Writing and Publishing News

There are many types of activities involved in book promotion and they require varying degrees of energy, time, planning and preparation. That’s why I maintain that you’ll be a more successful book promoter if you can learn to pace yourself while pursuing these activities. Here are some ideas:

List the initial activities that you want to pursue—those most conducive to your book and your audience. For a historical novel set in Connecticut, your primary list may include: send press releases to Connecticut newspapers, historical societies and bookstores; contact book clubs nationally; request book reviews by all major reviewers; solicit friends and colleagues to post reviews at Amazon; submit stories/excerpts to historical magazines and websites; become guest blogger or arrange for interviews at key blog sites; set up presentations at local venues; if you do not live in the locale where the story is set, plan a trip to that state and schedule book signings, speaking engagements, visits to bookstores that are not carrying your book and so forth.

If you’re promoting a young adult fantasy, your list might include, pursue appropriate book review sites; present programs to middle school students; submit stories to appropriate magazines and mention your book in the bio; do a blog tour and set up some games and other things of interest to young people visiting your website.

For a nonfiction book featuring natural beauty secrets, you may want to, post blogs daily at your own blog site and lead visitors to your blog by using Twitter and Facebook; comment at other pertinent blog sites often; plan presentations at many venues where your audience congregates; arrange for your book to be recommended reading at sites related to beauty products, health, etc; write articles for a wide variety of magazines and research appropriate trade shows and plan to attend with your book.

While continuing with these activities, you’ll also eventually add such things as, participating in book festivals (I recommend signing up for all local festivals and traveling to some of the major ones); piggyback marketing; speaking at appropriate conferences across the U.S.; creating spin-offs to entice more sales and so forth.

Prioritize activities, but also intermingle them. You can be sending out review copies and press kits while scheduling speaking engagements and keeping up your daily blog. You can seek guest blogger opportunities while offering excerpts from your book to key publications. You might plan a home party where guests will be encouraged to join you in acting out scenes from your book while running a contest to bring more awareness to your book.

That’s nearly two dozen book promotion ideas. All of these ideas and around 225 more are in my new book, Promote Your Book, Over 250 Proven, Low-Cost Tips and Techniques for the Enterprising Author. Available now at Amazon in print and Kindle http://amzn.to/oe56Ia. Can also be ordered through any bookstore or IndieBound or B&N.com. Or purchase it from the author’s website: http://www.matilijapress.com/PromoteYourBook.html

By the way, check out my guest post at Marcie Hill’s Marcie Writes blog this morning. http://www.marciewrites.wordpress.com October 18, 2011.

Do you open yourself up to being interviewed with regard to your published book? I suggest that you agree to interviews and that you seek them out. How can being interviewed by a blogger, editor or radio/TV show host benefit you and your book?

• Having your interview published in a magazine, newsletter, blog site or website, for example, is a good way to expand your readership and become more widely known.

• It gives you new material to use in your promotion. You can point your blog, Twitter and Facebook followers to the interview, post excerpts at your website, use portions of it in your promo pieces, and so forth.

• Your responses to the interview questions may give you food for thought about your project, your promotional tactics and your career. This can be an opportunity to reflect and possibly regroup and adopt new strategies.

• The questions and your responses might inspire you to compose new articles for appropriate publications and even write new books or booklets related to your topic or the theme of your book.

• Interviews can be challenging. When you’re speaking off the cuff, you don’t always know how the questions will be framed and what sort of responses you will give. It’s not easy to respond intelligently and succinctly on the spur of the moment. So each interview is a learning experience and good practice for live presentations.

Tip: Toastmasters is a good place to learn how to effectively give interviews as each club meeting includes the opportunity to participate in Table Topics, an impromptu speaking exercise.

Can you give examples of how granting interviews around the theme of your book has helped you in some way?

Giving interviews is just one of many book promotion ideas outlined in my latest book, Promote Your Book, Over 250 Proven, No-Cost Tips and Techniques for the Enterprising Author. http://amzn.to/oe56Ia

Yesterday was Ojai Day—a day of celebration for our community. A portion of our main street is closed and booths crop up throughout our city park, and up and down several streets. It’s quite festive with the aroma of freshly popping corn, booths alive with children blowing bubbles, climbing on a fire truck, getting their little faces painted, etc. and adults browsing the many booths bursting with the wares of local artisans. There’s jewelry of all kinds, items of cloth, yarn, wood, clay and other materials as well as olive oil, candles and more. This year, there was an Author’s Pavilion where local authors could present their books to the public. I was there all day with some of my books and about a dozen other authors.

I must comment here that flea market-type events like this are not the best places to sell most books—but I still encourage you to participate in those in your area. Go ahead and set up a booth or share a booth with someone and talk to passersby about your book. Depending on your book, your demeanor and the crowd, you might sell a few copies or a lot. But one thing you will definitely gain is exposure. Whether anyone buys a copy of your book or not, you will have the opportunity to show it to potential customers, talk about it, hand out marketing material, and make suggestions for purchasing it, perhaps, in the future. Once you’ve introduced your book to people, the next time they see it—at a local independent bookstore, in a specialty store they visit, reviewed online, mentioned in the local newspaper or on the coffee table at someone’s house—they will remember it and maybe become a step or two closer to actually purchasing it. Exposure, exposure, exposure.

Another reason for attending these events with your book is for the education. You’ll learn more about the best way to display your books. You’ll figure out what approach works best on behalf of your book. You’ll also get book promotion ideas from other authors.

