Category: Reading and Books

So far in our series, we've discussed how best to describe your book in an airtight sentence and who your first group of readers will be. This week, we're going to pull back a bit .

Imagine that you're in the weeks and months right before your book is published. What’s the best way to get ready for the big day? How much time will it take and what needs doing? All of these questions are part of the answer to the one that keeps authors awake at night when they have a new book on the horizon.

How ready would you like to feel?

When entertaining guests, we clean the house and stock the icebox. Before a trip, we pack a suitcase and notify the neighbors. We do this because the best antidote for fear of the unexpected is readiness. Just as you won't be a good host if you don't plan for your guest's arrival, you'll be a lousy spokesperson for your book if you don't get ready before its due date. Put more simply…

In order to best promote your book, make sure your own house is in order.

Anyone who has thrown a party knows that readiness does not mean scurrying about when the doorbell rings. Preparing to promote one's book requires time and effort in advance of the publication day. The normal amount of prep time needed for book promotion is 3-6 months. For what? you might cry with surprise. I'm about to tell you. And before you think I'm being excessive, think of how long it took you to write your book. Do you want to skimp on your efforts now, right before it’s time for your book to find its readers?

How do you get ready? I break it down into three parts: 1) your calendar 2) your team 3) your online presence

Your Calendar: Clear it.

A diligent and thoughtful promotion effort takes three to six months of preparation and at least that much once the book is published. So to give your book both a fighting chance, we're talking about a year. Sometimes it's more. A lot less and your book will suffer.

We both know life won't stop because you've got a book coming. So while it'd be unreasonable for me to say “clear a year on your calendar,” it's also smart not to actively court major life changes during this crucial time.

That may sound like an obvious warning, but after a decade in publishing, I’m still amazed by how often authors decide that the weeks and months leading up to their book's publication are exactly the right time to get married, have a baby, buy a house, change jobs, schedule major surgery, join the circus, etc.

Now is not the time for any of those things. Promoting your book, if done properly, will be at least a part-time job—more, if all goes well. And you want to be available for more interviews, more events, more everything should your book start to find its readers.

Promoting your book will be plenty hard. Don't let your schedule stand in the way of your success.

Your Team: Talk to it.

We may write alone, but most do not live that way. Even though book promotion requires substantial time and energy, our families, friends, and coworkers will not vanish and let us devote ourselves fully to it.

But they can help, and will, if you ask. Three to six months before pub date is the time to start communicating with the key players in your life. Let your job know that you might need to take some days off or start socking away vacation time. Enlist your spouse and family to help out and reward them afterward with the vacation you will have to postpone now. (I once worked with an author who had scheduled a three-week no-Internet-access vacation for the week after her publication day. Guess how well her book sold?) As we discussed last week, your friends are your best allies. Now is the time to start prepping them for what lies ahead. And what lies ahead for you may be travel, late night events, extra hours at your laptop, radio interviews at 5 AM.

And that’s if you’re promoting well.

Most importantly, if you are working with a publisher and/or a publicist, three to six months is the time to open lines of communication. A short, thoughtful email (four to six lines) to your editor saying you'd like to be introduced to your publicist is perfectly appropriate. If you won't have a publicist, that same email is meant to clarify with your publisher who has what marketing responsibilities. Are they handling pitching reviewers and mailing galleys, or are you? Who is scheduling events? The answers vary but they will never be "sit still, we'll take care of it." You will be working. Now is the time to get clear on what and how much.

A word here about manners. Your publisher and/or publicist is a skilled professional with a demanding job. Yours is likely not the only book they are handling. Now is the time to state that you trust their judgment and are ready to be a hard working member of the team. “Put me to work!” your communication should convey. This is not the time for demands, blurted expectations, or “I won't dos."  Rudeness or rigidity will sour your publisher on you and your book. And do you really want to do that to your book before it’s even been published?

Your Online Presence: Build it.

You will need an author website. A website takes time and money. Three to six months before pub date is a good time to start.

