Book Marketing Essentials™

The Windy City Advantage

Congratulations––you've written a book! Now comes the challenge of marketing and selling your work, and it's not as easy as it may seem. This is where Windy City Publishers sets itself apart from the publishing pack.

We call it Book Marketing Essentials.™ It's our proprietary marketing system developed to help clients identify the best way to sell their book and give them the tools they need to be effective.

Book Marketing Essentials™ (or BME) was developed by a professional marketer with over twenty-five years of experience. This trademarked marketing service educates each WCP author on marketing information specific to the book industry. We also provide every author a customized marketing plan that takes into consideration four important factors:

• An author's goals
• Time available or willing to commit to marketing
• Financial resources
• Comfort level promoting themselves

Being successful at marketing your book requires customization and action. As a Windy City author you receive a BME program customized just for you. We discuss your goals, identify your strengths, and evaluate opportunities––then create a marketing strategy specific to your book. Together we'll create an action plan to help you reach your goals.

Book Marketing Essentials is a two-part, step-by-step system that includes:

BME Part One

Shortly after joining the Windy City Publishers family, clients receive one of our proprietary books on how to market a fiction or non-fiction book. This book introduces authors to key marketing concepts that are essential to understand before their personal marketing roadmap can be executed.

BME Part Two

This is the customized marketing plan created for every client, and is divided into two main sections. Section One establishes the strategic foundation to market your book. It will identify essential marketing components such as determining a target audience, developing a meaningful value proposition, and creating key communication messages to use in your promotional efforts. Section One is the cornerstone for everything you do moving forward. The marketing basics you learn here will be essential in helping you implement the strategies laid out in Section Two

Section Two provides an action plan to help you market your book. It provides specific goals and identifies the action steps needed to reach them. We will develop marketing materials like:

• sell sheets
• business cards
• a list of book reviewers for you to target
• story ideas for the media
• tips on how to pitch bookstores, and
• many other value-added actions needed to raise awareness of your book.

We also provide worksheets for each section to help you stay on track and make executing your plan much easier. It takes a lot of work to sell your books––reaching out to people, making calls, engaging in conversations via social media, writing blogs, sending letters, visiting stores and libraries, and a plethora of other activities. The worksheets will provide you with step-by-step instructions AND help you keep track of all your efforts.

We encourage authors to get into a daily promotional habit, meaning they will need to do some type of marketing activity on a daily basis in order to increase their chances for success. We also identify a list of awards, based on your genre, for you to submit your book. Doing so may help with your future marketing efforts.

We succeed when you succeed. So we will do everything we can to make your marketing plans a success. That is the Windy City Advantage.

Book Marketing Essentials™ keeps you focused and organized.
Let us develop your customized marketing roadmap.