Here’s an interesting book promotion idea I gleaned while chatting among the other author. A couple of cool gentlemen recently came out with a humorous book of their favorite sayings. They sold quite a few books yesterday. Why? The book is inexpensive. It is a great conversation piece—thus it makes a good gift for the person who has everything (or nothing). It’s small and easy to carry around in a purse or tote. The authors had told numerous people they would be selling their book at this event—so a good number of their customers were friends/acquaintances. The authors were personable and had some irresistible sales pitches. And they’re creative promoters.

For example, recently, they set up a lemonade stand outside the local Sunday Farmer’s Market. One of the authors told me that they should have contacted the Guinness record-keepers as he’s pretty sure they were the oldest people to ever run a lemonade stand. Their gimmick was; buy a glass of lemonade for $10 and get a free book.

One author in our Author’s Pavilion yesterday, had a slow start with her array of children’s books. Not much was happening for her and, in fact, the configuration of the booth was not great for the sake of exposure. Visitors had to walk deep inside a large booth in order to see her books. So she sent her husband out where the crowd was walking past and he started handing out bookmarks and inviting those people with children inside the booth to take a look at her books.

She was quite busy selling and signing her books for the rest of the afternoon.

This idea is actually in my new book, Promote Your Book, Over 250 Proven, Low-Cost Tips and Techniques for the Enterprising Author. The lemonade stand idea is not. However, I do encourage authors to think outside the box and come up with interesting, off-the-wall, clever, creative, imaginative ideas for promoting their books. And the ideas should, of course, go along with the theme, style, focus, genre of their books. Neither of these promotional ideas I mentioned here today would probably work well with my new book on book promotion. It is a niche book of interest to a specific audience (like those of you who read this blog). Strategies that might work are piggyback marketing—packaging my book with a book on how to write a book proposal, fiction-writing techniques, choosing the right publisher for your book, etc. I sell books at writers’ conferences, especially when I conduct one or more workshops and when I speak at writers’ group meetings. I also sell this book through this blog. Order your copy now:
http://www.matilijapress.com/PromoteYourBook.html
Or at Amazon.com http://amzn.to/oe56Ia

People often ask me how I can come up with a new idea for a blog post every single day. This does seem like a stretch to most people—even writers. I notice that many bloggers post only a couple of times a week and some don’t post but once every few months. I say, why bother? Isn’t your purpose in blogging to stay in touch with your audience? Who’s going to notice you when you posts are only occasionally? On the other hand, how can you come up with something to say more often than weekly or monthly? Here are some tips for those of you with nonfiction books, either in the works or published: (Watch for a separate blog post for writers of fiction.)

• Write about what you know. Presumably there are many aspects to your topic—some of which you have experienced, studied and observed. If your book features vintage airplanes, report on your recent tour of an aviation museum. Conduct additional research on some of the planes and write about aspects of each in separate posts. Share something significant you learned from a pilot you met at the museum. List some of the best aviation museums in the states/world. Describe some of the most extensive or interesting airplane collections around. Write about how safety measures have evolved over the years. (This could fill several posts.) Can you see how the subjects could be endless?

• Write about things you want to know. Whether your topic is woodworking, managing feral cat colonies, making cupcakes, parenting or beading, presumably, you are constantly faced with new challenges. Write about what you learn when you set out to meet and overcome them—how to create more refined edges on your bird houses, a better way to ensure the right consistency in your frosting or how to barter for beads in estate and yard sales, for example.

• Relate the experiences of others. Interview other experts in your field. Invite guest bloggers to fill space at your blog site. They will surely have new information and a different perspective to share.

• Keep up with the news. Not only should you be studying and reporting what’s occurring in your own field, the national news can affect people involved in your topic. Environmental issues, for example, might affect birding, fishing or gardening hobbies. The economy affects many people—from those with a writing career to those in real estate to the viability of college for many families and to the state of our volunteer pool, for example. Many of your posts could stem from how world affairs is affecting your world of writing, coin or stamp collecting, hair coloring or pretzel-making.

• Recycle your ideas. Learn to write on the same subject from different angles. This skill alone will certainly carry you far toward a more successful and active blog site. Also dredge up older posts that attracted a lot of attention and rework them creating a new post.

• Here’s my number one favorite and most useful blog idea. I listen to my audience. I am in constant contact with writers and authors. Some of them come to me with questions or problems. I meet some at the presentations I participate in, at book festivals, at bookstores, at the grocery store… Writers comment on my blog and articles published on other sites. They participate in SPAWNDiscuss. I know what concerns them, pleases them, excites them and what challenges they face. And I write about these things in my blog. Take this post, for example. I started out by saying that people often ask me how I can come up with enough ideas to post every day. Lately, I’ve been visiting the blogs of my colleagues and I’m noticing that some of them do not post very often. These concepts led me to write on the topic of ideas today. See how that works?

Now, if you have a book to promote or you are working on a book, you really should be blogging often enough to attract regular followers. This is one way to build a platform to use in the very necessary process of book promotion.

Learn more about blogging, article-writing, giving presentations, sending press releases and tip sheets and so much more in my latest book, Promote Your Book, Over 250 Proven, Low-Cost Tips and Techniques for the Enterprising Author (Allworth Press, 2011) http://www.matilijapress.com/PromoteYourBook.html It is also available at amazon in print and on Kindle.