Marketing - Is It or Isn't It?

A few years ago I attended a workshop at RWA with author, Bob Mayer. One of the things he said was if you’re self-publishing don’t even think about marketing until you have at least three books published, four or five, even better.

I thought this made sense and marketing scared me. (It still does) So I kept writing and publishing books. Life threw a few curves and I didn’t publish the books quite as quickly as I had planned. Last year I planned on marketing but with selling and moving, twice it didn’t get off the ground. This year I’m beginning to market, and researching the best ways to market. 

It occurred to me that maybe I have been marketing. When we finish writing a book and write the blurb – is that marketing? We get a great cover – is that marketing? What about choosing the metadata? We join Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Triberr. We get a blog. We post the book on our blog, or website if we have one. We may send a post to a few loops we’re on that we have a new book, or post it on our facebook page.  Are we marketing?  

Does marketing have to be active like taking out ads and doing blog tours, etc. or can it be the simple things we do when we self-publish. I didn’t consider what I did, marketing. But I’m rethinking it. What about you, what do you think marketing involves?