Promoting Your Book - A No BS Guide For Authors and Small Publishers

There are a lot of different ways to get book reviews. For my book The Wealth Manifesto, I have tried several different routes to date. I’ll talk about one of them here and others in subsequent postings.

Pre-Publication Reviews - These are the big industry book review places that can, if you happen to get a review, provide you with a lot of coverage and a bit of cache … just for the fact that you were reviewed. You have to send in galleys (or in some cases, a finished book in lieu of galleys) three, four or more months before the publication date or they wont even look at your book - if it’s already published, it goes straight in the trash can from what I have read.

The Big Dogs in this category are typically considered to be Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, Library Journal, ALA Booklist, Quality Books Inc., Foreward Magazine, New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times Book Review (this list is largely from Dan Poynters industry standard The Self-Publishing Manual).

I didn’t send copies to Kirkus Review or the New York Times Book Review as their online guidelines specifically say “No Self-Help” which my book could be classified as.

For all the others, I sent review copies in 14 weeks before my pub date. I have made follow up inquiries via email to all of them. To date, I received an email reply from Library Journal saying ’sorry, The Wealth Manifesto was not selected. I also received a form letter from Quality Books Inc.s letting me know that “unfortunately, they must decline to stock the title.” I have been ignored completely by everyone else.

Mind you, my book is not some fringe fiction monument to my ego or cookbook or hamster recipes. I have a decent book: good title, good cover, timely useful info that appeals to several broad demographics.

Bottom line: if you are self-publishing or are a very small press, I would skip this whole process entirely and put your energy and money into other review possibilities (such as was mentioned in the amazon.com Top Reviewers post and other methods I will cover in subsequent post).

If you are a non-fiction book writer, you by definition must also learn to be a public speaker. The marketing combination of the two is incredibly powerful. If you are more of a speaker, a book gives you credibility, gives the impression that you are an expert (the more niche your book, the more of an expert you are likely to be), and gives you something else to sell besides your speaking services.

If you are more of an author, speaking will help you sell books. Then you can get into other info products such as audio recordings, DVD, workbooks, etc. The list goes on and on. There is a ton of info out there on this so I am not going to repeat it here, A friend of mine, Stephanie Chandler, has a book called “From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur” which talks a lot about creating information products. Good book, easy to read and a great place to start.

As a made up word, I dont have any trouble with ‘infopreneur’. I think that Robert Allen came up with it in the latter part of the 1990s as the info revolution was gaining steam through the emergence of the Internet. Some people take that (some noun)-preneur thing a little too far. Sam Horn who has an awesome book called Pop! which is about creating memorable branding for your business or books or whatever. She has been credited with creating the word ‘authorpreneur’.

I know I dont want to be called an authorpreneur. Entrepreneurs who write books and do others things to leverage their original content (i.e., speaking, creating audios, etc.) dont need their own word: they are called entrepreneurs.

EVERYONE should be more entrepreneurial in the future anyway. No one else is going to look out for you.

Later…

I first noticed this strategy in Steve Weber’s Plug Your Book.

Send copies of your book to the top reviewers on amazon.com. You can find the list here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/top-reviewers.html

The first thing I noticed is that you need to look at what kind of things the reviewers review. The first person on the list, Harriet Klausner with 16379 reviews (yes, that’s right) only does novels and most of them are the romance, mass market variety. The second person on the list only reviews DVD.

And so on.

So, I will work my way down the list and see who handles non-fiction, personal growth, self help, entrepreneurship type books such as The Wealth Manifesto. And I will let them know they were selected for a reason. Everyone likes to feel special - it’s human nature. And in my best interests.

I’m going to go through the list and shoot for 10 requests per day until I get to through the top 100. I’ll include their names here as things evolve and will let you know how it turns out.

Hi, Mark T. Rafter here. I am an author and publisher of information products. I just finished my first book The Wealth Manifesto: Transforming Your Life from Survive to Thrive and am in the first phase of marketing and promotion.  Also in the beginning of planning my publishing empire.

So, I thought I would share. There is SO much info out there on what you should and could be doing to promote your book, I thought I would put something together that was a real guy (that’s me) actually implementing some subset of the advice that all the pundits are recommending.

I will pull no punches, not show favoritism, tell it like it is … like the title says … NO BS.

This is happening in real time. I have some catching up to do but I will be doing some kind of promotion activity nearly everyday and certainly multiple activities on many days. I will post it here for 2 reasons. One was already mentioned - I think it will be useful for people to see what one (reasonably resourceful) person is REALLY doing and the results that are achieved.  There are more ideas out there than any one person can do so I would love it too when people start commenting and adding their lessons learned to what I have experienced.

The other reason was that I found myself making tons of notes about who I sent books to, what I was waiting for from this person or that service. This was to know what I did this time so I could be repeating it for the next book (and the next and the next etc.)

I start with where I am now (what has been done, what I was thinking about during the last year when the book was written and the promotion begun.  Then I’ll do the individual things completed to date (I’ll catch up on that quickly) and then you will get the blow by blow … everyday in the trenches and what is really happening.

Hope you enjoy it.