Ever wonder how trends get started? As much as we’d like to think that all trends are Madison Avenue creations propagated by the media, many times a movement is sparked by the action of a few. Then word of mouth makes it spread. Author Malcolm Gladwell examines this phenomenon in his 2000 book “The Tipping Point”. There’s a chapter where he describes how this kind of movement by a few groups powered Rebecca Wells’s 1996 novel, “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”, to surprising success. When I read that I sat up and took notice. I realized I could use the same concepts to market my first novel, “All I Need to Get By”. You can too! Here’s how.
1.) Write Your Book So It’s “Sticky”
Don’t compromise your artistic integrity, but do ask yourself the hard question: how much will your story appeal to others? When a book is “sticky”, it’s easy to remember. The story stays with people and they want to talk about it and tell others to read it. “Bridget Jones’s Diary” is definitely sticky. So is practically everything that Stephen King ever wrote and...