The Deathwatch Dash

Nicola Morgan is today hoping to set the world record for the greatest number of separate school-talks given by one author in one day, by talking at six different schools about her latest book, Deathwatch.

I bet she wears gorgeous boots to do it in, too.

Good luck, Nicola. Remember to eat plenty of chocolate through the day, or even you might begin to fade.

Calling All Book Bloggers: Penguin Wants You!

Penguin's publicity department is keen to forge links with the blogging community and has planned a series of online events to work out how this can best be achieved.

If you'd like to take part in the discussions, here's a link. The next event is planned for the week of 20 April, which is next week: if you review books on your blog, or even discuss them, then email your views to Penguin now.

If you decide to take part I'd be grateful if you'd consider posting your emails to Penguin in the comments here. It should make for an interesting discussion.

Email Promotions

In the last five minutes I've received three emails from Bostick Communications offering me review copies of various books. According to its book press releases page, Bostick charges writers $175 to send out their press release to "our database of over 20,000 book reviewers, print, radio, television and internet media contacts". I wasn't aware that I was a contact of theirs: until I received these emails I'd never even heard of them before.

None of the books are in genres I read routinely: nevertheless I've requested review copies for my other blog but I suspect that the authors won't be too pleased with the reviews that they get. Not that I'll automatically give anyone a bad review: but if writers are naive enough to use services like this, then they're also unlikely to know their ARCs from their elbows. And that usually shows in the quality of the finished book.

Look: spamming is not a good way to sell or market your books. Most of the emails sent out get snagged by spam filters or deleted automatically; the few that get read do nothing to promote your book or your reputation. The books that get requested aren't usually asked for by people with any power to make a difference to your sales and at best they're considered a hit-and-miss way to get free books, as this thread over at Library Thing makes clear.

If you want to promote your books you need to target your promotions appropriately. By all means consider using a good publicist but please, don't pay for services like this: you won't see a corresponding return in your sales. The only money to be made in this instance is, I fear, all heading towards Bostick Communications, and not to the authors whose books are supposedly being promoted by them.



Edited to add: I have just received another email from Bostick in response to my request for review copies, which reads:

Where do you post your reviews? Thank you.

Shouldn't they have checked this out before they added my email address to their mailing lists? Or would checking out people on their list of "over 20,000 book reviewers, print, radio, television and internet media contacts" cut it down to a far less impressive number? I've emailed them a link to my review blog and suspect that the writers they represent won't want to be judged by my demanding criteria, and I don't suppose I'll hear from them again--unless they decide to send me more spam.

Bumping Up Your Sales

Suppose you’ve done everything right for your self-published book but your sales have fallen flat. How can you spark things off again and rejuvenate your order-book?

You could get yourself a mainstream publishing contract—although you’re unlikely to manage this unless you’ve sold a high number of copies already, in which case you’re not likely to need one.

You could marry George Clooney.

Or you could send out a press release, or another appropriate pitch, whenever you see an opportunity. You could offer to give talks, write articles, or run workshops; and news stories which bear some relation to your book provide all sorts of promotional opportunities. You can try just about anything, so long as you’re qualified, able and confident.

It’s unlikely that anyone would self-publish if they had a mainstream publishing contract on offer, and Miss Snark has assumed first dibs on Mr Clooney: but the third option is something that anyone could do.

Book Reviews

Imagine that you’re an influential book reviewer, and each week publishers send you boxes of their books in the hope that you’ll sprinkle some of your fairy-dust over one of their titles and write it a wonderful review. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

How do you think that book reviewers reach such an enviable position? By reading widely and then writing honest, informed responses to the books that they have read, so that their readers know that they can trust them.

When a trusted reviewer praises a book, many of their readers will go out and buy it right away. If they enjoy the book, they’re more likely to buy the next book that the reviewer recommends. However, when readers don’t enjoy books that they’ve bought as a result of a reviewer’s recommendation, not only are they likely to stop reading that reviewer’s work, they’re also likely to avoid any other books that the reviewer recommended.

Book reviewers can only react honestly about books when their opinions have no impact on their financial health: if they’re paid by newspapers or magazines then their reviews will generally be candid and reliable; but if they’re paid by a publisher or writer, their reviews will be written with their paycheque in mind because if they write a negative review, that publisher or writer is unlikely to hire them again.

So, if you want a book reviewer you can rely on, make sure they’re independent. And if you’re looking for people to review your work remember it’s not normal for reviews to be bought and sold. If they’re not free, they’re not worth the paper—or pixels—that they’re written on and no one with any sense will take them seriously.

Book Signings: Right And Wrong

Book signings are fraught with problems. I’m not convinced that they’re particularly useful promotional tools for anyone but the most celebrated of writers, but if you’re still keen to have a go here’s a cautionary tale from the luminous Jenna Glatzer, and a comprehensive guide to doing it right from J A Konrath.

The Levels of Promotion

Promotion can be carried out on several levels, and it’s well worth considering which of those levels is going to be the most effective when you have a book to promote.

