Most of us would not put the effort into cooking a complicated gourmet meal and then not invite friends or family to sit down with us to eat it. If you are writing a book and never let it be read, then you are basically doing the same thing. The time to start promoting your book is no later than when you type “The End”, and yes, even before you find a publisher.
Your eventual goal is to sell books – make lots of money – and be able to retire to an island retreat… maybe not. Your goal though is to let folks know about your book and interest them in reading it. If you have, or plan to, write multiple books then you want them familiar with your name and ideally they will look for new/other work by you. Realize that generally unless you have a book from a BIG publishing house, you won’t be displayed in the actual brick and mortar bookstore shelves; but you might be among the more than six-million titles carried on Amazon.com or one of the other online retailers. Chances are unless your book has hit some bestseller list, or readers know to look for you, no one is going to even realize you book is there. They don’t realize it, they don’t buy it, they don’t read it.
Promotion and Marketing are often intertwined, but they each have distinct functions. Marketing is focused on selling your book(s), promotion is focused on making folks aware that you and your book(s) are there – promotion will have readers looking for your name or your book title even before it’s actually available.
Easy promotion can be really inexpensive – creating a blog about your book, handing out business cards with a picture of the book jacket and your name, finding opportunities to guest blog, using Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to introduce yourself and even leaving comments on other blogs with a link back to your own site are all easy methods. There are a few companies out there where you can purchase promotional materials (fliers, magnets, business cards, T-shirts, pens, brochures, etc) for little to even no money – if you are careful all you have to pay is shipping. Get yourself personal use postcards for mailing messages to friends, use return address labels with your website on them and put a linked signature line at the end of your everyday emails. The more familiar people are with your name and the title of you book, the more often they will recognize it as they are scrolling through an online catalogue or even look specifically for it.
A few points to consider while promoting yourself, people do not want to be bombarded with advertisements – if you are blogging, make your content interesting and more than just “buy my book” – post a tantalizing excerpt, do something creative like have a character talk about himself or the situation he is in or write about a totally different topic other than your book and tie it in to your story (ie: Focus on your town’s main street parade and tie it in to the small town reception that your hero might receive in your book). Using social networking to promote is give-and-take – you may believe you have the next blockbuster on your hands but you are not the only writer out there – show a SINCERE interest in the people you are socializing with, make sure to comment on their blogs and be mutually supportive of each other’s promo attempts. Always remember to thank someone if they do you a favor and help promote your title.
Writing Exercise: Choose any mundane task you’ve done in the past 24-hours and describe it from different points of view – 1st person (I went to the grocery store and bought milk…) and 3rd person (she rolled the shopping cart down the aisle stopping only to pick up a gallon of milk). Rewrite it, this time focusing on your thoughts and motivations (the milk was necessary because Johnny really enjoys his morning cereal). Have fun with this, maybe forgetting to replace the milk had caused a family argument and mention the conflict, etc.
Writing prompt: Choose any five random words from the dictionary or thesaurus; set your timer for 15 minutes and free-write. Make sure you use each word with its correct meaning.
Challenge assignment: Interview your main character; remember, YOU are asking the question and your CHARACTER is answering. Make sure you use the character's voice.
