Build It and They Will ... What?

August 31, 2009

As a number of you know, I opened a publishing company, Terry Communications, LLC, this summer. Its first publication is an e-newsletter aimed at physicians that run laboratories out of their offices. (POL Bulletin).

I got a nifty website up (www.terrycommunication.com) and started posting short articles on it 5 days a week. I'm now getting over 2,500 unique hits a month.

I pulled together the first issue of POL Bulletin and offered it free on the website.

I then sent out 1,000 postcards and about 160 brochures and handed out dozens of business cards at a conference.

But it wasn't until yesterday that somebody shelled out the money for a subscription.

And I'm absolutely delighted.

But what these numbers tell me is something I knew anyway. It's not enough to just write it and publish it. You've got to let people know about it.

Ah yes, the demon marketing. At all levels of publishing, fiction and nonfiction, apparently.

Are you prepared for the reality of it? Because tomorrow's September and I've got to do all that marketing stuff all over again. And in October. And in November. And I need to apply these lessons to my novels, too.

Oh boy. What did I get myself into?

Cheers,

Mark Terry