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

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.