Sell Your Book Like Wildfire

You’ve written a book, and now you need people to buy it, a task most writers dread and few do well. Sell Your Book Like Wildfire by Rob Eagar is a complete marketing guide aimed squarely at that problem, written by a marketing expert who has worked with bestselling authors and publishers.

It blends online and traditional tactics into a practical system for promotion. For an author who can write a book and has no idea how to sell one, it’s a useful, well-regarded resource, and I’m all for any book that drags writers out of the fantasy that good books sell themselves. One caveat hangs over every marketing book: the specifics age. The premise is blunt and correct. A book that doesn’t sell fails at its purpose, however good it is. In modern publishing the author drives much of the marketing personally, whether traditionally published or independent.

A complete marketing system

The book’s value is its broad, practical coverage of author marketing, from foundational strategy through specific tactics across both digital and traditional channels: building a platform, using a website and email, courting media and reviews, word-of-mouth, speaking, and the rest of the promotional toolkit.

Eagar’s professional experience shows in the concrete guidance, and concrete beats the vague cheerleading that fills too many marketing books.

This is a how-to instead of a pep talk. For an author overwhelmed by the question of how do I sell this, the book provides an organized structure and a menu of methods to execute. The combination of strategy and specific tactics makes it usable instead of merely motivational.

Platform and word-of-mouth

Among the book’s better emphases is its attention to the durable fundamentals of author marketing instead of chasing only the tactic of the moment. The focus on building a real platform, an audience and a direct relationship with readers, and on generating earned word-of-mouth, the recommendations that sell books, points an author toward the things that keep working even as specific channels rise and fall.

The launch-week mentality is backwards. Authors throw everything at one big push and then wonder why sales go flat a month later. Eagar treats marketing as a long-term project of building relationships and visibility, and he’s right; that lesson ages better than any particular tactic.

Is Sell Your Book Like Wildfire still current?

The unavoidable limitation is that book marketing, especially its digital side, changes fast, and this book dates from 2012. The platforms, tools, and online tactics have shifted enormously since, the social-media platforms, the advertising options, the algorithms and best practices, so the granular how-to on digital promotion is considerably dated, and an author should verify current tactics against up-to-date sources.

The strategic fundamentals, platform, word-of-mouth, knowing your reader, providing value, age well. The execution doesn’t. Anyone following 2012 social-media advice to the letter today is wasting their damn time, so no marketing book should be a writer’s only or newest source.

Is Sell Your Book Like Wildfire worth reading?

It’s a solid, complete, practical guide to author marketing, valuable for its organized system, its concrete tactics, and especially its emphasis on the durable fundamentals of platform and word-of-mouth that outlast any single channel. It loses ground only for the inevitable: its 2012 vintage dates the digital tactics badly in a fast-moving field, so it works best paired with current sources on today’s tools.

For an author who needs a structure for thinking about and executing marketing, the strategy holds up well and remains useful; for current digital specifics, supplement it. Eagar got the big picture right, and the big picture is exactly what most struggling authors are missing.

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