Author Name: Jay Thomas Willis
Book Title(s): Implications For Effective Psychotherapy With African-Americans; As Soon as the Weather Breaks; The Cotton is High; Born to be Destroyed; Paranoid but not Stupid; Why Black Americans Behave as They Do; Hard Luck; When the Village Idiot Get Started; Educated Misunderstanding; The Devil in Angelica.
Marketing Subject: Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Perhaps the oldest, simplest, and best form of marketing, is word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth marketing is passing the word about your book from person to person. It includes any type of human communication, such as face-to-face, telephone, email, and text messaging. Mouth-to-mouth marketing provides a strong motivating factor that compels folks to buy your book through referral from someone who has read the book.
Some believe that a book’s information communicated in this way
has an added layer of credibility. Research points to individuals being more inclined to believe word-of-mouth marketing than more formal forms of promotional methods.
Word-of-mouth occurs when book buyers become advocates because they are happy with a book and have a desire to share their support and enthusiasm. Two-thirds of all economic activity is affected by consumer recommendations, making word-of-mouth the number one influence on whether a person will choose to buy your book.
If you engage others in a manner that is genuine and sincere, you allow yourself to develop a unique relationship with them. For example, if you tell as many folks as you can; tell your parents, friends, co-workers, pastor, and your church congregation. Those persons will then connect you to other people, and these people will pass on the word to other people, and so on and so forth. These relationships will create a walking billboard for your book. People will relate and will speak a positive word about your book when you least expect it.
The first thing you can do is to give people a reason to pass on a positive word about your book. This means creating a book that is worthy of positive feedback. People are more likely to pass on a negative word than a positive word, but if your book is good enough people will pass on the word.
The second thing to do is to target key individuals that have authority and a high number of personal connections. You can then attempt to inject positive “buzz” into conversation directly. The Ponzi scheme and multi-level marketing are two examples of how individuals are identified who have connections and authority if possible, and then these individuals connect with others. Sometimes readers will review a book and share their experience with others on the Internet. This frequently produces a “buzz’ that captures the attention of others.
The more quality connections you can make the more sales you can generate. The more sales you can generate the higher the likelihood that another book buyer will purchase your book.
The receiver of word-of-mouth referrals tend to believe that the communicator is speaking honestly and is unlikely to have an ulterior motive. This marketing must be transparent and honest or it won’t work. Word-of-mouth marketing depends on the extent of customer satisfaction with the book. This technique of marketing has brought many books from the underground to mainstream. If you have a good book people will sell it for you through word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth can empower or devour you.
