The key to success in a commercial venture is marketing – if you can’t sell your product then you don’t have a venture. But how do you reach the market? Well, if you’re selling T&A – high demand “products”, then you’re pretty much set.
I’m marketing a memoir, and that has several challenges involved. If it were a “regular” book then I could latch onto a genre and go from there. Scifi, mystery, crime – these all have certain ingredients the market looks for. A memoir, on the other hand, is a specialized dish that appeals to those who have a taste for it, and their taste is often influenced by their perception of its value. That’s why celebrity memoirs are at the top of the list while memoirs by unknowns are hard to come by.
Adding to the difficulty factor is the memoir topic. Much of my memoir takes place in boarding school, in Ireland and England, with a good dose of international travel. On the surface the appeal of such a story might be limited.
Fortunately, after some time of hard thinking, I realized my story centers on my getting caught in the current of my parents’ desperate attempts to save my brother from himself, how I dealt with the situation I found myself in at a most difficult time, and how I finally realized I had to let go of the past to move on. That should appeal to a very broad audience, given the popularity of Oprah and Jerry Springer. But having a product an audience will want is only half the battle (and the easy half). Getting it to them is the tricky part.
It’s an absolute must for me to demonstrate the need for my story. I’ve researched the how’s and why’s, done the website, Facebook, Facebook ads, etc, and while I see hits I’ve yet to reach critical mass. I could choose to do nothing and mope as a result, but instead I move forward, asking myself what could I do differently to make the difference?
At a recent workshop, knowing your audience was hailed as crucial to marketing. The idea seemed perfectly obvious and was already something I’d been working on, and yet I’ve been struggling to hit the nail on the head. The only thing really obvious is that there is room for improvement.
So on a whiteboard in my head, in big, bold writing, I ask – what would make me (after all, I am marketing me) more attractive to the broadest audience possible? If you have any thoughts, drop me a note.
