This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 1/20/14.
Most marketing activities are (unfortunately) not directly measurable.
It’s widely agreed that the very best marketing is write a quality book, then write some more of them, and each of those books finding an audience will help market the other. I agree with that, but it generally takes a while!
You can buy advertising, which is measurable, or do other specific promotions. But for non-fiction in particular, there is one thing that makes a huge difference to sales, whether you have a platform or not.
Optimize your non-fiction book title for keywords people are actually searching for.
I’ve blogged before about the importance of keywords for metadata and discoverability, and that post contains the details of how to do the research and choose the right words.
I explained how I changed my book title from ‘How To Enjoy Your Job’ to ‘Career Change: How to stop hating your job, discover what you really want to do with your life and start doing it!‘ In this post, I’m going to outline some of the results of that book title change.
I can attribute pretty much everything to the book title alone, because this blog is not a platform for the topic of career change, I don’t tweet about it, or speak about it, or in fact, do anything at all to market that book other than have it in my blog header (which subscribers don’t even see). But the audience of this blog aren’t the target market for the book, so I would say that 90% of sales are due to the title alone.
Here’s how it works.
Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.