You’ve gotten your book published. Or maybe you have a story appearing in an anthology being released by a small, new publisher. Now you can just sit back and keep a running tally of sales. Right?
Wrong! People are not going to buy your book if they don’t know it exists. Unless you find ways to promote your book, chances are it will languish in a warehouse or on a computer disk, if it is a POD (print-on-demand) publication.
At the June 5th meeting, we will hear about ways to market your book and/or yourself. Since I have a story coming out in an anthology published by a new, small press, I am faced with the situation I describe above. (See how I managed to get that plug in?!) How do you get the word out?
The answer is: every way you possibly can. Tell your friends and coworkers. Get it in the Guild newsletter. Tack information to the bulletin boards at the grocery store. Try to get the local newspaper interested. Okay, so that’s a long shot. Convince someone to review your book. Badger bookstores to carry it and display it somewhere other than the back row near the restrooms. Arrange to have signings.
The Internet is probably new writers’ best friend. There are countless ways to announce the release of a new book on the web. The most obvious is to set up a home page. Convey the address of the site to your publisher so they can add a link from their web site. Still, setting up a web page is a little like renting a postal box. You’re not going to get any mail until people know your address. Read tips on how to make sure your web site is scanned and indexed by the main search engines. Add the URL (web page address) to the bottom of all of your (personal) e-mail messages. Post it to relevant newsgroups and bulletin boards. (http://www22.brinkster.com/shadowstone/new.htm).
Don’t be shy – if people volunteer to do something to help you promote your book, take them up on it. My editor at Cemetery Dance magazine offered me free advertising space, so the July issue will have an ad with the book’s cover, an enticing blurb, and a link to the publisher’s web site. I’ve printed out several dozen copies of this ad to take with me to the World Horror Convention at the end of May. I’ll find some friendly vendors who will let me stack some at their booth or at an information table. I’ll post them on the message board and any other place I can get away with it. I’ll hand them out to people I talk to – “By the way, I have a story in an upcoming anthology and I just happen to have some information about it right here.”
I have a vivid memory of Nancy McCoy standing at the entrance to last year’s conference, handing out fliers for her book. It was shameless…and inspired!
The need for promotion is an issue for authors at all levels of success. The so-called mid-list authors, the ones who languish somewhere in that purgatory a little below #15 on the best-sellers list, feel this problem as much as beginners do. Their publishers’ advertising budgets will be mostly devoted to the authors with the guaranteed big returns. No one is going to take out full-page ads for their books in Publishers Weekly. You’ll find these authors grateful for every little thing that will help increase their readership. They do publicity tours, talk shows, radio interviews, print interviews – not because these things are always necessarily fun, but because they are necessary, period.
Does an unpublished book make a sound when it falls in the woods? I don’t know, but the same question applies to a published book no one knows about. As authors, we will discover that writing is only part of the job. Perhaps the most pleasurable part. We must also become adept at the art of self-promotion, something that requires that we emerge from our secluded life as writers and show our best face – and our best work – to the public.