully Marketing Your Novel in the 21st Century. Camacho talks about evidence-based marketing, and gives you a chance to get a free copy of his new book by sharing your own tips for marketing full-length fiction!

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I wrote my new book, Successfully Marketing Your Novel in the 21st Century for fiction authors who are self-published, are published by a small press, or published through a Print On Demand company. The book is filled with valuable tips and detailed techniques that have worked for me in the decade I’ve been promoting my own novels. It’s built on three broad principles: camouflage, planning, and evidence-based marketing. Today I’ll tell you a bit more about that last idea.I’ve spent a lot of time, money and energy, on marketing and have learned three important things:

1. What worked for someone else may not work for me.
2. The person pushing a marketing idea may not really care whether or not it increases my sales, as long as he or she gets paid.
3. Some of the traditional wisdom may no longer apply. The publishing landscape changes every day.

For those reasons I keep careful records of everything I do in the marketing arena. Evidence-based marketing means that before I invest in a tactic, I consider the cost and project how many books it will have to move to pay off. Whenever I try a new idea, I look for some sort of measurement by which I can objectively judge if it was successful. And whenever someone offers to help me for a price, I ask specific questions about the success of previous clients and what guarantees they’ll give. If a publicist or marketing expert is unwilling to offer any kind of guarantee, there’s often a reason.

That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t think outside the box. New ideas can be valuable. In fact, one way they can pay off is if you enter my contest.

THE CONTEST!

Send me your best tips on how to market full length fiction. I will feature the best three in my newsletter and on my blog – Another Writer’s Life. The entrants will each receive a copy of my book, and the one who sends the best tip will also receive a $50 gift certificate for bookmarks, business cards or a book cover from Iconix – the company that designed the cover of Successfully Marketing Your Novel in the 21st Century.

To enter, just visit http://www.ascamacho.com/sfmyn.htm.

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