I receive several emails every day asking me for advice and I always do what I can to help. But a few months ago it occurred to me that if I were to respond to these emails in a more public way, more people could weigh in on the conversation–and more people might benefit from…
Category Archives: marketing and promotion
Publishers’ Websites: How Do You Like Them?
A couple of weeks ago an editor asked on Twitter what people wanted to find when they visited publishers’ websites. You can guess what I said: my books, in prime position. But that was no help to the editor concerned who has more to consider than my ego, like attracting new customers, selling more books,…
What Is Your Platform?
Writers are often told that in order to sell their books they’re going to need one of those remarkable things, A Platform. This isn’t something you can just buy from your local hardware shop: it’s something you really have to build yourself, and often writers aren’t even aware that they’re doing so. Essentially, a writer’s…
Trios: Devil’s Gold, by Julie Korzenco—Marketing The Book
Julie Korzenko, author of Devil’s Gold, has been kind enough to arrange a trio of articles for me about the publication of her book. Two weeks ago Julie described how she found a home for her book; last week her editor at Medallion Press, Emily Steele, discussed the editorial process; and this week Paul Ohlson,…
How To Write A Press Release
A good press release informs the media of an upcoming event, or of a reaction to something that’s already happened. The press release isn’t a finished article: but if it’s good enough it will be used as the basis of several articles, written by the journalists who receive it, and it might just get you…
Snowbooks On Marketing
Snowbooks is one of the UK’s publishing’s success stories. It’s a thriving independent publisher with a solid reputation for publishing strong titles and selling them in high numbers (the covers are beautiful, too). It’s got a great blog, too. Here Emma Barnes, Snowbooks’ co-founder, discusses her very effective approach to marketing and promotion. One of…
Special Orders: Why You Have To Pay In Advance
Suppose that a customer walks into a bookshop and asks the bookseller to order her a copy of a book that the bookseller has never heard of: and that when the bookseller looks the book up, he finds that it was published by a vanity publisher which is notorious for publishing terrible books at horrible…
Email Promotions
In the last five minutes I’ve received three emails from Bostick Communications offering me review copies of various books. According to its book press releases page, Bostick charges writers $175 to send out their press release to “our database of over 20,000 book reviewers, print, radio, television and internet media contacts”. I wasn’t aware that…
Book Reviews
Imagine that you’re an influential book reviewer, and each week publishers send you boxes of their books in the hope that you’ll sprinkle some of your fairy-dust over one of their titles and write it a wonderful review. Wouldn’t that be lovely? How do you think that book reviewers reach such an enviable position? By…
The Levels of Promotion
Promotion can be carried out on several levels, and it’s well worth considering which of those levels is going to be the most effective when you have a book to promote. If you meet someone in a supermarket queue and get chatting, there’s a chance they might ask you what you do for a living….
Marketing Your Book: An Author's Guide
In an ideal world, every publisher would hand a copy of Alison Baverstock’s Marketing Your Book to every single one of their authors. It’s written from the assumption that your book has been published by mainstream house: and this is its great strength. While most books on the subject are aimed at the self-published and…
Marketing, Publicity, PR And Promotion
There’s a lot of confusion about what these terms mean. This is how I’ve always separated them, but others’ opinions may (and do!) differ. Marketing is the paid-for stuff: the catalogues, magazine ads and trade ads which position a product in the market with the aim of telling trade buyers and end-users that the product…
Marketing And Publicity: What Really Works?
Literary agent Nathan Bransford recently opened his blog up to a handful of guest bloggers in order to explore the issues involved in effective book marketing. One of the guests he invited along was M J Rose, who contributed this post in which she discussed what marketing and publicity actually mean, what works and what…
A Successful Writer's View Of Self-Promotion
Victoria Strauss is one of those writers that we all wish we could be. Not only has she published umpteen best-selling books, she’s also extremely well-regarded in the writing world for her tireless efforts in exposing publishing scams over at Writer Beware which she runs with Ann Crispin, another ridiculously successful writer. Both Victoria and…