Book Promotion and Book Publicity for Authors and Publishers
Authors and publishers can give their book promotion campaigns a great boost from media exposure. The best way for authors to get media coverage is to offer themselves as an interviewee for radio and TV shows, podcasts, newspapers, magazines, blogs, online news sites, newsletters, and the like. If you’re an author who hasn’t booked interviews before, or even if you are an author who has experience in doing media interviews, here are some tips for getting even more interview opportunities:
For authors and publishers, the best time to get excited about a telephone radio interview is after the radio interview has aired. Yes, it’s wonderful when your wish to appear on a radio show by telephone turns into an invitation. But until the radio interview actually airs, a radio interview is still only a hope. There are so many things that can go wrong with a telephone radio interview, and most of those problems with radio interviews happen right at the beginning — when you schedule the radio show.
Book promotion brilliance is a privilege to see and experience. What is book promotion brilliance? That is my phrase for great marketing ideas that I sometimes come across, suddenly and powerfully. I stumbled across one such brilliant book promotion example this morning.
Well, I say that I stumbled across a brilliant book promotion example. Actually, I was handed a great example of book publicity by a forever (and ever and ever) friend, Paul Amirault (more about the forever and ever and ever part later).
Cindy, a fellow publicist and good friend, recently asked me, “Do you ever use a news clipping service? I recently did an article marketing campaign for a corporate client, and I’d love to track all of the pickups the article has received. But they don’t always pop up in Google alerts.”
It was an interesting question. Cindy the publicist handles corporate clients and not members of the book publishing community, but there is some overlap between what we do. She knows that, as a book publicist, I frequently conduct book promotion campaigns that include print media outreach as well as strategic article marketing.
If you’re like most authors, you’ve probably figured out how to use Google Analytics, or whatever metrics your web site host or blog host offers to determine how many readers have viewed your web site or blog. That’s important, because the amount of traffic you’re getting helps determine how effectively your efforts to increase your reader base are working.
Would you like to enhance your reader base? Indie authors and publishers have long used book publicity to accomplish a variety of worthy goals, whether it’s to turn their book into a calling card; to build brand; to gain recognition and prestige; to persuade or inform a target audience; or to simply increase their readership.
In other words, although book promotion can be a part of an indie author’s overall marketing strategy, sometimes an author or publisher has a far more straightforward goal: to enhance their readership base.
How much advance book promotion do you really need? Can you allot too much lead time and too much of your resources to advance book publicity?
The time to begin a book promotion campaign is before the book’s publication. Every author and publisher knows that. But this is where confusion can set in.
For new authors and publishers, it can be confusing to know how long before publication a book promotion campaign should begin. How would you know how much time and money you should invest in advance book publicity?
I’ll admit to being a fan of technology in general, and I especially like to keep up with technology for writers and publishers. As I come across new tools that might interest authors and publishers, I’ll share them with you.
On a friend’s recommendation, I decided to check out Scrivener. The friend who told me about Scrivener is an indie author who had heard about the writing and publishing software but hadn’t yet tried it. So I decided to be the guinea pig. I bought Scrivener, registered it, and watched a couple of the quick-start video tutorials. That all set me back about 30 minutes and 40 dollars.