Stop Playing the Part of a Marketer to Sell Your Books
Build the foundation of your marketing strategy like this instead.
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Hi,
Today, I am excited to bring you a new contributor from
to talk about marketing your book authentically.I first met with
and her team a few weeks ago, and love the energy they bring to this work. Even though we’re at different parts of the journey, we’re seeing the same things.If there’s one thing I’ve seen over and over again, it’s that most authors aren’t struggling because they’re lazy or untalented. They’re struggling because they’re trying to be something they’re not. They’re performing a version of success that burns them out.
That’s why I wanted to share this piece by Ceylan Gundaz.
We talk a lot about authenticity here, but these are also the pieces that tend to resonate most. People need permission to stop playing the dance, and so here’s another person giving you that permission.
I really like what they are doing with their publication, and hope you find something useful in this article. If you do, follow their publication.
When I published my first book, I did everything wrong.
(Granted, I was 15, but age is not an excuse for ignorance, only an explanation for it).
I got arrested by the story that grabbed me by the throat and demanded I write it. I cried, screamed, and laughed my way through getting the words onto paper.
I wrestled with an editor who returned my manuscript with more mistakes than I sent it in withm, paid for a self-publishing company to publish my work, and assumed their “package” deal included doing all of the networking to reach big book buyers for me.
I set up accounts on Goodreads, Gmail, and Pinterest with “Author” in the bio that I no longer have the passwords to no matter how many times I search for them.
I had only a vague concept of marketing strategies and business plans. I thought the extent of personal branding was designing a pretty Blogspot for an author website and planning for the next books I would write and how they would fit in with my style.
Then, I sat back and waited for my dedicated fans to come to me and my 15-year-old self to be asked to do interviews for being a teen author.
Surprise: they never came.
I launched my author career to cricket chirps…and I learned the hard truth every baby author must, namely that writing the book is the easy part of being a published author.
Are You an Author or an Actor?
We are incredibly lucky to live in an age where the entertainment industry is less and less gatekept. Tools like social media that were at the beginning of their inception when I was launching my career now grant us access to information and personal experiences from others who have forged their own paths to success.
When I started learning from such resources about how to use these tools successfully, I realized everything I did wrong with my debut novel. However, I also quickly gave up on the idea of ever publishing again because playing the part of a successful marketer sounded absolutely exhausting.
When you publish, you have to do way more things yourself than you are prepared for. My mistake was being fooled by these “publishing packages” into thinking that someone else would do all that work for me, and I would only have to wear the hat of the author.
I felt overwhelmed and ill-equipped realizing I actually had to wear the hats of business owner, marketing strategist, salesperson, content creator, platform builder, and networker if I wanted readers to even know my book existed. I had to embody countless different personalities with all of these opposing skillsets that go into each of these roles authors have to juggle.
Playing the role of a successful marketer in particular required being loud, assertive, and incessant, or the exact opposite of the quiet, soulful, gentle storyteller I am.
The performance polish, the constant duplication of someone else’s trends, the marketing gimmicks, and the inundation of fast content felt not only foreign to my personality, but genuinely soul-sucking to engage in for a career.
Now that I work as an editor and story coach, I’ve met countless other authors who are in the same boat. Most of us write our books because we genuinely want to say, “Sit with me awhile. Let me tell you a story that takes you away from the chaos for a minute and helps you see a different world. Hopefully my words can make you feel something.”
When we write our stories, we write with a certain vulnerability. Our souls peek out on the page because our words come straight from our hearts. Playing the part of a salesperson seems to go against the very genuine, down-to-earth personality we tell our stories with.
But! I was absolutely floored to learn, after years of trying to mold myself into a person I wasn’t in order to build my writing career, that believing I needed to put on a different personality with all of these different hats was a lie.
You don’t have to play a part that isn’t authentic to your own personality and voice as a storyteller if you want to be a successful author, either. In fact, being inauthentic is actually hurting your marketing.
What Place Does Authenticity Have in Marketing?
Without a consistent foundation that connects and strengthens all the facets of your personal brand—storyteller, author, content creator, marketing strategist, business owner—not only will your brand fracture and confuse your potential audience, but you will very quickly burn yourself out trying to keep up all of the different personality masks that aren’t really you across all of these different roles.
You do not need an entirely new personality to speak the language of marketing. All you really need is just being yourself.
But that solution sounds way too easy. Maybe even a little delusional. Actually, when you look at the statistics, you’ll find that nowadays authenticity is the key to success in marketing.
This is why authenticity must be a pivotal part of your marketing plan:
1. Your authenticity makes you stand out from the noise.
We live in an age of an inescapable, global, oversaturated market. Not only that, we are entering an age of AI where there is instant, unlimited content being generated for publishing—both online and in print. What can make you stand out from this sheer volume of competition?
The only thing unique to you that no one else on this planet has ever or will ever have is your human story and your authentic voice—exactly what you (hopefully) used to write a book that stands out from the noise in the first place.
