Marketing Your Book Using Winnie the Pooh as a Guide

How are you marketing your book?

Winnie-the-Pooh, originally named Edward Bear, is a bear with very little brains, but he always has the best ideas when it comes to friendship and cunning traps.  Writers can learn a lot from this bear and his friends.

I was reading Winnie the Pooh, by A.A Milne and found that some of the things he said can work well for marketing your books.

He loves honey, and he finds ways to get this wonderful food. Marketing your book the way Edward Bear might. You are certainly not a bear of very little brains, but I believe you can take inspiration from his innocence and determination. You want to people to buy your book, and you want the right kind of readers to buy your book, but you need to find them.

These quotations from A.A. Milne’s story should move a writer think about how they are marketing their book.

“Some people care too much I think it’s called love” Winnie the Pooh

“You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” Winnie the Pooh

What do these two quotations from Winnie the Pooh have to do with marketing your book?

 Let’s start the first quotation If you write a book, and then take the time to publish it, you have to care about that book enough to market it, otherwise you won’t earn anything with it.  It isn’t simply good enough to say you have a book published, you have to be passionate enough to make plans to write another one, and to market the one you have already written.  You can call it passion for your work, but it is truly loving the product you are putting into your readers hands.

Winnie the Pooh was passionate about honey and most readers will remember that part of the story first and foremost.  It does not mean that other people will love your writing (or your book), but it does mean that you have to continue to love your book. Money does matter, and the necessity of making it should play a role in how much you write on the topics you choose, too.

Marketing your book means that you need to write more books.  Not everyone needs to enjoy each of your books, but you need to offer a choice; one book is great, (In Search of The Lost Ones is my only one right now) but it only shows you care enough.  Enough means that the market is good for you and you aren’t willing to expand on your networks by using social media to your full advantage.

If you care too much, as Pooh tell us, you will write more since you care about your readers choice. Marketing means starting with a great plan and then going forward from there.

The second quotation encourages writers to step out of their comfort zone and find something else.  You can do this! It means that you can go on to a social site you would not normally go on only to find that there are more readers there.  You went to them; they did not have to lift a finger to come and find your book.

It also means that you should never truly rely on one thing, or one marketing idea.  If it worked for one book, it might not work for another.  This is where you need to be smart. You need to “get out of the forest” and try something different.  If a network isn’t going well for you it’s time to try something new.

If your readers aren’t on Google Plus, try Twitter; if they aren’t there, or another social networking site,try a writing site; if you can’t find them there, try a bookstore; if you can’t find them there, try GoodReads, and keep on going, because success is a market away. Your readers are always there, but you have to find them, and market to them.

You have to care too much- just like Winnie the Pooh.

Winnie the Pooh might have said he was a bear with very little brains, but he sure understood the concept of marketing your book.  Writers should take that to heart and use Winnie the Pooh as a guide to marketing their book.