Imagine this… You’re sitting at your desk and an ad crosses your social media feed or maybe you see someone post about a class that really helped them. You go to look at the website and it’s a slick marketing page. And the class costs $497 but promises that it will change your book marketing forever and help you bring in millions. How does this person know? Because it happened to them!
Or perhaps you see someone launch book after book about writing and selling and marketing books to the tune of thousands of dollars. And yet, you don’t see where they’re actually writing fiction or publishing in your genre.
These are just two ways that “marketing gurus” perpetuate the author space. And I’m seeing it more and more, often with tricks that are tried in the entrepreneur/business coaching space until someone realizes that hey, writing is a business too, and they can sell their same stuff to authors and have a whole new audience for their $497 or $997 class.
Now let me stop here and say there is nothing inherently wrong about selling your knowledge. And yes, many of these people have made dollar figures that many of us can only dream about.
The question is: how are they selling their knowledge?
Limited time offers, scarcity (count down timers are a big tip off here), tripwires and upsells, those are all tools of the “internet marketer” and they’re tools of capitalism.
The other question is, are they making the bulk of their money selling “how to sell more” to authors, or are they actually in the trenches writing and selling books as well? What kind of books? How often do they publish? Are they any good?
These are all questions we should be asking ourselves before we shell out for yet another kickstarter, class, or program designed to help us sell more. Because as I’m going to talk about in next week’s blog in more detail, these kinds of people and programs, using sales tactics that frankly were outdated even a decade ago, zap your energy. They leave you feeling that you’re not enough, that you’re not doing enough, that there’s something wrong with you.
It’s true we could all tweak our marketing, perhaps change our tactics a lot. But also, we’re not robots and life happens. Gurus would like you to believe that life doesn’t happen or that their simple systems will mitigate the fact that life is messy and we’re human. So this isn’t me saying that no, the problem isn’t with you or me or any author out there who wants to boost their sales, but rather the system in it’s entirety. There’s a lot of change that can happen, but the bulk of it isn’t within our ability to change if we keep opting in to the same old systems and the same old tactics.
Before you look at another class or think about investing in a program that’s going to set you back three or four figures, ask yourself…are they truly looking out for you? Or are they just trying to sell to more authors?