Another question we got from the audience for our book marketing panel in Tucson last week was, how much marketing must you do for a book? How do you know when you’ve done enough?
If this is one of your questions, you may be interested in the response. If you want to keep selling copies of your book, you must keep promoting it. In most cases, when you stop refreshing your website, when you stop blogging and submitting articles/stories to appropriate publications, when you stop going out and talking about your book and attending book festivals and so forth, book sales will falter and sometimes dry up. Your readers will forget about you and your potential new readers won’t know about you.
So in truth, book promotion is ongoing for as long as you hope to sell copies of your book. The more you want to sell, the more intense and wide-spread promotion you must do.
If you find this idea distasteful and if you haven’t published a book yet, you might reconsider publishing at all. Or you can lower your standards for sales. You’ll discover that your book sales will be in direct relation to the amount of promotion you do.
I’m off to speak to a group of writers in Fountain Valley today on book promotion for the reluctant fiction and nonfiction author.
If you are newly published or are working on a book for publications and you have a lot of questions about publishing and book promotion, be sure to order a copy of “Publish Your Book.” It’s at Amazon.com in print, Kindle and audio. You’ll find it at most other online and downtown bookstores and here: http://www.matilijapress.com