An ideal author's website will be professionally designed (that means by someone who designs websites for a living, not your neice between homework and band practice) and will cost between $500-$1000. The domain name should be yourname.com or yournamewriter.com if you have a common name. Remember, the Internet is a big, unruly place. You want it to be as easy as possible for you and your book to be found.

A quality author website will contain pages for your biography, your book, news/events/happenings related to your promotional efforts, and a contact page with your email and that of your publicist. That’s all you need. With writers’ websites, less is often more. Music, animation, or a lot of fancy graphics are a distracting waste and come off as desperate. Your website should focus on conveying the most useful information to a prospective reader as quickly as possible

To find a good website designer, visit the websites of authors you respect who have new books coming out. A clear, simple, dignified website was designed by someone good. Their email will be at the bottom of the page. Contact two or three designers and see how you get along. A good designer will answer your questions promptly and with patience and clarity. A lousy designer will be short, thoughtless, tardy, or will not listen. Don't give them your money, no matter how pretty talented they seem.

Should you set up a blog? A Facebook page? A Twitter account?

Can you maintain it? A blog is a continuously updated set of short writings. A Twitter account is a continuous stream of 140 characters updated several times a day. Do these sound like tasks you'd be willing to maintain for the duration of the promotion process? Because a poorly maintained blog/Twitter/Facebook page is worse than none at all.

We'll be discussing which technologies to use on the marketing trail in a future segment. For now, three to six months is the time to start learning about these basic social media tools. Ask a friend or another author who uses them well to walk you through. Or just do a Google search on “How do I use Twitter to promote my book?” These are called “social media” for a reason. How to use them is not a state secret.

Exercise: It’s three to six months before your book is going to be published. Begin clearing your calendar, assembling your team, and researching your website and social media tools. Then tell us in the comment section how it's going.

Next week: Why book promotion is all about good manners

 

In our last segment, we talked about how you, the author, must develop an airtight answer to the first question anyone you meet on the book promotion trail will ask you:

"Tell me about your book."

In this segment, we're going to discuss whom will be doing the asking. If book promotion is an act of matchmaking your book to the right readers, today’s segment is about how to find those "right readers." The answer, you'll see, is a lot closer to home than you think.

Everyone knows somebody. And by "somebody" I don't mean Oprah or John Stewart or the Bestseller Fairy. I mean the circles of humanity we all have in our lives. Those circles are the first 75-100 readers of your book. They have the potential to be much greater if you ask them to be then work with them to make it happen

As an author who spends much of their time at the keyboard or in their imagination, it may not seem like your world is teeming with allies. But it is. Try this.

Make a list of:

• Your friends and family members, the ones who will say "I'll buy that" when you tell them you've got a book.

• Your colleagues at work. Same criteria.

• Anyone you are friendly with via your kids. Again, same criteria.

• Friendly faces through hobbies and community work—at the ski club, dance class, church, neighborhood association.

• Old friends from childhood, high school, or college.

• Anyone you talk with regularly via social media (Facebook, Twitter or the like).

Unless you're a hermit or just not very nice (I'm afraid I can't help you there), you've probably got a good list of several dozen names. These names are where you begin.

Let's take another look at that list and ask these questions.

• Who on this list works for or knows someone well at the local media (newspaper, TV, radio)?

• Who leads a social group (book group, synagogue committee, monthly dinner with friends) or professional association that would like to have an author as the meeting's entertainment?

• Who on this list has a blog, an active and well-read Twitter feed, runs an email mailing list, or has more than 300 friends on Facebook?

• Who is a natural-born host who would love to throw you a book party?

• Who knows someone in another part of the country whom would do any of these things for you as well?

Separate out that smaller list. Three months before your book becomes available, get in touch. Thank them for their support, their friendship. Tell them you've spend a goodly part of the last year or two writing this book and it means the world to you. It would mean the world all over again if you could enlist their help in matchmaking your book with the right readers via one of the means described above—if they could talk about/recommend your book in a way that's comfortable to them.

You're not asking List A to spam or make nuisances of themselves on behalf of your book. You're asking to speak with sincerity and an open heart about the creative project of someone they like—you. Handled with honesty and grace, no one will hold it against them.

