This month I had the opportunity to interview Bob Schiers, founder and CEO of RAS Associates, an award winning Marketing and PR firm, on the need for authors to plan how they will leverage their book.  Bob explained the difference between marketing and PR, as the two are often confused.  Marketing consists of making the target market aware of your service or product.  PR is one component of marketing, and consists of promoting a product or service through a third party, such as a newspaper review of a book, or a radio station interviewing an author.  PR is NOT advertising, which is paid placement, and accordingly has much less credibility.

Bob advised authors to start planning their marketing and PR efforts well before they finish their book.  Think about issues such as:

• How will you get the word out about your book?
• Who will you seek to provide endorsements or testimonials?
• What makes your book unique or special?
• Why should your target market read your book?  What will they get out of it?
• What are your goals for your book and how will you achieve those goals?

While writing a book is a terrific tool for business owners to build their business, the book by itself won’t help much.  You need to leverage the book, and for that you should develop a plan detailing what you are going to do, when you are going to do it and what you expect the results to be.  Then you need to implement the plan and frequently assess whether you are on track.

To help our authors leverage their books effectively, SkillBites has teamed with RAS Associates to create a group marketing program designed to help authors develop a marketing plan for their books at a fraction of the cost of individually hiring a marketing professional.  For more information on this program and to sign up, click here.  We are running a special half off promotion for the group starting February 17, 2015; however, we have only a few slots left.  If you want to take advantage of the promotion, you’ll need to sign up quickly before the remaining slots are taken.