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

Blog Post Summary - This has nothing to do with Promoting Your Books.  This is the occasional soap box rant that I shall take advantage of through my exposure to the vast swarms of readers I have out there.  Then I will write today’s blog on RTIR.  If you dont like ranting (via a very astute historical juxtaposition), dont read any further.

Does anyone recall what is going on in The War?  Or more accurately, The Wars, since there are two of them happening right now that involve the US of A.  Could be they are sharpening their smart bombs for Iran too but it does not count as a third war just yet.

It’s The Economy Stupid has taken over everyone’s consciousness and the coverage of what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan has taken a deep left field bleacher seat in terms of news coverage.  This is part of the danger … an ongoing cost that goes on indefinitely while we electronically print money, piling up debt that will be passed on to future generations.  This is not what got me ticked off enough to write this.

Does this sound familiar:

“We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the government of (the country we are occupying) for the complete withdrawal of all US ground combat forces.  As the forces of (the country we are occupying) become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.  I have not and do not intend to announce a timetable to our program.”

Just pop the word “Iraq” in there for (the country we are occupying) and you have Curious George W Bush’s oft repeated milque-toasty platitude about troop withdrawals for most of 2007.

But guess what?  This is not a quote from Dubya.  Nope my friends, this is nobody other than our dearly departed and disgraced Chief Executive Richard M. Nixon speaking about Vietnam on November 3, 1969.

Anyone that totally dismisses the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq is doing too much meth.

And why are we in Iraq?  Just about anyone with a brain at this point figures it has something to do with oil, which is of course, one of the big issues with the economy.  So if we are concerning ourselves with the economy we are KINDA thinking about the war.

Or something like that.

These are scary times my friends.

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).