Marketing 101 - Promotion Part 2 Standing Out From the Competition

How to stand out from the crowd? Every indie author wants to be able to stand out from their competitors. Let's be honest: there is a lot of indie writer's out there today. Many of them are very talented writers. So how do you get readers to choose your product?

There are two things your advertising must do:

Encourage (the target audience) to engage in it, and
reward them when they do".

Ken Krimstein states "Most ads try to spoon feed people. But nobody past the age of 6 months wants spoon-feeding". Instead, he suggests to stand out from the crowd, tell a story. To get the audiences attention you need to be:

meaningful.
believable.
distinctive.

I also love this video by Marie Forleo.

One of the key points she makes is that if you are looking to stand out from the crowd, don't do what that crowd is doing. Instead of doing what every other indie author is doing, start looking at what people are doing in other industries. Every indie author is on twitter. Most have blogs and most do book trailers. So what do indie authors NOT do?

Here's one thing I'll be working on for a writer's guild I'm part of: a reward program.

It's something that many other industries. A reward program is an incentive to keep doing business with a particular business. What are other indie writers doing to reward their readers?

Think about how many ads for other industries we are bombarded with every day. Most we tune out.

Start focusing on the ones that do stand out. Analyse why their method of promotion works and copy them.