A few months ago Seth Godin posted one of his typically short and to the point blog posts with the headline When should we add the marketing?
(Godin is also the author of the famous advice that the best time to start building your platform is three years before you publish your book. This will give you an idea of where Seth is going with this topic.)
Here’s part of the argument:
Marketing is the first thing we do, not the last. Build virality and connection and remarkability into your product or service from the start and then the end gets a lot easier. Build it into your app, your book, your movie, your insurance policy, and the red soles of your shoes.—Seth Godin, “When should we add marketing?“
Robert Bruce at Copyblogger picked up this theme in an interview with Godin where they went into even more detail on the the idea that you start with marketing concepts, it’s not something you “tack on” to a project already in process.
The idea that the marketing is the first thing we do will sound unpleasant or even sacrilegious to many writers. For lots of people writing is a refuge, or the fulfillment of a vision, or a daily need, something they are “called” to do, or simply something they do because of an inner drive.
What, these authors might ask, does marketing have to do with any of that?
But there’s one central truth to what Godin is talking about here. This truth applies to writers who want to interest other people—people who don’t know them and who aren’t related to them—in an idea, a story, a skill, a collection of information.
That truth is this: making marketing part of the beginning of the process acknowledges the importance of readers, the end users of our books. When marketing is “baked into” our books or other offerings, we’ve really thought about the readers first.
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