Those who don't make the cut should get a separate email after the book comes out asking them to buy it. Because it would mean the world to you. And remember what we learned in the last segment about talking about your book. Succinct, precise, but leave a little to the imagination

Book promotion is a block party. If you're lucky, the party is thrown by someone else (the New York Times, your well-paid publicist, Oprah) and you just show up. You don't even have to bring potato salad. But that's simply not the case for most writers, and everyone knows that. Which is why most publishers, publicists, booksellers and members of the media will be most impressed by the effort you put in yourself, by your willingness to bring what you have to the party, or to throw it yourself.

I know perhaps you are shy and it’s no fun to ask for favors. This is the time to get over it. If you can't ask the people closest to you to invest in your book, how do you expect complete strangers to invest their time and money in reading it?

Why do this? Because effort breeds effort and work begets work. You want readers. You have to begin with the most obvious candidates. Starting there means a) at least you have someone interested in your book, and b) the more excited you can get those readers (who know you and are predisposed to support your efforts) about being part of the block party that is the promotion of your book, the more likely they'll be to invite others.

An author friend of ours once spoke to 175 book clubs over a year's worth of promotion for his second novel. Why, I asked, when he had a wife, two young children and a day job as a professor, not to mention writing a third book, to return to?

"I wanted to be the one responsible for my book's success or failure. I figured as long as I kept the water running, the bathtub would eventually fill up. If it didn't, it wasn't anyone's fault but mine."

Exercise: Make a list of everyone in your life who wishes you and your writing career well. Separate that list into two groups: Group A, those that know someone, head up a group or would be willing to help in a larger way; and Group B, those you just want to buy the book.

 

Today BookTour launches a ten-part series on Book Promotion called "Everything you Wanted to Know about Book Promotion but were Afraid to Ask" written by CEO Kevin Smokler. Kevin has been advising authors and publishers on marketing and promotion for nearly a decade and has written and lectured on the topic throughout North America.

Part I: Tell Me About Your Book.

So you've written a book. Hooray! That's a huge accomplishment. Be proud, tell all your friends, do a silly dance and take yourself to dinner. You deserve it all.

But easy on the champagne there, partner. The work isn't over yet. Writing a book is one thing. Getting people to read it is entirely different, as big an undertaking as writing it in the first place. So congratulations on finishing something huge. Now take a deep breath and get ready for Something Huge The Sequel: Promoting Your Book.

A book can't get read if readers don't know about it. It's your job as the author to make that introduction. At its bones, that's what book promotion is. Matchmaking between your book and the right readers for it. It doesn't take a lot of money or Oprah's home phone number. But it will take take preparation, time, smarts, and creativity, the exact skills you brought to writing your book. Which tells me you can do it.

There was a time (in the age of stone tablets and loincloths) where you, the author, didn't have to promote. It was your publishers responsibility to get your book its readers and you, having finished one book, took a deep breath, then started another. But that was a long time ago and let's not dwell on it. It won't come back in fashion any faster than the horse-drawn plow.

So how do you introduce your book to the right reader? We're all familiar with the obvious ways to find out about new books. The front table at your local bookstore, a primo interview on NPR, The Daily Show. But every other author in the known universe knows about them too and how many readers they reach. As such, those opportunities are winning lottery tickets, once in a life timers. They aren't smart planning, any more than "I'll strike oil in the backyard!" is smart planning for your kids tuition money.

How do you introduce your book to the right reader? That's what this series is about. We're going to travel together chronologically though the process, meaning that the essay you're reading now is the very first you'll do, next week's will be the second thing and so on. Each part is designed to make you as smart and nimble with your career as you are with your prose.

Let's go.

"Tell me about your book."

The entire story of book promotion begins with that phrase. Without a good answer to it, you the author are trying to grow flowers without soil. Nothing else in book promotion happens without that answer. A good answer to "tell me about your book" is "Once Upon A Time…"

A lot of people are going to ask you "tell them about your book." Here's a short list…

• Booksellers who need to know what shelf it goes on at their store.
• Members of the media who what to know what they are covering.
• Readers need to know why your book should be read before the 15 others currently piled on their nighttable.

