By Stacey J. Miller, Book Publicist
S. J. Miller Communications
[email protected]
Whether your book marketing project involves ebook promotion or traditional book publicity, there’s one strategy you’ll want to employ. That’s tapping into your alumni network. Your college alumni network or even your high school alumni network can be persuaded to help you in your book discovery efforts even more easily than the media can. That’s reasonable when you consider the fact that your book marketing successes reflect favorably upon your college, university, or high school. Your positive book publicity is the schools’ positive publicity, and when you’re acting as a publicist for an author — yourself — you’re also acting as a publicist for your alma mater.
For example, as a proud Emerson College alumna (class of 1981, thank you very much!)< I was please to note a wonderful item on Emerson College’s web site this morning.
An Associate Professor at Emerson College (in Boston, Massachusetts), Megan Marshall won a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Emerson College let its alumni network know about the professor’s win, and now each member of that network will tell potential book buyers. (Some of us will even blog about it and post a link to the article and the book!) Emerson College looks good, Emerson College’s alumni network feels good, and Megan Marshall enjoys even more book publicity for her already widely-recognized (and deservedly so) book.
You don’t have to win a Pulitzer Prize to persuade your alumni network to put its publicity efforts to work for you. Your book marketing wins are their PR successes, as well. So let your alumni network know about your eBook or your traditional book, and let the book marketing payoffs begin!