What do you do when things slow down? It’s inevitable that there will be lulls in your activities along your book promotion route. There are times when you are so busy, you wonder how you’ll have time to do it all. You’re swamped with speaking engagements and upcoming book festivals. You’re presenting workshops, organizing a local author’s event and still working to get your book up at Amazon.com. Oh yes, and you’re shipping books, delivering them to local bookstores and libraries and continuing to send announcements to your mailing/emailing list.
But how do you handle the quiet times—when you’ve exhausted your book promotion resources or when you get tired of the hustle bustle of it all?
We all experience burnout at some point, especially when we’ve been pushing so hard to get our books noticed and working so hard for those sales. So what do you do? What is your remedy?
The most reasonable course of action is to get back on the horse. Take a brief breather, if you wish—putter in the garden, have coffee or a cocktail with a friend, take a hike in nature or simply sit and meditate. Then pick up where you left off. Your book is not going to sell itself. It needs you to come up with good marketing ideas and implement them. So, once you’ve taken that rest, either continue doing what you were doing—if you were experiencing some results—or try new promotional tactics.
After a bout with burnout, you might need a change of pace.
• Spend a few weeks submitting articles on your book’s topic or stories in your genre to magazines.
• Contact the managers of key websites and ask about having your book listed as recommended reading.
• Offer to be interviewed or to be a guest blogger at blogs related to the theme or genre of your book.
• Establish your own blog.
• Power up your website by adding resource pages where your audience can come for information on your book’s topic.
• Design a new workshop or presentation.
• Outline a booklet or workbook to accompany your book.
• Search for more book reviewers and contact them.
• Seek appropriate conferences where you could speak on behalf of your book. Start contacting the organizers with your resume and presentation details.
Burnout might be more prevalent in summer because there’s more going on outside of our homes. The kids are out of school, the weather is nice and people are visiting. There are more distractions. As an author, however, you’ve taken on a full-time job—that of promoting your book. You are an entrepreneur and book promotion is your business. Your decisions and actions will make or break your business and you’ll soon find how important it is to stay on top of your game.
Having your book reviewed a couple of times is not enough. Notifying your mailing/emailing list that your book has been published is not enough. Doing a couple of speaking gigs is not enough. Getting local bookstores to carry your book is not enough. Spending a weekend at a book festival is not enough. Book promotion is full-time and ongoing for as long as you want to sell copies of your book. So, if you suffer from a bit of burnout, it’s understandable. Promoting a book is hard and intense work. And it’s okay to take a little time away—in fact, it is probably a requirement for a healthier you. But, if you desire success as an author, take a brief respite only with the full intention of returning to your “job” full-force and full speed ahead.
For more about what it takes to succeed as a published author, read my book, The Right Way to Write, Publish and Sell Your Book.
http://www.matilijapress.com/rightway.html
Sign up for one of my on-demand, online courses. I teach courses on book promotion, self-editing, memoir-writing, how to write a successful book proposal, self-publishing and article-writing.
http://www.matilijapress.com/courses.htm
Be sure to check out my brand new Patricia Fry website:
http://www.patriciafry.com