Over the years, I’ve fielded a lot of questions about writing, publishing and book promotion. I planned to list some of them here this morning and share with you my responses. But something else occurred to me when I started to list the ways that people find me to ask those questions. The sentence listing the different ways customers and clients come to me became so long and cumbersome that I that I decided to make that my blog for today.
If you have a book to promote and especially if you are a nonfiction author with an expertise you wish to share with your readers, you’ll want to have a sense of how to reach your audience. In fact, that is one question I get occasionally—not as often as I used to before the Internet grew to such proportions.
Anyway, if you have a book that you are interested in selling, you might want to pay attention to the many ways that my customers and clients locate me.
• Book festivals, signings and other events.
• My blog.
• One of my websites.
• The articles that I write.
• From my comments left at other blog sites.
• Through my affiliation with SPAWN.
• From my books.
• Through other websites that feature my book or articles.
• Through my presentations at conferences, etc.
• Word of mouth.
• Occasional paid advertisements.
• Personal recommendations.
• Interviews and book reviews.
Now that’s over a dozen different ways that my promotion helps me to sell books and gain new editorial clients. I think I will leave my blog at that this morning and proceed with some of the questions I field starting tomorrow. If you have a question you’d like to see featured in my blog, send it along: PLFry620@yahoo.com.
In the meantime, we’d all like to hear some of the specific ways that you reach out to your customers and clients and how these activities have served you. Probably my most spectacular story demonstrating how your promotional efforts can pay off is when I was invited to speak at a Toastmaster convention in Dubai because the committee wanted to introduce their first woman keynote speaker to the Middle Eastern clubs and because they knew me from my frequent articles published in The Toastmaster Magazine. (Read more about this adventure in my May 20, 2006 blog.) I even wrote a small book about the trip. http://www.matilijapress.com