7 Principles Crucial for Marketing Your Book

Dean Gee
ILLUMINATION
Published in
5 min readJun 19, 2024

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Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash

Having spent my whole career in marketing after studying marketing at university and witnessing the technological revolution, some key principles remain, just the vehicles have changed.

Not a single copy sold

You can write the best book ever, and still not sell a single copy, outside of selling to your family and friends is what I am referring to when I say ‘sales’.

Why would this be?

Marketing, if nobody knows about your book, why would they buy it?

The word ‘marketing’ conjures up fear in most people, because it means spending money before getting a return, which means wasting money on stuff that does not work.

But authors, especially self-published authors, don’t have the money to showcase their books.

1. Start with the reason - why. Why should I buy your book?

Why do people buy books in the first place? WIFM, that’s the answer or what I call the principle of ‘What’s In It For Me?’

People want to know what’s in it for them. The reason they pick up a book is that they think it will fulfill some need that they have.

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Dean Gee
ILLUMINATION

Corporate Director, writing about health, weird phenomena, leadership, good ideas, in Data Driven Investor,Illumination.