Book Promotion and Book Publicity for Authors and Publishers
Here’s a question about book reviews that many self-published authors ask, sooner or later. “My book was recently published. How can I get attention for it? Specifically, I would like to get book reviews. Where do I begin?” Here’s how I would answer.
If the book is already published, then it’s too late to reach out for most traditional unpaid print book reviews. They require months of lead time. At one time, traditional book reviews were the only option. Now there are others.
While marketing books, authors and publishers often skip one of the key steps: creating a press release. They think, given the fact that we live in a Digital Age, press releases are obsolete. They do everything else they can think of to promote their book. But, for them, press releases seem to have fallen by the wayside.
Because the rules of self-publishing change almost from one minute to the next, it always surprises me to see how one self-publishes a book “this time.” I am pleased to say that I recently had the opportunity to run through the process again.
My new book, Getting Past Childhood Bullying: How Adults Can Recover From Trauma That Began at School, is now available as a trade paperback and as an ebook. My publishing company is called BPT Press and, you’ll notice, I use my own ISBN for the print book but not for the ebook.
I”ll bet you have terrific digital content, and that you are using it to develop and maintain your platform. You’re on the right marketing track!
Digital content can include your blogs, guest blogs, articles, social media posts, interviews, podcasts, videos, or press releases. What you create must be top quality. It should convey your messages accurately, persuasively, and credibly.
If your digital content does all that, the next question is this. When was the last time you added to it?
Have you been told you have to develop a platform so that you can promote your book? What is content management, anyway? And what does all of that have to do with book marketing?
You may be a thought leader who intuitively understands how it all fits together. Perhaps platform development is something you’ve built into your book publicity plans.
But if you are like many authors, the phrase “platform building” can be bewildering. What is a platform, and where do you begin to create one?
Frequently, I hear from authors who can’t afford to hire a book publicist. Still, they hope to get some advice about book promotion.
Recently, a book promotion client realized he was putting a lot of thought, time, and effort into writing blogs. He knows his blogs are inspirational, and he enjoys writing them. So he asked me, “Can you pitch my blog to newspapers?” Specifically, he was inquiring about whether or not one of his blogs could be published in major newspapers as an op-ed.
My answer was that, yes, I could pitch some of his blogs as op-eds to newspapers. It would require some editing, though.
As a book publicist, I’ve booked hundreds, if not thousands, of interviews for authors over the years. Like all book publicists, I have my war stories — you know, the stories about interviews that may seem funny now, but that reduced me to tears at the time.
I really want my clients’ book promotion campaigns to succeed, and when authors make rookie mistakes during interviews, it’s tough for me to see (or hear, read, etc.). So, authors, I’m about to share with you some of this book publicist’s advice about mistakes authors make with interviews — and how to avoid them — to maximize your chances of book promotion success.
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.