Here’s number 30 of my 50 Ways to Use Your Personality to Sell Books. This is a free ebooklet, available now at http://www.patriciafry.com
30: How to Speak About Your Novel
There are basically two types of audiences for the novelist. Those wanting to be entertained by excerpts from your story and those who want to know why and how you wrote and published the book. Here are some ideas for speeches designed to promote a novel.
• Talk about your writing/publishing journey. There are definitely many people who are interested in how you did it because they are eager to write and publish their own novels.
• Reveal something about your research practices and share fascinating anecdotes. For example, perhaps you discovered a new in forensic studies. Or maybe you laughed at yourself when one of your test readers pointed out that you had the order of events mixed up in the story. Explain how something like that can happen when you’re writing a complex mystery.
• Share aspects of your story.
• Act out a scene from your book.
• Read from your book, but only under the most specific conditions. See number 32 (which gives tips for how to be more effective when reading from your book).
• Bring your character to life. Consider whether your character would make a good president, or not. Devise scenarios revealing the personalities of your main characters by starting with the question, “What would happen if your character lived in this century, if your character made a different decision in the beginning…”
• Use your story to emphasize a real life dilemma and involve the audience in resolving it.
• Cleverly create entertaining spin offs based on your story. I know one bestselling novelist who shares interesting bits of trivia from the old west and/or on other topics she covers in her western novels.
This list of tips should also help novelists devise interesting blog posts. I know that some of you are blogging. Would love to be directed to your interesting blog. Leave your comment here.