Marketing and the Art of Writing, or, Why I'm Taking This Approach

I've been looking into copywriting as a way to make money. I mean, who doesn't want to earn six figures? And to earn it for writing? Heaven!

To be a good copywriter, you have to know a lot about marketing:

• How do you convince people to buy something?
• What psychological buttons do you push?
  
• What do people want, and how do you give it to them?

As I was studying all this, I kept remembering all the times I'd read that non-fiction is a lot easier to sell than fiction. That if you want to actually make a living with your writing, you should write a book about a new weight loss plan, or a car repair manual, or a blueprint for how someone can open their own bed and breakfast. That a book about a specific and useful topic is, for example, a lot more likely to get PR coverage than some unknown writer's first novel.

In other words, it's a lot easier to identify the target market for a non-fiction book, and to convince those people that your book will give them the information they need to make their lives better in some way, than it is to sell a work of fiction, which tends to get lost among all the other thousands of novels out there.

This reasoning makes sense to me. But I wasn't satisfied that it was the final word. I couldn't stop thinking, "Why can't I apply this to fiction?"

I firmly believe that the world of marketing has a lot to teach a writer of fiction. If nothing else, the intelligent application of marketing principles can make your query letters stand out from the mountain of queries that all agents and editors receive every day. But there are already lots of books and articles on that subject. I want to go beyond that.

So I have decided to start exploring further, to see how many different ways I can find in which to get my novel noticed by as many readers as possible. Which will make my publisher -- not mention me, and my creditors -- very happy.

So stay tuned -- film at 11...