What is Marketing? A (Very) Little Guide for Writers
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Freelancing, Writing, Creativity, Productivity, Marketing

The sooner you understand that this the better: Marketing is your job, if you’re a writer.

No one will ever care as much about your work as you do.

That’s an absolute truth and important to keep in mind for two reasons. It highlights the reason why marketing your work is (and always will be) your job and it points to the fact that your reader isn’t here as a favor to you.

You are your work’s first and truest advocate.

Even if someday you get to the point that you have a whole staff of promoters and sales people and publicists out there beating the pavement and hand-selling your work all over creation — not a single one of them will ever care about it as much as you do.

None of them are part of it the way you are. None of them understand it the way you do. None of them are as tied up with it as you are. And none of them are as invested in your work’s success as you are.

None of them ever will care about your work as much as you do.

But also? Right now, none of them even exist. And let’s be honest. Chances are that they might not ever. You are your marketing team. You’re it. The entire marketing department.

But it doesn’t matter what title anyone else has in the future — in your writing business, you are the head marketer. Right now, when you’re just starting out and the idea of it makes you want to vomit. And twenty years from now when you’re rich and famous. At the end of the whole thing, when you’re thinking about legacy. And every minute in between.

You might as well get used to it.

The biggest mistakes I see other writers make are these:

They talk down about their work. Being overly humble is at least as dangerous as being a braggart. If you tell people that your work sucks they’re going to believe you. Why wouldn’t they? Don’t do that.

They wait until they’re ready to market. If you’ve published anything — including a blog post — you’re ready. You might not want to be ready, but you are. If you have three followers and those followers showed up at your front door to talk to you, you wouldn’t tell them to come back when they had a thousand friends. Be brave and try to remember those early fans are amazing. They’re your early adaptors and that’s incredible.

They just don’t do it. Sometimes they seem to think they’re above it (I have an email list, but I never have to use it.) Sometimes they seem frankly lost (so many options can cause complete shutdown.) Sometimes they just decide they don’t want to. (If my work is good enough, I won’t have to market it.) Whatever the problem — they aren’t putting on their marketer hat. And even if they’re doing okay, they’re not doing as well as they could be.

The sooner you accept that marketing is part of the job, the sooner you’ll start to see progression in your writing career.

The flip side of the coin is this: Your reader is here for themselves.

When someone spends their time reading what you’ve written, they are never thinking about the work you’ve put into it. If you think about your own experience as a reader, you’ll know that’s true.

Readers aren’t doing you a favor. They don’t care how much time you’ve put into your work or how carefully you’ve chosen your words. They’re reading because they get something from your work. They learn something or they’re entertained.

No one will ever care about your work as much as you do. Readers will never advocate your work the way you hope they will — not as a whole. Sure some will interact with it. Some will share it. They’ll talk about it, if it suits them to.

But if they do, it will be for their reasons, not yours.

If you can remember that, you can remember that you’re in a service business. And when you wrap your head around that, it changes everything.

Focus on creating work that readers want to read for themselves, because they get something out of it, not because they’re doing you a favor. Give them a reason to do what you hope they will — share your work — because they can’t help it.

It’s the natural progression, if you’ve written something that serves them. They’ll want someone else to read it. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool there is. And it is entirely out of our hands — except that it’s up to us to create the kind of work that readers want to share.

And we do that by remembering that no one will ever care about the work itself as much as we do. Weird, I know. But true.

Writing something for ourselves and then carefully placing it, quietly, on the internet and hoping that readers will first somehow magically find it and then, if they happen to do that, do us a solid and help us spread the word is a really bad business model.

Here’s a what marketing is for writers.

It starts with remembering that you’re in a service business. Write with your reader in mind. Create work that your reader will have no choice but to share. Or, at the very least, that they’ll learn from or be entertained by.

Keep the idea that your reader is not doing you a favor by reading your work top of your mind. They are the purpose for your work’s creation, after all.

Then, be proactive about putting your work in front of those readers. Build an email list. Create a self-promotion plan and implement it. It’s your job, just as much as the actual writing it.