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