You must let the YOU that shines in your story also shine in your marketing. This is exactly what will connect with your target audience of readers who are looking for your specific story.
2. Authenticity is memorable.
Due to the onslaught of information overload we are all living with, everyone is going through their life with constant demands on their time and attention. It’s impossible to focus on everything the market asks us to focus on.
As a result, everyone is scrolling with incredibly short, distracted attention spans, and you know what they’re sick of giving their time to? Fake people.
We’re coming out of an age that was full of fake performance polish, fake personas, and fake perfection, and we are moving into an age where AI’s fake humanity is tainting everything. The system that has sold us nothing but these plastic performances has convinced us that we won’t be successful if we show up as anything real.
We are taught that genuineness in business is a weakness and our imperfect, messy humanity isn’t appealing to anyone buying. So when we try to learn how to copy marketing success, we learn to hide behind these masks that ultimately just make us sound like a carbon copy of the next person, who is also hiding behind a mask.
No one is memorable in a sea of avatars that all look and sound the same. If you show up the same way everyone else is, you will only fade away into oblivion.
3. Authenticity makes a lasting impact.
People use “marketability” to define what readers are looking to buy. Marketability is what makes you appeal to a larger audience. Industry experts are paid specifically to study the current trends and stay on top of what tropes, imagery, genres, and pacing are popular in this moment. But at the end of the day? All of this is just a trend.
The average of what sells best at the moment is nothing but a fad. You can create a second career for yourself studying how to make a perfectly marketable book, but by the time you write it the trends will have changed. You can chase what is popular now, but you’ll never catch success.
The books that endure through the ages—the stories that stick with readers long after they’ve put the book down—aren’t written for the trends of the time. They are timeless. If you want to tell a truly impactful story, you must be true to the real humanity inside of you. When you tap into those universal human emotional truths, you will find that you connect with readers across every fad. Through the ever-changing trends, authentic humanity will never go out of style, even if it is momentarily unpopular.
So knowing that authenticity is a necessary marketing strategy, how do we now turn our authenticity into a practical marketing strategy?
3 Steps to Building Your Authentic Marketing Strategy
These are the three pillars you must establish if you want to build a marketing strategy that is authentic, effective, and won’t burn you out—all genuine storytelling, no gimmicks, all YOU.
Define your why — purpose. Why did you tell this story in the first place? What is the message you want to share with the world? What is the reason that keeps you pushing through all of the work that goes into being an author, even when there is no payout? You need to constantly remind yourself, because you will forget. Write your “why” down somewhere you can look at it every day. Keep the stories, art, and artists who light that fire in you on rotation in your life. This purpose will keep you centered across every venture you pursue and through any challenge to your authentic brand.
Use your own voice — identity. Define what your individual, authentic voice sounds like. Before you face the market and online trolls that will beat you up and spit you back out again, be anchored in who you are and what you stand for. Get to know yourself so well that you will recognize when something starts creeping into the edges of your tone that isn’t you.
You won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you are no one’s cup of tea then you probably will need to make some changes to how you present yourself so that your readers will connect with you better. The reality of the industry today is that you have to compromise between the wisdom of authentic marketing strategy and the parts of the game we have to play to break into the arena of marketability. Before you face these moments of conflict around these harsh realities, decide what you are NOT willing to compromise on.
If you consistently sound like yourself whenever you show up in public, your audience will learn they can trust you because they know who you really are. Confused buyers don’t buy, and if your voice isn’t consistently and distinctly yours, then they will be confused.
Get knocked down 100 times, get up 101 — resilience. There is trial and error in every personal journey. Your path to success as an author will not look like anyone else’s. As a unique individual, you have to discover your own secret sauce for success. We can get incredible advice and insight from others who have walked their paths to the same goal before us, but what has worked for a different individual in the past won’t necessarily work for you. Learn continuously and widely. Be humble, willing to make mistakes and try again until something sticks. The only thing in common on all of our paths are setbacks and challenges. What sets apart the successful from the failed writers are the ones who refuse to stay down.
When we dream of being published authors, doing the behind-the-scenes, unglamorous work of marketing doesn’t show up in our daydreams. But marketing doesn’t have to be the bane of every author’s existence. Using your authenticity as the theme of your personal brand is a surefire way to grow your platform without dimming your soul.
Are you looking ahead to the publishing process with dread? Are you feeling lost with your current work in progress in the middle of your own words? Need a professional editor for your book who will work WITH you as your story partner, not AGAINST your authentic voice? One Brilliant Arc’s team of story coaches and editors walk you through the entire process no matter where you are: from writing, to editing, to publication, to marketing. Check out our newsletter and subscribe for weekly pro storytelling tips, insightful conversations with industry experts, and a supportive community for preserving your authentic voice while telling stories that matter!
What do you think?
What is your why?
How do you think about constructing your own voice?
Let us know in the comments.
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So amazing to have met you, Russell, and be inspired and encouraged by the work you are doing!! What a joy it is to support authors in telling their real stories and living in their authenticity!