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

A good friend of mine, Stephanie Chandler, is holding a teleclass tomorrow entitled:

Build Your Online Marketing Plan for Authors

This class is based on methods in Stephanie Chandler’s newest book: The Author’s Guide to Building an Online Platform: Leveraging the Internet to Sell More Books.  Stephanie is a great resource and always over delivers …. if you want to get a ton of info about getting started - or advancing - your online marketing skills for book promotion at a very reasonable price, check out this event:

http://author-teleclass.eventbrite.com/

Yeah … Ok.. that WAS a bit of the ‘man bites dog’ type title.

Yeah? So what? It’s my blog anyway. The new policy and approach part is true though. Sorry to disappoint you budding first time authors who belong to greenpeace. You were probably thinking you really found something.

Rule 1: Dont write stuff in your blog that you can find elsewhere on the Internet. A few posts ago, I went on and on about amazon.com bestseller campaigns. You can learn about that elsewhere. The WHOLE point of this blog is to let you in on what I am doing and the results a real live normal guy (OK .. that may be a push) is experiencing in book promotion. After all, most blogs are a bunch of mental masturbation anyway … all of us typing away for our own self aggrandizement.

NEver has so much been written by so many and read by so few …

Rule 2: At the beginning of the blog, I will put in the one or two sentence summary of just what exactly is useful about the blog you are about to read. That way, once I get all enamored with my own verbal blathering, you can bail out having got the important stuff right off the top.

Unless you are heading off to somewhere useless (the odds are good for that) and then you might as well read what I have to say. I’m not boring.

Sound good? OK … we’ll start with the next entry

Premise: Radio interviews are a good way to drum up book sales, promote yourself and your other products and services.

The Radio & Television Interview Report is a ~70 page brochure of ads from authors and others that is subscribed to by radio and television show producers. It is recommended by many people (Kremer and Poynter for example) and was used by Robert Kiyosaki to help launch Rich Dad Poor Dad and Canfield and Hansen when they were getting the word out about Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Problem is, it’s expensive. Maybe not in the BIG world of advertising but in the small world of my budget, $1000 or more is a lot. So, what I did was email to everyone who was listed in the issue of RTIR that was sent to me as a part of the promo package. I asked everyone if they thought it was worth doing. The issue was from last November so they have had plenty of time to have an opinion if the investment was worth it.

Almost half of the people responded within 24 hours (an amazing % actually). And guess what? I got so many good ideas from the responses I received …. it overshadowed my original objectives. I was even offered a slot on a couple of internet radio shows hosted by the folks I sent inquires to. (This goes into the category of things that I come up with on my own that I will call a Great New Idea.)

As far as the verdict on using RTIR, it was shaded to the positive although some people thought it was a complete waste of money. I would take that with a grain of salt as some of the books and ideas that are promoted in RTIR are crap (it seems that the magazine will not turn down money from people who have a lousy product, although they will work with you to put your ad together).

More on this later if I actually go ahead and do this to promote The Wealth Manifesto.