Writing and Publishing News from

How often do you have an opportunity to promote your book or your upcoming book and you don’t take it? Last night I had the pleasure of working with two dozen or so writers and authors under most unusual circumstances. I’m at the Cat Writers Association conference in Los Angeles today. This organization receives a whole lot of support and attention from companies that sell items for and about cats—nutritional products, toys, treats, magazines, calendars and so forth. Not only do they support this organization financially, but they send boxes and boxes and boxes of their product samples to be given away at the conference.

So on the night before the conference, volunteers (that is speakers, attendees, organizers) gather and fill goodie bags with all of these items for conference attendees.

Generally, I travel to New York for this event and I arrive too late to participate. This year, the conference is in my backyard, so I arrived early enough to join in. What great fun! I met friends from past years and many new cat writers. They refer to members who are attending for the first time as, “kittens.” Cute!

After the work was completed last night, we sat in a circle, shared some veggies, fruits and cheeses and introduced ourselves to the group—talking about our work and, of course, our cats. What a nice moment. And it was a great opportunity—one of those unexpected marketing moments. How cool is that?

As authors, we must be prepared for such moments. I don’t suggest that you necessarily always have the hard-sell thing going on. Not everyone can pull it off well. I’ve met people who can. Most who do it annoy me. But you certainly can mention that you are an author and introduce your latest book. Only one woman, last night—and it wasn’t me—had the foresight to bring a copy of her latest book to hold up during introductions. I guess she’s been involved in the goodie bag stuffing party before.

After the introduction session, came socializing and networking. I noticed people gravitating toward those with interesting stories—backgrounds or work they wanted to know more about. I heard, “Oh, congratulations on your new book, can I see it?” “I write about black cats, too—have you heard of such and such magazine?” “I’d like to know more about that resource you mentioned.”

You’ve heard/read me suggest that you carry your book with you everywhere you go—that you collect business cards—that you have interesting materials of your own to hand out. In other words, always be prepared when one of these great opportunities arise.

Secrets From Novelists
I’m excited about my planned series of blog posts for all next week, where I interview novelists at various stages of publishing and success about their techniques and approach to their stories. I’ve received most of the interviews back and I can tell you, these are going to energize and inspire you in ways you can’t even imagine, yet.

To give you a sneak peek into who will be featured—Wendy Dager, Raven West, Hope Clark, Margaret Brownley and Kathleen Ewing.

The interviews run all next week—November 5-9, 2012.

My new book is up at my website. If you have a book to promote, please do yourself a favor and order it. It’s Talk Up Your Book (Allworth Press) 300 pages, $19.95. http://www.matilijapress.com/TalkUpYourBook.html

Speaking of book promotion, an interesting story came across my desk yesterday. It seems that a publisher was interested in producing an anthology of stories from members of a particular writers group. The publisher had already published some of these members’ stories, however. And, since no one seemed interested in promoting their work (sales were dismal), the publisher decided not to go ahead as planned. This group of authors lost out on an opportunity because they did not promote their work.

Promotion is such a very different animal than most hopeful authors realize. Some of them don’t understand that promotion is part of the publishing game. They aren’t aware that, along with writing for publication, comes the HUGE responsibility of promotion and marketing. While most authors hear this and read it many times throughout the process of writing their books, they either don’t believe it, choose to ignore it or think that their situation is different—somehow special.

And then there are those people who just don’t know how to go about promoting a book outside of telling a few friends about it.

Many authors go right back to work writing another book after producing one. These authors are probably the worst promoters. What would you rather do, sit at your computer and write or go out and beg people to buy your already published book?

It doesn’t take an author long to realize that just reminding friends and twitter/facebook/discussion group followers to buy your book isn’t enough. In order to sell numbers of books, authors must launch a plan—organize projects to promote their books. They need to step outside their familiar box and organize events and activities, learn about events and opportunities and get involved.

