Marketing, publicity,
and promotion

• Resources for and articles about marketing,
publicity, and promotion
• Recommended reading on book marketing,
publicity, and promotion
• VidLits, book trailers on the Web
• Thoughtful radio and TV talk shows and video
<== Here are some well-designed author's websites (left column).

Book authors traditionally lament their publishers' failure to run ads about their books in book review media, but advertisements (for which one pays) lack the credibility of reviews and publicity (news and feature stories, for which one doesn't pay). It pays to understand the full marketing mix, which in this day and age includes getting to popular bloggers, websites, and anything the purchasing public is likely to read and be influenced by. The most important thing is to get information about your book out there, where people know it exists, and can easily purchase it.

Publicity is getting some media to do a story about you. You may have to pay someone to help you get an interview, but you generally don't pay to get the interview. Advertising is when you pay someone to feature you or your product. Marketing is basically the catch-all term for everything else, and may or may not include advertising and publicity, depending on who's talking. With a book, a good title has to be MEMORABLE--otherwise you can't get good word-of-mouth, which is essential to book sales. Marketing requires more of a commitment of time than money. "All marketing is really just relationships."
~ part of John Kremer's recorded comments on Great Writers Book Marketing Series, hosted by N. Kali Mincy (loosely captured--not verbatim). John is the author of an excellent guide to book marketing: 1001 Ways to Market Your Books (get the Sixth Edition). You can subscribe free to his useful book marketing e-letter here: http:/​/​www.bookmarket.com/​

Ads. An emotional tipping point for ad research. "Advertising that generates a strong emotional response, even in the absence of a discernible product message, is more efficient than message-based advertising," reports Orlando Wood, Brainjuicer, in the Warc blog

Authors as brands. Authors'--and publishers'--shifting responsibilities. Jesse Kornbluth, in PW (11-23-09) writes: "Authors are beginning to grasp that the job description of 'writer' has changed. Writers may be artists. They are also brands. And restless brands at that; it's the rare writer who stays with one publisher for the long haul. More typically, publishing contracts are for one or two books; in that truncated relationship, a publisher can only do so much for its writers. The heavy lifting of a career will fall to writers and their agents, or it just won't get done.So unless they are geniuses—and recognized as such—writers who want attention for their work need to cultivate some 21st-century media skills. They should be camera-ready, because they'll want to make YouTube videos. They should know their way around social networking sites. They should have some experience with book clubs, and they should be willing to spend as much time there as they used to spend on book tours. Who should finance these virtual media tours? My vote is for the publishers of books that stand a chance to succeed..."

"We've actual found that signings are the least effective author promotion which can take place in the store. What really works are events or panels. For instance, the topic of taxes is something that starts to concern everybody after the first of the year. What we do is put together events by various tax money management people or financial consultants from January through March in the stores."
~ Marcella Smith, Small Press Business Manager, Barnes & Noble (on Book Marketing Matters--see back issues here)
Thanks, Anita Bartholomew, for this lead.

Book tour? More like a safari (Carolyn Kellogg, L.A. Times 3-7-10). With publisher publicity departments backing away from traditional author tours, writers are left to their own devices--and strangers' couches. Which is where we learned about couch-surfing!

Building a Mailing List: How I Did Mine by Steve, on Vertical Response, a newsletter service. One of the responses is from Joann Ross, a successful romance writer, who uses interesting techniques to build reader loyalty.

Case history in successful do-it-yourself promotion: On Web, A Most Novel Approach by Nelly Tucker tells how Kelly Corrigan sold 80,000 copies in hardcover and 260,000 in paperback of her memoir A Middle Place.

How to publicize and promote your own work

Rusty Shelton and Katie Andrews, of Phenix & Phenix Literary Publicists, were guest bloggers on Lisa Tener’s Writing Blog, where you can read several useful postings on how to publicize and promote your work:
• Why Publicity Is Your New Best Friend
• The Publicity 411: What to Know Before Getting Started
• Press Releases & Pitches: How to get the word out about your book
• Virtual Media Training: How to Rock Your Interviews
• Social Media and Beyond: Why You Must Join the Movement and Where to Start
With "extra credit" for a three part series on the Phenix & Phenix blog about prepping authors for TV talk shows:
• Part One: Booking the interview
• Part Two: Soundbyte prep
• Part Three: Networking

Nick Morgan's blog, advice on public speaking, by the author of Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, Working the Room: How to Move People to Action through Audience-Centered Speaking, and Give Your Speech, Change the World: How to Move Your Audience to Action

Radio interviews
"To me, the secret to everything is radio. I was busy doing radio interviews for a year, and finally book sales started increasing."
~John Gray in an interesting interview on how he honed his message down to something people could hear (it took years) and how he worked his way to the bestseller list, where Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus stayed for seven years

A Tale of Two Authors. Matilda Butler, guest-blogging on Straight from Hel (Helen Ginger's blog), with Part 2 continued on Women's Memoirs.