If you meet someone in a supermarket queue and get chatting, there’s a chance they might ask you what you do for a living. If you tell them you’re a writer, there's then the chance that they might subsequently buy your book. There’s also a chance that you will irritate them quite wholeheartedly if you are too pushy: I read an account a few weeks ago of a vanity-published writer who was thrown out of a restaurant for attempting to sell copies of his book from table to table between courses.

If you give talks, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to sell copies of your book at the end of the event—just remember that if your talk isn’t particularly informative or amusing then you’re unlikely to sell many copies as your audience will assume that it is as dull as you are.

The very best form of promotion, though, is when you recruit people to act as your books advocate. How? By finding groups of people who have some connection with you, or your book’s theme; by giving them a witty, empathetic, and informative talk and engaging them in conversation in some way, so that they feel involved in the event and connected directly to you; and by making them realise how grateful you offer the opportunity they’ve given you.

Marketing Your Book: An Author's Guide

In an ideal world, every publisher would hand a copy of Alison Baverstock's Marketing Your Book to every single one of their authors.

It's written from the assumption that your book has been published by mainstream house: and this is its great strength. While most books on the subject are aimed at the self-published and ignore or try to discredit the techniques used by mainstream publishers, Alison Baverstock’s book shows exactly how the mainstream publishers promote their works and achieve sales figures that most self-published writers can only dream of.

This book gives clear, detailed advice on everything that writers can do to publicise their own books, and gives a lot of advice on what to avoid. Alison Baverstock has worked for years in book marketing and promotion, and it shows. If you've got a book to promote then you need to buy this one, no matter how you're published.

Marketing, Publicity, PR And Promotion

There’s a lot of confusion about what these terms mean. This is how I’ve always separated them, but others’ opinions may (and do!) differ.

Marketing is the paid-for stuff: the catalogues, magazine ads and trade ads which position a product in the market with the aim of telling trade buyers and end-users that the product exists and what it is.

Publicity encourages debate: it gets a product (in this case, a book or its author) written about in articles, discussed or interviewed on TV or radio, or otherwise talked about through user-groups like book clubs.

PR (public relations) centres around improving and enhancing the target group’s perception of a person, a business or a corporation. The target group whose perception is being enhanced is sometimes the general public but it will more often consist of a far more specific group such as a company’s shareholders before an AGM, or parents when a new baby milk or disposable nappy is launched.

Promotion usually involves more legwork than the other three: for a writer, it involves book signings, giving interviews, and giving talks to interested groups. It tends to be focused on smaller groups (unless you’re JK Rowling).

These categories all depend on each other to work their best: you can’t hope to maximise your sales if you neglect any one area. An author can’t carry out a book signing (promotion) without the bookshop knowing about the book (marketing), knowing that the author is available for a signing (publicity), and caring enough about her to consider inviting her in (PR).

Marketing And Publicity: What Really Works?

Literary agent Nathan Bransford recently opened his blog up to a handful of guest bloggers in order to explore the issues involved in effective book marketing. One of the guests he invited along was M J Rose, who contributed this post in which she discussed what marketing and publicity actually mean, what works and what doesn't, and what sort of money has to be spent on a book to achieve the sorts of sales that we dream about. It's worth reading because in just a few hundred words she clarifies what everything means and what all that activity achieves--even if we don't have the budget to do what she suggests.

A Successful Writer's View Of Self-Promotion

Victoria Strauss is one of those writers that we all wish we could be. Not only has she published umpteen best-selling books, she's also extremely well-regarded in the writing world for her tireless efforts in exposing publishing scams over at Writer Beware which she runs with Ann Crispin, another ridiculously successful writer.

Both Victoria and Ann regularly contribute to the forums at Absolute Write and while I was browsing there today I spotted this little gem from Victoria: it's not long, but it's a very useful analysis of book promotion, and just a few of the problems that writers with small publishers will face when trying to promote their work. While she wrote it in response to one particular publisher, the information she gives applies to them all. I hope it's useful.

The Myth That Publishers Don't Promote Any More

(I'm going to recycle one of my recent comments here: sorry for the rehash, but it's an important issue and one which is much misunderstood.)

Following my post Questions About Self-Publishing, a reader commented, "Another big myth is if an author sells his/her book to a publisher then the publisher will do all the promotion. This rarely happens."

He was almost right, but not quite. And that "not quite" makes a big difference.

Publishers don't allocate over-large promotional budgets to every single book that they publish; nor do they arrange book launches or signing tours for everyone. However, they do include every title that they publish in their catalogue, and it's this catalogue that their distributors' sales teams use as a sales tool when they visit bookshops.

Those sales teams visit every single bookshop in the country, as often as they can, to discuss new releases and hot titles. This is what gets books into bookshops; and consequently, books into people's homes.

Publishers also routinely send out advance review copies of every single title that they publish, to every appropriate publication that they can find, and to carefully-selected bookshops all over the country. Depending on the title they might send out 50 ARCs, or perhaps a few hundred: but this is something that very few self-publishers can afford to do, or have the mailing list and contacts to do effectively. And it's this that generates the most effective reviews, and gets booksellers motivated to promote certain books.

Even though publishers don't heavily promote every title, they are very effective at selling books. While it's true that publishers don't automatically spend big money promoting every single book that they publish, they do an awful lot to get them into bookshops: because bookshops are where most people buy their books, and where most books are sold.