The fact is that you won’t sell a copy of your book to everyone you talk to or everyone who hears about your book. The percentage of books sold per your efforts is probably around 8 or 10% at best in this competitive bookselling climate. Now, if you’re talking about friends and family, your percentage might be close to 50%. Sales to acquaintances (co-workers, fellow club members, neighbors, etc.) might amount to 6%. That is, for every 100 acquaintances who know about your book, six might buy it. And that’s if you are promoting to them personally. It’s much harder to sell a book from the background. Your customers will be more apt to buy your book from you in a face-to-face situation.

The reality of bookselling success is that it is time-consuming, energy-draining and hard, hard work. An author who wants to be widely read—who wants to profit from his or her publishing venture—must be willing to give promotion his full attention for at least three months. But I have to warn you, your book will only sell for as long as you are promoting it. Stop promoting and it will die.

The group of writers who were so thrilled to be published and then were excited about being involved in another anthology, really blew that opportunity with their publisher. It will be interesting to see if they learned something.

Let’s hope that each and every one of them will begin to take book promotion more seriously—that they will buy books on book promotion and study them, take courses/webinars on book promotion, read the many book promotion articles in the magazines and newsletter they subscribe to, bring in speakers on the subject of book promotion, attend writers conferences and sit in on sessions on book promotion.

If you are new to publishing, this is also what you should be doing. Start by reading my series of books.

Publish Your Book helps you to understand the publishing industry, all of your options and your responsibilities as a published author. http://www.matilijapress.com/PublishYourBook.html

Promote Your Book offers way over 250 tips and techniques for promoting your book. This book provides a treasure trove of ideas for the hopeful, new and struggling authors. http://www.matilijapress.com/PromoteYourBook.html

Talk Up Your Book shows you how to use your personality to sell your book in many different ways. This is a must-have book for any author who wants to or who should be doing signings, interviews, book festivals, public speaking, workshops at appropriate conferences, readings and so forth. http://www.matilijapress.com/TalkUpYourBook.html

You wrote an amazing book, designed it to perfection and even managed to get it published. But it isn’t selling as well as you thought it would. What went wrong?

1: The author wrote the wrong book for the wrong audience. Way too many authors write the book they want to write without truly considering their audience. It’s no wonder they fail in their attempt to promote the book.

There are two things this author can do:

• Start marketing to the right audience.
• Create a book that actually appeals to his target audience.

2: The author doesn’t know that he is responsible for promotion. It’s never too late to promote your book. Start now soliciting book reviews in appropriate magazines and at related websites and set up speaking engagements, for example. Read my new book to learn how to use your personality to sell book: Talk Up Your Book. Available at Amazon.com. (Use my name with the title in order to bring this book up at Amazon.) “Talk Up Your Book Fry.”

3: The author neglects to establish a platform. Many new authors don’t know what a platform is. It’s the author’s following, his reach, his way of attracting his audience. Most successful authors today have a platform in place before they produce a book.

How can you play catch-up with regard to your platform? Start now getting exposure and establishing credibility in your field. Participate in online forums on your topic, submit articles to appropriate magazines and newsletters, set up speaking engagements, write letters to the editor of pertinent magazines, make news by starting a volunteer organization, for example, and then tell the press about it. For fiction, get exposure and establish credibility as a novelist. Submit stories to publications your audience reads, blog regularly, use social media to become known and so forth.

4: The author gives promotion just a lick and a promise and then wonders why his book didn’t “take off.” Authors need to understand that book promotion is ongoing. It should start before you write the book and continue for as long as you want to sell books.

Remedy this mistake by establishing a solid promotional plan immediately. Start by compiling a mailing and emailing list. You’ll use these lists to announce your book, publicize any specials you’re running, inform folks of new additions to your products or services, let them know about upcoming appearances and so forth.

5: The author gives up. I can’t tell you how often I hear this from disillusioned authors, “I can’t sell my book, so what’s the use?” There’s one thing for sure; you won’t achieve the level of success you desire if you quit. Successful promotion takes time, energy, patience and lots of persistence.

