Every author must master the right book marketing strategies if they want to reach their target readers and make their work known to the world. Juliet Clark is here to discuss the Superbrand Audience Accelerator program she has created with Gary MacDermid, which helps authors and even entrepreneurs in elevating their marketing approaches. She emphasizes the importance of long-term planning, consistent content creation, and getting professional help in building a strong multi-channel marketing. Juliet also discusses how to improve client experience analytics and use your book to direct readers to bigger ticket items.
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Mastering Book Marketing: The Crucial 12-18 Month Author Platform Strategy Explained
Optimizing Author Marketing Strategies
I am solo for this episode. Very rarely do I do solo episodes because I enjoy talking to people and our guests. I decided there’s a very important topic that I do want to talk about. Before I get started, I want to remind you about our monthly training. The one coming up is Jackie Lapin, and she’s going to be talking about time-saving shortcuts to get yourself booked on podcasts to talk about your books. I know in 2025, we’ve had a lot of training on podcasting and the reason is because that’s the new wave of media, TV hits or shorts. You don’t get to say much about the book.
These long form interviews that most podcasters are doing are a great way for people to find out more about your book and about you. At the end of the day, if somebody’s hiring a non-fiction author for a coaching gig or whatever it may be. They’re going to want to know you. They’re going to want to know all about you. You can sign up for that. It’s on November 7th at BAMagTraining.com.
The big topic I want to talk about, several months ago, one of my partners, Gary MacDermid, created a program with me called the Superbrand Audience Accelerator. Since we’ve launched this, we have a lot of coaches using it and we also have some big corporations that have bought in that I’m super excited about. They’re having us run for their clients so that they’re able to help align their marketing a little bit better. I want to talk about it again and why this is an important tool for authors.
The first thing that I want to say about it is, a lot of times when we start writing a book, we sought to know who our audience is but we’re not writing the right things for them. I don’t mean that as far as a book. I mean it as far as what is the social media we’re putting out there and what is the content we’re putting out there. For me, when we ran this report the first time, it put a whole new spin on the articles we were writing for the newsletter, just a completely different way of titling things and writing about different topics that other people weren’t writing about in their books.
I want to go over a little bit about what we do with it. You can find the Superbrand Audience Accelerator at SuperbrandAudienceAccelerator.com. It’s something that every author should haul, spend the money and go through it before they write their book. It literally covers who your author avatar is. It gets deep into the authority, how you want to build your legacy, and defines the demographics. When people help you form your message, they don’t hit the psychographics. It also looks into the behaviors, pain points and buying triggers.
Long-form podcast interviews are a great way for people to find out more about you and your book. Share on XWhy is all this so important? A lot of times when new authors or new entrepreneurs look into pain points, they don’t know the difference between pain points and benefits. There are differences there. This lays out what are the actual pain points. When we go over these reports with people, they either go, “I didn’t know I’m missing things,” or they say, “That is right on.” I know it’s right on because that’s what I’m doing now.
Enhanced Marketing & Messaging Guide
We get great results from understanding deeply what those pain points are. The other part of that is the buying triggers. Nobody ever thinks about the buying triggers except people from advertising, because we used to know or we do know what triggers people to buy. What are those emotional responses, and how do we hit those in our copy? Both of those are very important pieces that you should have before you go forward.
What I love about the report is it not only goes through those stages of where your marketing should be. It also addresses core motivators, so emotional triggers, financial recognition and needs, legacies and long-term goals. These are all big pieces of your avatar puzzle that you need to know for everything you’re doing. Even if you’re not writing a book, this is a big help for your business. If your marketing is not hitting the mark, this is a way to tighten it up and do better with it.
The other part of this report is the messaging frameworks in it. It takes your core value proposition and moves it from just a book launch into building a sustained thought leadership and business opportunity. That goes to crafting your message, your elevator and extended elevator pitches. That one-minute pitch that’s there and also that longer one when you have 2 or 3 minutes to tell someone what you do. It also hits pieces that people forget all the time, those emotional fear, authority, and social proof hooks.
If you have all of those and which motivates your audience the most, you can expand on that and start writing social media posts that hit. Start writing articles that hit. I don’t particularly like it when you hit the fear quotient on there, but all marketing is emotional. People buy because you’ve hit something emotional inside of them and having that Authority and those social proof hooks as well. It’s important because that’s how you grab that audience and bring them in.
It shows you how to take your message, anticipate and answer specific objections. I’m going to assume that many book writers/authors who are in the non-fiction space are also coaches. If you’re a coach, more than likely you’re closing your own deals. The more you know about those hooks and about those specific objections and how to overcome them, the more sales you’re going to be able to close. All of this does come together. It brings your book together with your business as well.
