We’re coming upon the most active entertaining season of the year. Families gather, neighbors welcome neighbors into their homes, friends and coworkers join together in celebration. Why not throw a party to promote your book?
Invite guests in for some traditional holiday goodies—cookies, home-baked breads and warm spiced cider. Or ask friends or colleagues to throw a party in their homes. Entertain guests by demonstrating some of the meals in your cookbook, spinning yarns about the good-old-days described in your memoir or sharing tips from your book on family budgeting, for example.
Many books are conducive to this type of promotional activity—you just may have to get creative when planning the home-party entertainment. Illustrate stories from your book of cat adventures or your travels to Turkey using a slide show of photographs. A slide show might also enhance your presentation about going green, giving your house more curb appeal, pet photography tips or the plight of the wild horses in America.
Involve guests in your program. This would work for books featuring natural beauty secrets, dog grooming techniques, journal-keeping for emotional health, do-it-yourself acupressure and so forth.
If you have a novel, bring props and scripts and ask guests to help you act out parts of your story.
What are some of the elements that will make your event a success?
• It should be fun and/or informative.
• Guests must feel as though they benefit from your presentation—that they learned something of value, their life is better because of what they learned or they simply enjoyed the evening.
• Offer a discount on your book or give a bonus item to those who purchase the book that evening.
If you have a book to promote, spend some time this week developing a presentation to give in a home-party situation. Just as you did when writing your book, keep your potential audience in mind. Rather than focusing on how many books you can sell, consider what the guests want/need that you can provide. Here are some tips that should help you in preparing your presentation.
• Be well prepared.
• Make it interesting.
• Keep it fairly brief—you want to give enough that your audience feels fulfilled, while also leaving them wanting just a little bit more.
• Involve your audience wherever possible.
• Change things up throughout your talk. In other words, tell a story, give some facts, throw in a quote and ask for audience participation a couple of times. Anecdotes are always interesting and can break up a mundane talk.
• Before launching out to speak in public or present quaint home party entertainment, practice in front of people you know. Join a Toastmasters club. Get involved in a storytelling group.
While your purpose is to sell books, this should not be evident to your audience. They should not get the idea that you are there primarily to sell them a book. Instead, they should feel as though you are interested in their well-being and that you want them to enjoy the evening. At some point, however, you’ll want to announce (or have your host announce) that autographed copies of the book are for sale throughout the evening.
How many books can you sell in an evening at a home party? If guests are invited in accordance with their interest in your topic/genre, you could potentially one or more copies to 50 or 60 percent of them. So if there are 13 guests, and you sell one or two copies to 8 of them, that might add up to a dozen books. That’s $220 for a $20 book. A nice evening’s work.
I’m off to teach an article-writing class at the local college this morning. I’m looking forward to spending a few hours with writers. If you want to learn how to establish a freelance article-writing business or to promote your book through articles, sign up for my on-demand, online article-writing course. Learn more about it here: http://www.matilijapress.com/course_magarticles.htm