There’s a lot to contemplate when entering the huge and competitive business of publishing. And promotion is a major consideration. Whether you land a traditional royalty publisher, self-publish (establish your own publishing company) or go with a pay-to-publish service, it is up to you—the author—to promote your book. And the time to start thinking about promotion is before you ever sit down and put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

Do you have an opportunity antenna? Are you aware when a publishing or book promotion opportunity comes your way?

Sometimes we stay so busy and focused on what is in front of us that we don’t even notice when an opportunity arises. For example, you attend a social event or business meeting and someone asks you what you’ve been doing lately. You might say, “Oh, I spent a few days at the beach with my kids,” or “I’ve been shopping for a new sofa,” or “I worked in the yard yesterday.” Instead, why not use this as an opportunity to promote your book.

Say, instead, “I just picked up a few boxes of my brand new book on vegetarian cooking last week,” or “I’m planning a book signing for my novel Friday night—here’s an invitation, please come,” or “I’m speaking next week to a group of businessmen about the history of our city—have you seem my new book in local bookstores? Here’s some information about it.”

I see authors at book festivals and writers conferences with their antenna down. A magazine editor might introduce herself and hand the author a card. This would be a great opportunity for the author to ask who their audience is and if they do book reviews or if they solicit articles from freelancers.

Librarians, booksellers and educators stop at the SPAWN booth at book festivals and speak to our authors. Some of them neglect to see this as a possible opportunity to get their books in libraries, bookstores or schools.

I once watched as the program director for a radio station tried to engage a couple of our authors in a conversation about their books and the authors just gave their usual spiel. It didn’t occur to them to pitch their book for a radio show.

And this is the very reason why so many authors leave a book festival feeling as though it wasn’t worthwhile. When book sales are your only measure of success, you may miss a lot of good opportunities. No, book festivals and conferences are full of opportunities and it is up to the author to develop and use his or her opportunity antennas.

It’s bad enough that authors stop seeking opportunities to promote their books. But when they avoid or ignore opportunities that look them in the eye, this is a sad, sad situation.

Can you think of an opportunity that you missed because you weren’t alert enough or that you accepted because you were paying attention? Would love to hear about them. PLFry620@yahoo.com

In the meantime, have any of you checked out my latest book at Amazon.com? It’s Talk Up Your Book. As it is now, you have to type in the book title AND my name in order to bring up this book at amazon. I hope that changes.

You may find, as I have, that there are many glitches and much waiting when a new book comes out. It seems to take a while for all of the ducks to be put in a row so that the book is available in print and Kindle/Nook, etc., so that you can easily order it from the most reliable sources, and so forth. The book cover for this book changed in midstream and the publisher hasn’t even posted the correct cover on his site, yet. I’ve asked about this twice and am told the request has been made.

In the meantime, I am working on getting the book on my site. I am eager to start promotion, but will wait until those ducks are all lined up.

As we’ve discussed, the purpose of your free ebooklet is to help you become more well-known among your readers and to sell more books. When you advertise the freebie, it will bring people to your website. When they read your brilliant, educational, informational or even entertaining ebooklet, some of them will buy your books or services.

Use the ebooklet itself to promote your books and services. I always include a paragraph or two about me and my books. I include ordering information in a couple of places throughout the ebooklet. I also recommend my books. For example, in my ebooklet, “50 Ways to Promote Your Ebook,” when I write about public speaking as a way to promote your ebook, I recommend my latest book, “Talk Up Your Book.” I also mention as often as possible without making it sound like a commercial, that I do book editing.

If you can offer valid resources and information on a topic of the reader’s interest and if you can come across as knowledgeable, people reading it will order your books.

And one of the best things about offering a free ebooklet at your website is the fact that those receiving it must sign up for it. Now you have the names and email addresses for those who are definitely interested in your topic or expertise. You can contact them with news of new books, new services, etc. These potential customers will become an important part of your massive emailing list.

Order my freebie here: http://www.patriciafry.com

Tomorrow, I will talk about freebie ebooks for novelists.