Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Publicity and Promotion: The Golden Key to Getting Published



Newton discovered the laws of gravity and motion. Galileo realized the earth is not the center of the universe. The budding author must likewise discover a world-changing Immutable Eternal Truth concerning publishing: Sadly, with only rare, lottery-like exceptions, books DO NOT SELL THEMSELVES!


They must be promoted aggressively  -- through talks before groups, social networking sites, blogs, radio and TV interviews, newspaper columns or articles. And a hundred other ways. In fact, as many ways as the mind can dream up, from publicity stunts to booths at book fairs.


The cold hard truth is that it is almost never enough to pick a powerful subject, research it masterfully, condense it concisely to 200 pages, and package it colorfully and with flair. Without publicity, your tome will be a needle in a book superstore's 100,000-title haystack. If it even gets that far, since sales determine your distribution, and without publicity, there will be no sales, hence no distribution.


Luckily, the media have a huge appetite for articulate authors with compelling subjects who have honed their presentations and piggybacked them onto a news peg. That news peg could be a holiday that fits the book's theme, or a current news event that is relevant to the title's subject matter.


Getting the interviews, though, is a tricky matter. First, you craft a powerful media kit about you and your book to be e-mailed to pre-identified decision makers. You try to time the submission to coincide with a news peg. You follow up continually, knowing that most e-mails are "lost in space" in the newsroom because of the flood of publicity aspirants bombarding media people. Then, having landed the interview, you prepare thoroughly, because the quality of your performance, not the quality of your book, will of course determine sales. This is, after all, the only thing your audience has to go on in deciding whether to buy.


The art of promoting a book is critical for self-publishers but just as important for commercially published authors, since most companies do comparatively little promotional work on mid-list titles (titles that are not designated by the publisher to become "big books." With "lesser" titles, which is the great majority of books, the publisher leaves most of the promotional work to the author. And usually, by the time the author of an also-ran title figures this out, it's too late. The book is being taken out of print for "lack of public demand." Of course, the public may never have demanded it, because it never heard about the title in the first place.


Remember: If you have a business or hobby, promoting a book also promotes what you do and can bring you clients or simply new friends to add to your network. And remember this, too: Publishers are always on the lookout for authors who know how to promote themselves and their work.


For a detailed report on how to get publicity and to promote your book or your work, see my detailed report: A 25-year Publicist's Guide to Promoting Your Book -- available for download for $3.95 at Amazon.com. Happy publishing.

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