Fail To Plan = Plan To Fail

In last week’s blog we discussed marketing for the Indie author and, in particular, constructing a marketing plan.
 
The blog was getting pretty long, so I didn’t say all I wanted to say at that time.
 
What I did say was that the content of your plan lay in the old Rudyard Kipling quote “I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); Theirs names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.”
 
Putting those words into questions helps you to decide the content of your plan: what you will say, who you will say it to, when you will say it etc.

That is all good, but some people have never constructed any sort of plan at all, so this blog is aimed at them. How do you get from that Kipling quote to selling more books?
 
For those of you who have written so many plans it is you who should be writing this blog, please feel free to tune out. Maybe go and browse our catalogue, which can be found on the ‘Books’ tab of this website.
 
For everyone else, are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

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The first thing you need when creating a plan is an objective, goal or desired outcome. Call it what you like, but it is a description of where you want to be by the time your plan has been delivered.
 
For Indie authors this is usually quite simple to define – your goal is probably to sell more books. You even have a readymade measurement there to tell you if the plan is working – the number of books that you are selling after you have delivered the plan compared to the number you are selling now.
 
But that is a big goal to achieve and you will need to do a lot of work to achieve it. What you also need to know is if your plan is taking you in the right direction. It might take you 3 months or more to achieve your goal and that is a long time to wait to find out that your plan isn’t working and needs to be re-thought.

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So you have to create sub-objectives, which you can tick off along the way to make sure you are staying on track for success. Believe me, if each step is successful, then the final outcome can never be in doubt.
 
And if some of the sub-objectives still seem quite daunting, you can break them down even further. Remember the old maxim: “How do you eat and elephant? – One bit at a time.” (apologies to vegans).
 
You may even want to run a few “pilot schemes” or “trials” to see if what you plan to do is actually going to work on a larger scale when you set the whole plan in motion and those trials also become sub-objectives.

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Build the walls before you try to put on the roof.

​One of the things of which you have to be careful, is that you lay out your sub-objectives in the right order. For example, if you were building a house, “Put the roof on” wouldn’t appear in the plans until after “dig foundations” and “build walls”.
 
You may need to spend a bit of time making sure your marketing plan is constructed in the right order, just like you would build a house.

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Last week we talked about getting some training in social media marketing, so that might be an early sub-objective in your plan. We also talked about writing your marketing messages, so trying those out on people might be another sub-objective. But basically, all you are doing is breaking down one very big and daunting objective into several smaller, less daunting tasks, then laying them out in a logical order.
 
In project management we call the completion of sub-objectives or tasks “achieving a milestone” and it feels very rewarding to reach each milestone and tick it off your plan. But, just like real milestones, you have to know where they are, which means having some sort of measurement of achievement for each task.

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After all, there is no point in knowing “you are here” if you have no idea what “here” looks like. In the same way, you can’t know you have reached a milestone if you don’t know what a milestone looks like.
 
A written description of what it will look like is the best way of recognising a milestone. For example, a description of the messages you want to send out about your book might read:
 
“Write 7 sentences/paragraphs of up to 140 characters* that provide a clear indication of the book’s content., grammatically correct, correctly spelt and tested on sample readers.”
 
You can see from the description that “quality” checks are built in. That is the sort of “product” or task description you could write for each sub-objective, so you will recognise your milestone when you get to it.

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But all plans are meaningless if they don’t have resources assigned to them. A plan without the resources to deliver it is just a wish, a hope or a dream.
 
These resources can include money, to pay for things such as advertising. But a far more important resource is information.
 
You have to know the answers to those who, what, why etc questions you asked, so that you can apply your other resources in the right place at the right time. So one of your objectives is almost certain to be information gathering, or research as it is more commonly known. This will result in you not wasting your other resources (such as money) on the wrong activities.

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Time is another major resource. None of this stuff will do itself. Yes, I know, you’re a writer. You don’t want to have to spend all your time doing marketing.
 
Which makes it all the more important that you don’t waste what time you are willing to expend on marketing, doing the wrong things.
 
There is an old saying in quality management “Isn’t it amazing how people who don’t have time to get things right the first time they do them, always have plenty of time to correct their mistakes.”
 
And if you are spending money, you can’t afford to spend even more money correcting mistakes by getting things wrong first time.
 
So, all that research is critical to you avoiding getting things wrong the first time you try them. 

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The final resource I’m going to talk about is knowledge, which I have already touched on earlier. If you don’t really know what you are doing, you are going to waste your other resources on getting things wrong. “Trial and error” may teach you a lot, but it is an expensive way to learn.
 
Invest in yourself, even if the investment is just time spent doing a free on-line course. We’re not talking about studying for a 3 year business management degree here, just a few hours learning the basics of social media marketing and trying out a few ideas to get a feel for what is right for you and your books.
 
And once you have your marketing plan – you can use it again and again, refining it each time as you learn what works best and what isn’t working so well.
 
Because you will have to keep repeating your marketing activity, because marketing messages soon fade from people’s consciences and you will always be looking for new readers who will buy your books, because nobody buys the same book a second time (except as a gift for someone else or because they forgot they owned it already).
 
* We know that Twitter now accepts posts of up to 280 characters, but you need to make an allowance for the inclusion of a link to the book’s sales page and for hashtags. And, of course, character count isn’t an issue for Facebook posts, though people rarely read beyond the first few lines. For Facebook, think “elevator pitch”.

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