Book Marketing: Can a College Intern be an Effective Book Marketing Assistant?
By
V. Michael Santoro
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Imagine being able to manage your book marketing program, as opposed to doing all the work yourself. As an author, you offer a unique opportunity that will have college marketing and communications majors thrilled about helping you market your book.
How often does an opportunity arise for them to not only work with a published author, but contribute to making your book a best-seller! Imagine how your book marketing and PR project will look on their resume! This is a win-win scenario. You get a “for credit” or low cost resource and the college intern receives the experience that can help her career.
Benefits and Challenges
Using a college intern as your book marketing assistant has its benefits, as well as its challenges. You are hiring a young individual who has potential, as well as some educational background that may include school projects, but she has probably not marketed a book before.
These students are seeking to work for you to gain relevant work experience and a good reference they can add to their resume. Gaining some “real world” experience will give them an edge in the marketplace. What you have is an enthusiastic assistant with great potential that will require your direction, a detailed plan and some training. You have to plan on managing your intern to achieve the best return.
Your intern will be a young enthusiastic college student that will have excellent online research, writing, and social networking skills. However, the rest of her knowledge will be academic. For example, she will understand the fundamentals of marketing and public relations as this is her major, but she may not have applied her knowledge in a real business environment. She will expect you to determine how she can apply those skills to help you and will want training in order to successfully achieve your book marketing objectives. Without your direction, she may flounder and get frustrated.
Also, college interns may not have developed the types of behavioral skills that are expected in a business environment. For example, their follow up skills and timeliness may be less than satisfactory. These attributes must be part of the job description and reinforced during the interview process.
Book Marketing Plan and Training Requirements
By offering direction, you will be able to manage your book marketing program, as opposed to having to do all the work yourself. The good news is that it is a lot easier than it sounds when you use the Author Intern system. You will be amazed at how much an assistant can bolster your book marketing campaign with this training. The enthusiasm that your student intern will bring to your book marketing project will energize you. Expect to be treated like she’s working with a rock star!