When we left off, I introduced the glyph at the top of this post.

This line is where I shine, because I’ve been consulting tech businesses on this line for a long time. It’s a go-to-market strategy. It’s the process of taking a product and making people buy it.

Now, notice I’ve only labeled the first and last dots on this line: “Idea” and “Sale”

This is, again, illustrative and meant to hammer home the important fact that ideas hold no intrinsic value.

As authors, we know this better than most. Just remember back to the first time you had an idea for a book. It probably seemed valuable. Then you followed through and spent hundreds of hours actually writing it. In doing that, you learned that the value is mined from an idea through hard work. So when someone says to an author “I have an idea for a book!” we kind of wince.

We know ideas are everywhere, but execution is all that matters.

As an indie author, once you have that manuscript in your hand, your priorities change. Now, your idea is selling that book. You’ve got to connect all those dots again. You need the go-to-market strategy.

That’s when you have to start thinking about the Marketing Mix:

In simplest terms, it covers:

• Product: What is it?
• Place: Where will consumers find it? (Distribution)
• Promotion: How will consumers find it? (Advertisement and PR)
• Price: What will they pay for it?

All four quadrants need your attention! Knowing that, you should immediately see something here that addresses the most common go-to-market strategy in indie authordom. Can you guess what that is?

Slap your book on Amazon.

On the surface, this seems like a great way to bring a book to market. But here’s the problem… Amazon is just a Place. It does little to nothing to drive consumers to your book. Putting your novel on Amazon is kind of like getting your widget into Walmart — and then having one widget on display on a dark shelf down the hallway from the bathrooms.

Publishing through Kindle KDP isn’t a go-to-market strategy because it doesn’t address Promotion at all.

We’ll talk about that in the next post, where we’ll be looking at this author biz glyph:

See you then!