After reading Nick Thacker’s new book Welcome Home: The Author’s Guide to Building a Marketing Home Base, I ended up with about four pages of notes and a lengthy to do list. Welcome Home offers some great advice for any author trying to build a platform and ultimately, sell more books.
Many of the book’s chapters discuss why authors need to be active in social media and build a platform. While it may seems that he spends a lot of time on why, I found these chapters to be helpful. Once I fully understood many of the reasons something needed to be done, I was in a better position to form my own strategies and action steps. While Thacker provides lots of specifics, everything needs to be tweaked to work for each individual author. Thinking about why I was doing things helped me in this process.
Of particular value to me were the sections on twitter and writing blog posts. While I’ve been struggling along for years trying to make a go of blogging as a book marketing strategy and have read countless books, blog posts and reports, Welcome Home offers some of the best advice I’ve found. Finally I’ve found a book that helped me put all the pieces together. Finally I feel like I have a plan that will work for me.
Additionally, he gives some great principles any web marketer would do well to follow. From page 118:
“You need to promote, but not interfere.
You need to market, but not interrupt.
You need to be attractive, not attract.”
I know I am annoyed by intrusive, pestering marketing. Following these principles will help me avoid being the kind of marketer I don’t want to be.
He recommends the use of WordPress as the blogging platform. Welcome Home does not include too many specifics on how exactly to use WordPress, but it seems that was beyond the scope of what he set out to do, and there are many other places to find tutorials.
I highly recommend Welcome Home to any author trying to become successful at marketing books on the internet. As a side note, I was given a free copy of this book to review. However, since I’ve read another of Nick’s books, I would probably have bought this one and would have felt it was worth every penny.