Marketing for Authors––Is This Viable?

By Susan Reichert, Editor-in-Chief for Southern Writers Magazine 

Do you ever think about those avenues of direct mail marketing?

With more people using the internet there is less mail being stuffed in our mailboxes.

Which means I read most of those paper direct mail pieces now. A few I find distinctive. One thing for sure, there isn’t near the competition there use to be because now they have morphed into being email direct marketing.

What is ironic about all of this? Used to, we took the direct mail marketing pieces and threw them away.

Guess what I am doing to all those direct marketing emails? Yep, deleting before I read them. I have become quite good at recognizing junk email. The amount of direct email marketing has become too hard for me to handle. There is way too many of them. I just don’t have time to read all those every day and I bet, you do the same.

This made me think. Since the paper direct mail pieces have dwindled what would happen if some authors got together and developed and designed a direct mail marketing piece and mailed it out. It would contain a copy of each of their books, a description that would entice the reader.

It would cut down on the cost if there were several authors. You could choose to send to bookstores that were within a certain radius (100 to 200 miles) to each of the authors and/or libraries. I’m sure you could enlarge the list to include readers.

Some of us still like to feel the paper.  There are other things you can choose, like vertical fold-overs and small catalogs. 

You know people love to get catalogs in the mail. I do. And I always go through them.

Authors must find ways to market and promote their books. It is a daily quest for authors to find readers who will buy their books.

Something to think about!