Book Marketing Buzz: Book Promotion & Publicity Tips: How to Promote Your Books with Author Sheila Roberts

Book Marketing Buzz: Book Promotion & Publicity Tips: How to Promote Your Books is a continuing series to help authors learn how to promote their books. If you would like to be a guest blogger for our book promotion and publicity series, click here.

Our guest blogger for today is Sheila Roberts, author of Bikini Season.

Get a group of working writers together for long enough and eventually the topic of conversation will turn to publicity. How can we get it and for how little? We writers love to come up with clever ways of getting our name out there that doesn’t cost us a cent.

 

I’m sorry to say, this essay isn’t going to give you any such handy tip. I’m not going to tell you how to promote your book by giving away bookmarks, nor am I going to rhapsodize about the benefits of book signings, contests, or speaking at conferences where you can have a chance to plug your book – although I’m a big believer in doing all of the above. But I want to talk about a bigger, more costly step, one that I am convinced every author needs to take if she is serious about growing her readership and getting name recognition, and that is budgeting a serious chunk of money and hiring people who specialize in the business of promotion and publicity to help her take her book to the next level.

 

I’ve always been a big do-it-yourselfer. I’ve done giveaways, set up my own book signings, and finessed my way onto radio programs that were probably only listened to by my mother and my best friend. For my last book I did my first ever book trailer and put it up on Utube. My fame was growing. All my friends saw it. If there was a promotional rock to turn over, I’d find it. And why not? I love to promote! I consider myself to be the queen of the quotable quote. But, bottom line, I don’t have the experience, the skills, or the contacts to be the best publicist for my book. So who really hears all those quotable quotes? That’s why I’m leaving the ranks of the do-it-yourselfers and hiring a pro. In fact, I’m hiring a couple: one is organizing my blog tour, and the other is writing ad copy and making media connections.

 

You may be reading this and thinking, heck, what kind of advice is this? I don’t need to hire someone to do all that for me; I can set up my own blog tour and I can call radio and TV stations.

 

Yes, you can. But do you have connections (not to mention the expertise) to do this successfully? Do you know the best blogs to review your novel? Do you know what angle is going to get a radio talk show interested in talking about you and your book? Do you know what publications to advertise in to get the attention of radio and TV talk show producers? This is a world with which most of us as writers have only a nodding acquaintance, and the door to it can be hard for the untrained eye to find. Most of us don’t have the time or tools with which to look.

 

I know I don’t. I have a book deadline . . . right about the time my new book is coming out. I can’t do it all, and I can’t do it all well. Much as I would love to be my own publicist, I am seeing that as my writing business grows I have to start delegating some aspects of it to others. I need to subcontract for related services so I can stay where I need to: in product development. As a writer, I am the heart of my business. Without my brain babies – my stories – I have no business. Now, I can try and save some dollars and run my own publicity campaign, but who will run the business while I’m down in the marketing department writing ad copy? Leaving the helm to set up all my own promotion would be the equivalent of the CEO of Ford going down to the marketing department and offering to help brainstorm ideas for the next ad.

 

I realize most of us writers don’t make a ton of money, so it makes it very hard to part with any of that small advance check. But if this is your business, you have to invest part of what you earn back into the business, at least until you become a household name. A successful writer promotes. A really successful writer doesn’t do it all herself.

 

Good publicists are everywhere. Nancy Berland Public Relations handles such authors as Debbie Macomber and Linda Lael Miller. Penny Sansevieri, author of “From Book to Bestseller” is another well-known publicist. Theresa Meyers at Blue Moon Communications was responsible for getting Carly Phillips picked for Kelly Ripa’s Book Club on LIVE! With Regis and Kelly in 2003.

 

Now, that’s the kind of thing I want to see happen to me, but I know if I try and get there on my own I’ll never make it. So I have a publicist on board to make sure I don’t start dropping all those balls I’m trying to juggle. And if I try to set up my own blog tour I’ll end up dead-ended somewhere in the blogosphere. Now, why should I do that when I have Pump Up Your Book Promotion to drive the car and take me where I want to go, and all for a reasonable fare? I have a business to run. I have to write. I don’t have time to be my own driver as well!

 

So, there’s what I’m doing for promotion. Nothing cheap. Nothing new and ground-breaking. But, I think, something very smart.

 

Sheila Roberts is the author of BIKINI SEASON.  You can visit her website at www.sheilasplace.com. 

Sheila’s virtual book tour is brought to you by Pump Up Your Book Promotion and choreographed by Dorothy Thompson.  You can visit their website at www.pumpupyourbookpromotion.com.