Creating Your Marketing Plan

As important as it is to create at least a basic marketing plan, surprisingly, it’s something few people actually do. Perhaps this is why marketing has gotten a reputation for being such a hassle. The Whole Artist approach really depends on it though. Since you’ll be tackling marketing tasks a little at a time, often with gaps in between, it’s essential you’re able to return back to the Basic Sequence right where you left off. This is the whole trick in balancing your creative life with marketing your book.

So, while it’s true that committing things in a document ahead of time makes everything a lot easier later on, when doing so you’ll need to take this first step slowly and carefully. A gentle warning: since you’ll be giving all your attention to what’s ahead, it’s only natural to over-plan and bulk up your marketing plan with more items than you’re actually able to accomplish.

To help calibrate your own expectations, the first two things we like to ask authors are:

Question 1: “What are your goals?”

Goal-setting is itself a kind of dark art. We all love being ambitious. We strive towards aspiration with a sense of dedication to our futures. But when it comes to the Whole Artist way of doing things, we ask that you step back for a minute and think things through. This is not a fitness class, a financial exercise, or even a career plan. The creative life is different. By setting goals in the context of this course, you are in effect making a kind of contract with yourself, one that must fit into other aspects of your life.

We discovered that people have longer term success in marketing by setting relatively modest goals and properly achieving them instead of setting the bar too high and walking away with a sense of failure. None of this is surprising or original. But we want to remind you of it early in the process anyway. Keeping yourself creative means staying positive and open-minded. The more we fail at our self-contracts, the more depleted and shut down we get. Being a Whole Artist above all else means being fair and kind to yourself.

Depending on where you are in your writing career or other activities in your life, some sample goals might be: “Sell more books than my last release,” or “Find others who have lived through my story,” or even “Pivot my book content into an online course or seminar as a source of revenue.”