: Re: Is it advisable to begin marketing a book before it is published? I watched a presentation called Your First 10k Readers. It explains a marketing course that will build an audience for your

@Bryan361

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I haven't seen the presentation you describe and it's not clear to me what sort of marketing it calls for. You mention giving out a free sample. Like a sample chapter or something? I see two big catches to doing this before the book is complete.

One, as Amadeus mentions, what if you write chapter 1, give it out as a free sample, and then as you continue to work on the book, realize that you need to make a change to chapter 1? I can easily imagine all sorts of reasons why that might happen. You realize that something happening in a later chapter is not adequately foreshadowed. You discover that something that something you want to do in chapter 15 contradicts something you said in your first draft of chapter 1. Etc.

Two, are you sure you can meet the promised schedule to finish the book? If you tell readers, "Here's a free sample, the complete book will be available in two months", and then two months later you're still struggling and you're not finished, you'll embarrass yourself and confuse or frustrate potential readers. Even if you don't promise a specific date, any interest generated by a free sample is likely to fade quickly. Few people are going to say, "Hey, isn't this the book that I got that sample chapter from a year and a half ago?" I know when you're writing your first book you can get anxious to see it published. I certainly did. But if I had some marketing plan that relied on sending out these teasers, I'd wait until the book was complete, then send out the free samples, then wait whatever I believed was the optimum time before publishing the rest. Even if it meant sitting on the book for a couple of months when I am just dying to get it out there.

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