When is the right time to begin marketing your book?

I’ve read a lot of books and blog posts around the subject of book marketing and most of them say to begin marketing your book at the same time you are writing it. There is some wisdom to the idea that when you are finished writing your book, you should already have a platform with which to sell it. Starting to build a platform when the book is done, makes selling the book that much slower. I get it. Having an audience waiting for your book is a good thing. The problem is it takes lots of time to build an audience, and if you don’t do it right, at best you will turn off your potential readers and all the time you spent trying to connect with them will be for nothing, at worst you will create a bad reputation that could take many months or even years to undo.

So, what to do?

For me, I tried to build a website, blog, tweet, FB and write all at the same time and found that finishing my book was never going to happen. It slowed my writing down to a crawl. I am now of the mind that if you don’t finish your book, you will have nothing to sell, so that should be your first priority. This explains the dearth of blog posts of late. I am almost finished with The Dishwasher’s Son. When that hurdle is completed, I will tackle the marketing with my full attention and be better able to connect with readers on a more genuine and meaningful level, which will be better for all concerned.

That’s what I’ve learned, how about you?