Nicola Morgan is today hoping to set the world record for the greatest number of separate school-talks given by one author in one day, by talking at six different schools about her latest book, Deathwatch. I bet she wears gorgeous boots to do it in, too. Good luck, Nicola. Remember to eat plenty of chocolate…
Tag Archive: publicity
Calling All Book Bloggers: Penguin Wants You!
Penguin’s publicity department is keen to forge links with the blogging community and has planned a series of online events to work out how this can best be achieved. If you’d like to take part in the discussions, here’s a link. The next event is planned for the week of 20 April, which is next…
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…
Bumping Up Your Sales
Suppose you’ve done everything right for your self-published book but your sales have fallen flat. How can you spark things off again and rejuvenate your order-book? You could get yourself a mainstream publishing contract—although you’re unlikely to manage this unless you’ve sold a high number of copies already, in which case you’re not likely to…
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…
Book Signings: Right And Wrong
Book signings are fraught with problems. I’m not convinced that they’re particularly useful promotional tools for anyone but the most celebrated of writers, but if you’re still keen to have a go here’s a cautionary tale from the luminous Jenna Glatzer, and a comprehensive guide to doing it right from J A Konrath. How Publishing…
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…
The Myth That Publishers Don’t Promote Any More
(I’m going to recycle one of my recent comments here: sorry for the rehash, but it’s an important issue and one which is much misunderstood.) Following my post Questions About Self-Publishing, a reader commented, “Another big myth is if an author sells his/her book to a publisher then the publisher will do all the promotion….