Now, the other part of this report that I love so much is that author’s journey by awareness stage. What we see over and over is that the platform is not billed, the book comes out and it goes nowhere. You launch your bestseller campaign. Some people that you know buy it. Maybe some other people do and then sales just go right off the cliff. People don’t understand the reason for that is because they didn’t build the platform and because they don’t understand the marketing around it.
I’m going to take you through some areas where this report will be helpful for you. When we structure this, we start out with the unaware phase. What that means is we’re showing you the existing gaps between your authority in where you’re sitting and where your competitors are at. This is important because you can see why that guy who sells a half a million books how he got there compared to the audience that you have. By the way, I don’t know many people who’ve sold half a million books but I just threw that out there. Even a thousand books it’s a huge difference since the average author sells 200 books.
Effective Book Marketing Timeline
Understanding that gap and where you need to fill it is important. That’s why I call the unaware, nobody knows you’re alive. That’s important in building your platform because when you start out, you have to keep that in mind. If you’ve ever done serious advertising with Google or Facebook or any of those. The person that’s doing your advertising will tell you, “This will take 3 to 6 months to get it going because we have to do this testing.” That’s your unaware stage.
Imagine you just released your book and you’re in the unaware stage. How slowly do you think that’s going to be? Your book is going to be obsolete by the time you get through all the marketing phases. If you start 12 to 18 months out in advance of that book being released, you have a much better chance of moving from that nobody knows you’re alive stage into the other stages of marketing. Let’s say you’ve done all your work and you’re 3 to 4 months into the unaware stage. Now, you’re starting the problem-aware stage.
This is where you can reveal why DIY or sporadic things fail. If you’re doing it yourself, chances are your copies are probably not good, so your marketing is not heading you. Perhaps make your own DIY website, where I can spot a DIY website within seconds. I can tell that you wrote your copy because most of you think copyrighting is cute. It’s not. You’ve done cute things with words instead of emotional things with words. I can also tell from the layout. Maybe you’ve done a DIY newsletter and you can tell it’s DIY.
In that problem-aware stage, before you hit it, get professional help with that messaging. Get some professional copywriting done. Also, one more thing. Be consistent. One of the things I see is people start this process and then they say, “I don’t have time to write a blog. I don’t have time to record an episode.” Consistency is the key. That content that you’re building in that problem-aware state is your trust builder and it’s your authority builder.
It’s telling people without telling them, so the old writers can show versus tell. You’re showing them that you have the skill. You’re showing them the problem is and you have the solution. All of that is tied up in that second phase, that problem awareness. From there, you’re going to move into your solution-aware state. This is where you’re going to compare approaches. You might have a DIY where I’m going to direct you. You might have something like the group program or that’s a one-on-one program.
Overall, you’re showing people that problem-aware states that you had before, you have the solutions and probably the solutions that no one has. This is an important stage as well and you don’t get to it on day one. Many marketing people that I’ve seen out there helping people don’t even go to the unaware stage. They go straight to problem solutions. That’s great but if nobody knows who you are, they’re not going to find that their problem is there and the solution is available for them either.
Gradual Marketing for High-Ticket Sales
You’re doing it in a backwards way. After that problem solution phase, that 1-2 punch, then you go into the product awareness. What do I have that solves this problem? You can see. If we’ve already released this book, first of all, you have to get people to look at you and that’s going to take a while. You have to say, “This book has a problem,” that you have. That’s going to take a little bit and then you have to say, “I have the solution in this book.” That’s going to take a while. Now, I have more products to sell.
I have the book to sell and a coaching program to sell you. You can see why it’s important to start on the 12 to 18 months at the front end of this book. By that time, you’ve already made them aware of who you are, what the problem is, what the solution is and now you’re introducing the product that will solve all those problems. For those most aware people, which is where you’re going to go after that book. That’s where you start selling those bigger ticket items.
It’s not as easy as people think it is to sell a $30 book, but a lot of times it’s a lot easier than selling a $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 program because people don’t know you. Again, people go from, “I’m going to be a coach,” to, “Nobody knows I’m alive, so how am I going to sell this?” During this whole phase, you’re going to be assigning content types, delivery methods, and what calls to action you want to happen at each stage. If nobody’s aware you’re alive, they’re not seeing you.
Lead Magnet & Multi-Channel Marketing
Maybe you get into that problem stage and that solution stage. That’s where your lead magnet is. That’s where people start seeing that you’re telling them about the problem. You go, “Download this five-series of videos or download this eBook that’s going to give you some instant gratification solutions.” It’s not going to be long-term, but if you can give something in those piece,s something that they can make an improvement right away. They’re going to follow you more because what you gave them worked. That’s stage four of what this report gives you.