They all need an answer and they need it fast. These are busy people and there are several dozen authors in line behind you who want their attention.

"Tell me about your book"

You're the author. You know the story of your book better than anyone. Nonetheless I'm amazed how many authors break out in sweat when asked that. The answer then comes out something like this….

My book is a mystery novel, set in Seattle, 409 pages long with a main character named Sally Ann. She has a boyfriend who plays baseball and a dog. I thought about not giving her a dog because how would she solve crimes if she always had to go home to walk Woof Woof? I didn't want to name the dog Woof Woof. The dog's name was originally Thurston Terwillager and wait, did I mention Sally Ann, my main character's favorite food is anchovies? Anchovies are very important to the story and…

Still listening? I'm not. We're six sentences into "tell me about your book" and I still don't know what's about. I've already moved on to the author in line behind you.

If book promotion is matchmaking between your book and everyone who you want to know about it, "tell me about your book," is the first date. And nobody wants to be on a first date with a motormouth who can't keep their thoughts straight. If you WROTE the book and can't say, with confidence, what it's about, is there any point to continuing the conversation? All I'm thinking is "If this author writes as badly as they explain…"

I know you've worked on this book for two years and want to talk about everything in it. But it isn't time for "everything." You're on a first date. You goal is to get a second date.

When someone says "Tell me about your book" here's what are actually asking you…

• Tell me what category your book fits in–mystery, memoir, poetry, romance etc.. This gives me a frame of reference.
• Tell about what happens.
• Tell me just enough about your book so that I'm left curious. Tell me too much and why do need to read it?
• Tell me about your book in 20 seconds or less. After that, I'll stop paying attention.

Your answer therefore has to accomplish a lot in not much time. Sounds hard, I know. But let's try it with our friend Sally Ann.

My book is a mystery novel, set in Seattle, about a detective named Sally Ann framed for murder, when her dog Woof Woof finds the body of her boyfriend, A Seattle Mariner Shortstop on her front lawn.

I want to read more, don't you? What happened to her boyfriend? How does Sally Ann solve his murder? Who framed her? Is Woof Woof crucial to the mystery?

Where can I buy this book right now and find out?

Every great book summary has these 3 parts

1. A category ("mystery novel")
2. Parameters aka what happens and what is the reader getting themselves into ("Seattle", "a detective" "a dead boyfriend")
3. Something left to the imagination (a dead body, a framed main character)

More is noise. And on the first date, you need to speak loud and clear. Noise makes me plug my ears and run away.

Assume this: Everyone who wants to hear about your book is yes, busy but also dying to get hooked into a great story. Or else why would they be interested in books in the first place?

Don't stand in their way. A confusing, messy summary leads to a confused frustrated conversation about your book that no one–not media, bookseller, reader–will want to have. They've just lost interest and haven't even picked up the book yet.

A great summary does the opposite. It sharpens, clarifies and focuses your efforts. A great book summary helps whomever your talking gauge their interest quickly and decide if they want to hear more, have a second date.

No book is for everyone (The editor of Men's Health is not going to write about "Twilight" no matter how many millions of copies it sold. His readers are not "Twilight" readers) and the sooner you know who yours are, the less time you will waste in promoting your book to readers whose interests lie elsewhere. It doesn't matter what happens in chapter 9 of your military biography. Your book is not for a radio show aimed at teenage girls.

A good summary clarifies that immediately. For you and the reader.

"Tell me about your book." A good answer is difficult but vital. Without "once upon a time" why would anyone continue reading? If you can't begin the conversation about your book, who else will have it?

In the next chapter, we'll be talking about who exactly you you be promoting your book to.

Excerise: Using the "Rule of Three Parts" (category, parameter, imagination), come up with a great answer to the question "Tell me about Your Book"

Next Week: "It's Whom You Know. And Every Author Knows Somebody."