It’s time to give up your old happy hour of drinking and snacking after work.
If you want to sell more books, you need to start a new Happy Hour—an hour in the morning or early afternoon where you pick up the phone and call people who could make a difference in marketing your books: media people, editors, bloggers, podcasters, website owners, social media influencers, etc.
In an hour, you can call four or five top influencers and have meaningful discussions with them. Ask them what you can do for them? Focus on that in the beginning. After you’ve created a helpful relationship, you can ask them if they can help you as well.
The best help you can offer each other is simple: Interview each other on your podcasts, or Facebook Lives, or Google Meetings, or Skype calls, Zoom calls, Whereby calls, etc. Or on your new podcast on Substack.com!
Once you interview your new friend, social share that sucker everywhere and everywhen you can. Once your new friend interviews you, again, social share that sucker everywhere and everywhen you can. And ask your friend to do the same.
Remember: You need to start a new Happy Hour: an hour in the morning or early afternoon where you pick up the phone and call people.
Note: Most people don’t answer their phones these days. They let it go to voice mail. Or, they let their mail box fill up and only take the calls they want to take. Many people in Hollywood now use this strategy to keep their return calls down to a minimum.
Here are some things you should know about this new Happy Hour:
It’s a numbers game. All of marketing is a numbers game. It may take 10 or 20 or 50 or 130 calls before you get one YES.
Results will come. You will get a YES if you call enough people. It’s your job to make the phone calls, not their job to say YES.
Stay positive. Keep plugging away. The YESes will come.
Make this a habit. Call every day. Or, at the very least, do your Happy Hour at least three times a week.
Make time for it. If you work full-time, do your Happy Hour during your lunch break or after work. But do it.
Stick to it. Try doing Happy Hour for at least one month. That’s the amount of time you need to take to give the new Happy Hour a chance to work its magic.
About John Kremer
John Kremer is author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, the Relationships Matter Marketing program, and many other books and reports on book marketing, Internet marketing, social media, and book publicity. -- John Kremer on Book Marketing.