Website design: Smashing Magazine has excellent material on website design (including 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines, tutorials, navigation, typography and free fonts.

Does Radio and Television Interview Report (RTIR) work? Is it worth the money? It depends on your topic, your budget, your marketing moxie, and whether the planets align, apparently. On Thursday, 3-19-09, Debra Sanders wrote in her blog, A Matter of Panache, "I have been running ads in The Radio and Television Interview Report (RTIR) since September, and let me tell you, these are not cheap ads. RTIR is one of the mainstays of the radio and television talk show industry—every month it contains almost a hundred pages of tabloid type ads, all clamoring for the attention of talk show hosts ranging from the likes of the guy running the little radio station up the road, to those in charge of finding guests for Good Morning America and Oprah." Debra was writing about a small subset of head injuries: concussions. And in five months she got not one call. Then Natasha Richardson died of an untreated head injury and Debra's phone started ringing.

Her main message: "Anyone…I mean, anyone and everyone who sustains a jolt to the head (note that I said jolt, not crack or bump to the skull) needs to be carefully watched for a minimum of twenty-four hours, with the absolute understanding that slow bleeds which cause swelling, can cause death if not treated. The subdural hematoma that killed Natasha Richardson was easily enough treated had it been caught. Physicians treat it all the time—they open up the skull and make room for the swelling, and rarely does the injury become fatal. Left untreated however,the outcome is nearly always tragic." Without a celebrity death, the media weren't interested.

If you have a book topic or personal story that the media ARE more likely to be interested in, listen to "Rich Guy" Robert Kiyosaki talk about how marketing, not good writing, was the key to his success selling Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money--That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! This is basically a plug for RTIR, and a knock on the publishing industry, which said "no thanks" to the book, which the author and his wife self-published. It sold 26 million copies.

For yet another take on TRIR, read the exchange (especially "Manny) on the Absolute Write forum on how Manny (presumably Stuart J. Smith) tried three ads on RTIR and had an interesting kind of success selling The Russian Bride Guide.

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[Go Top] Recommended reading on book marketing, publicity, and promotion

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers, or get a free sample here, or better yet, listen free to his presentation at O'Reilly Tools of Change on 10 Bestsellers: Using New Media, New Marketing, and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books

· The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott

· The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't, by Carolyn Howard-Johnson

· The Well-Fed Self-Publisher: How to Turn One Book into a Full-Time Living, by Peter Bowerman

· 1001 Ways to Market Your Books: For Authors and Publishers by John Kremer

· Complete Guide to Self Publishing: Everything You Need to Know to Write, Publish, Promote, and Sell Your Own Book, 4th edition, by Tom Ross and Marilyn Ross

· The Publishing Game by Fern Reiss (three titles: Bestseller in 30 Days, Find an Agent in 30 Days, and Publish a Book in 30 Days ). Shorter books.

· Beyond the Bookstore: How to Sell More Books Profitably to Non-Bookstore Markets, by Brian Jud

· John Kremer's Self-Publishing Hall of Fame

· Publicize Your Book: An Insider's Guide to Getting Your Book the Attention It Deserves by Jacqueline Deval

· Guerrilla Marketing for Writers : 100 Weapons to Help You Sell Your Work by Jay Conrad Levinson.

Many resources are available online. Check the links below.

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Book Trailers (Book Videos, VidLits)
Like movie trailers but for books and on the Web, book trailers (some call them VidLits) are increasingly used to promote books. Do they sell books? The jury is still out on that. But check out these examples. Do they make you want to at least look at the book?

P.S.: What I Didn't Say, a do-it-yourself book trailer that Megan McMorris made
(using iMovie and Garage Band) for her anthology, P.S.: What I Didn't Say: Unsent Letters to Our Female Friends

VidLits--examples of book trailers from one of the first sources
• Laura Sydell's NPR story about Web 'VidLits,' featuring Yiddish with Dick and Jane
• The Dog Dialed 911
• Julie and Julia (brings out the book's appeal, which is different from the movie's)
• Liz Dubelman's "Craziest" (8 minutes and a 'must-see' for Scrabble fans)
• Yiddish with George and Laura
• More VidLits

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Thoughtful radio and TV talk shows and video
Some of the best talks shows are not only good places to market a book but good ways to hear about what's going on in the world, and why. Let me know which intelligent talk shows that are available online are missing here.

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