Complete Your Marketing Circle  

By Polly Wirtz, Peakview Consulting, Inc.

As a sales and marketing consultant, I’ve worked with numerous small non-fiction publishers and their distributors. One marketing omission I see repeatedly is the failure to complete the marketing circle after articles, reviews, and radio interviews have come in from a recent marketing/PR campaign. The last step to complete the circle is to let book buyers know the results of your marketing/PR campaign. To optimize book sales, publishers need to take advantage of their hard-earned publicity by taking the following steps:

Gather Data

• When thanking reviewers, always ask for the date of review and what their circulation numbers are. Request that they send you a “tear sheet” (the page where your review was printed) via email or snail mail.  Email is preferable, because assuming you have obtained permission to use the review, you can post it on your web site and excerpt it in your marketing materials. 
• Understand the publications: who are their audiences, how often do the publications come out? The Internet is a great resource for this research. Usually, you will find 2-3 sentences explaining who reads the publication.

Share and Announce Publicity

• If it is a national publication, the publisher’s distributor will want to know the publication date, circulation figures, and audience description along with having other particulars such as if the article included a picture of the book or was a full page.  Distributors will pass this information along to major bookstore buyers and wholesalers, who will in turn increase their inventory of your book.
• If it is a regional publication, the same information will be important, but to a lesser degree depending on the breadth of the coverage. (An article in the Oakland Tribune/Circulation 65,000, will not carry the same weight as one in the Today’s Charlotte Woman/Circulation 34,000. The larger the circulation, the greater your impact will be.) Therefore, to increase sales in regional areas, call the local bookstores and alert them to your article/review/radio show.  
  Bookstores are always grateful to learn about local publicity that will draw customers to their stores, and they want to have books on hand. 
  Use the Internet to search for bookstore telephone numbers in a particular city.  Tell the person who answers the phone your name and relevant information, e.g., your book, After-Holiday Treats, will be discussed in the January 25th  issue of the Tribune, in the Food section, in Joan Smith’s column. Suggest they order a few books to have on hand. Give them the ISBN, along with the title.  Tell them your book is available through Ingram and Baker & Taylor (if applicable) and through your distributor.  They will look up the ISBN in their computer and usually tell you if the store has any in stock or if there is stock in their warehouse or Ingram’s. (Obviously, your distributor should see to it that Ingram has or will be getting more stock.)  Hopefully, the bookstore will say they will bring in four or five books. And remember, the earlier the stores know, the better your chances are of their having books on the shelf when your review comes out. Three weeks’ advance notice is ideal. (Note: Borders does not allow store managers to order, but all the other major chains do.)

So, don’t stop and rejoice about your publicity campaign until you’ve made sure this publicity has been used to generate sales of your book and thereby complete the circle!

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