Stage five is your multi-channel book marketing strategy. This is important because it’s going to go from, where you are at and where you should be marketing. Many people are on Facebook, Instagram and these other places. Most of my clients, non-fiction authors, are on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where the money’s at. What’s that LinkedIn strategy? Are we going to do webinars? Are we going to have partnerships, speaking, SEO and blogs? Are we going to podcast? Do we have paid ads? Do we have email marketing? What does our YouTube channel look like?
All of those things you have to look at because those are your content pillars. Again, content is your trust factor. You need a platform-building strategy. You need authors’ success, testimonials and stories. You need bookmarking and publishing industry insights. I am shocked sometimes how little people know about the publishing industry and I probably should not be at all shocked. If I were an engineer, I would have no reason to learn about publishing but I work in the industry, so I know about it.
I can see how people that are outside the industry that are writing nonfiction books, would know nothing about the industry. It is a very complicated industry. Anybody who tells you it isn’t probably doesn’t have a good grasp on the system either. There’s a lot with returns, royalties, and distribution, and all of those things that you need to be aware of. Authority-building tactics, this is where you have to be able to build your authority. It’s 12 to 18 months in advance.
What are the lead magnets that align and nurture the strategies during all of those awareness phases? You need to know that as well. I’ll tell you. One of the biggest things I used to see but I don’t see it as much now. It’s people doing webinars. They’ll do a webinar on a topic but they’ll give away an old lead magnet and it doesn’t align.
The audiences are sharper than ever before because they’re more aware of what’s going on in the digital world. Your whole platform needs to be in alignment. People can phone in on what doesn’t feel right away. Your brain has about three seconds to decide, “It doesn’t look good.” That’s colors and messaging. It’s everything put together. Which is why I recommend that the first time you do this, you hire a professional. I did and it helped a lot.
Number six in this report is conversion and client retention system. Mapping that author’s journey from awareness to post purchase. What are you going to do as a sales process? Is it going to be educational? Is it nurturing? Are you going to send out a proposal? Most non-fiction authors have a second part to that. They know they’re not going to make money or a lot of money from that book. That book is a nurture tool. It’s getting those people from the book into that bigger ticket item.
Improving Client Experience Analytics
Are you good at objection handling? I remember my days in real estate. You would not believe how many times I had to go to sessions where I have to overcome objections, especially when you’re working with sellers and you’re getting listing agreements to sign. It’s no different in the business I have now. I tend to be someone who’s not a hard sell. I don’t have to handle a lot of objections. When it comes to working with me, you’re either my person or you’re not. I have a much more simplistic version, and that may mean I’m leaving money on the table. I rarely do try to overcome those objections because a lot of times I feel like it’s a mindset issue on their part. Not mine.
Onboarding, what does that client experience look like? The same with your book. What does it look like when someone comes in and they don’t have a good client experience? Maybe your book didn’t download when they needed it to and from your website. Maybe your funnel didn’t work. That leaves the lasting impression.
Lastly, one of the things I key on in that you guys rarely look at is now you’ve implemented all this. Are you looking at the analytics? Are you seeing what’s working? Marketing is a guest until it’s not. If you’re not hitting the right metrics, you have to go back and reformat. You have to go back and tweak. I know a lot of people come to me and they’ll say, “I had this funnel built and it’s not working. We’re just going to scrap it.” You don’t need to scrap it a lot of times.
Marketing is a guess until it is not. Share on XMany times, it is as simple as a tweet here and there. It’s, change a word or two or a line or two in the copy or change the image or the color. It can be just as simple as that and then inflammation road mapping. As you’re going through this, take the quick wins, LinkedIn authority, lead magnets, webinars, case studies, partnerships or midterm projects or look at your content hub, podcasting, YouTube or advanced client experience system.
In long range, what is your thought leadership positioning? Look at your service portfolio evaluation and how you can expand in the market. All of these are things and I know this is a book podcast. For the most part, it’s books and business combined. You have to think long-term when you publish that book. You have to go back that 12 to 18 months and think about what are those goals? What am I going to do this whole time?
Book Writing Roadmap & Consultation
The business experience doesn’t stop with the book. It expands with the book. How are you going to expand that as well? I encourage you guys. Go over and grab this report. It’s for $497 and we do offer a consultation with it to go over it with you compared to how you’re doing now. I suggest that everybody who’s thinking about writing a book, please take the time to do this. You will be amazed at how the roadmap will help you map out your book experience, incorporating it into your business and what’s next. See you guys in the next episode.
Important Links
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