Using Long Tail Marketing to Sell Your Book

All the time, if you follow Publisher's Weekly or the biggie book reviews, you get the message that you have to be a giant name with a best-seller's record to get a book published and out before the reading public. Not so with what is now called "long tail" marketing, and quite often the long tail comes at the end of a hot topic.

It looks like all of the fiction and even nonfiction that makes the best seller lists are based upon What Happens instead of Who it Happens to. That is another way of saying that the story lines within these books are plot-driven, circumstance-driven, and not always character-driven.

Hot topics sell books. But even if you have expertise in a hot topic, and have not the heart to become emotionally attached to the people inside the hot topic, your book might not make it off the remainder shelves, regardless of who publishes it.

It really does not matter if it is about your being kidnapped and tortured by radical Muslim sects in the Middle East, or if it is about how much you love ironing your children's shirts or watching the leaves fall in the autumn wind. The true thing that will hold the story together and turn it into a captivating piece of writing is how much you care about the subject you are writing about.

Does this mean that you have to be a dreamy-eyed Romantic in love with the sway and turn of each maple leaf soaking up its last ray of sun in its little leaf life? Maybe.

Even if you are writing a science book full of intensely complicated special Physics,
You can pull in readers by the armfuls if you care passionately about the equations and what they mean for human beings. Master physicist Frank Voorhees does it in every book. People who know nothing and care nothing about Quantum Physics wade through his books because they are so ALIVE with passion for his subject. He makes you want to know more!

It is true that some of us do a crime unto his research and skip some of the lengthy equations, but we read on anyway, to get to the prose sections, because Voorhees is telling us something very important. How do we know this? Because it is important to Frank! Is that enough? You bet. He is not writing Best-sellers, but he is reaching a much wider readership than most Physicists who are currently publishing.

You will always hear the semi-truthful advise: Write about what you know. I want you to think about something else, though. How many Quantum Physicists publish books of groundbreaking research every year that are written dispassionately and therefore never reach a larger audience? Plenty. Maybe they refuse to play to the cheap seats. Or it could be that they simply do not have any emotional attachment to their own work.

How pathetic is that? You don't want to go there. Find a way to care, and let other readers share those feelings in your writing.

One other thing: If you think you know enough about something to write about it, do it.
Don't let some critical jerk cast a shadow of doubt on your writing project. Later, if you need to beef up on detailed knowledge regarding your subject, you can do it at your own sweet speed.