Book Promotion and Book Publicity for Authors and Publishers
As a book publicist, editor, and writer who has been part of the book publishing world for nearly three decades, I have been proud to work with authors and publishers who have traditionally published books. I’ve seen (and experienced) the thrill of seeing a traditional publishing company’s imprint on a book. It’s wonderful when a brand name publisher validates your work by accepting your book and investing in its publication.
Did you know that there’s a new book about the college admissions scandal? There is. I know, because I wrote and published it. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, we can manifest a book almost as quickly as we can conceptualize and write it. A book can emerge from our thoughts onto its own Amazon page within a few days.
My latest book did just that.
As soon as Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman, and other Hollywood celebrities emerged as the part of the college admissions scandal (code named Operation Varsity Blues), my imagination was fully engaged. I decided to see how the felines of Cattywood might deal with their own college emissions scandal.
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.
Independent authors: what’s your Plan B if Amazon fails?
Once upon a time, it hardly mattered to authors and publishers if one book printer or book distributor or bookstore failed. There were so many others that nobody would miss it all that much.
But now we have independent authors and small publishers that rely solely on Amazon’s ecosystem (through CreateSpace and KDP) to publish, print, and distribute their books. Need a book cover for your printed book? You can use Amazon’s Cover Creator to design one. Need a cover for your ebook? You’re in luck; Amazon has a Cover Creator tool for your Kindle ebook, too. The only hitch is that, once you’ve used Cover Creator to create the cover, Amazon owns that cover. You can’t take it with you — if, for example, you wanted to bring your book to iUniverse, Lulu, or IngramSpark, or even to a traditional offset printing company.
An author emailed me today to ask a very reasonable question:
How many books will I sell if I invest $10,000 in a book promotion campaign?
I wish I had a reasonable, pithy response. Unfortunately, the best that I could do was to send him the following reply:
It’s very hard to equate dollars spent on book promotion with book sales. Here are the challenges inherent in even taking a guess.