Book Marketing Buzz: Book Promotion & Publicity Tips: How to Promote Your Books with Literary Fiction Author Jean Hackensmith

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 Jean Hackensmith, author of Checkmate.

As a former fiction editor and publisher, I probably realize better than most the importance of an effective marketing strategy for my books. I’ll go out on a limb here, however, by saying that I absolutely hate the promotional end of writing. I am an author first and foremost. I want to write, not promote. But that little monkey on my shoulder continually reminds me that my books will never make their way into readers’ hands if I don’t do everything possible to market them. I consider myself lucky to have found Pump Up Your Book Promotion. They’re an author’s dream. They do all the work, after all. All I have to do is write these guest posts, which will serve to introduce me and my work to readers and other authors. A Virtual Book Tour alone, though, will not make a book a best seller—or even close. That takes persistence, both on the part of the author and the publisher. It also takes money. The old adage that you “have to spend money to make money” holds very true when it comes to marketing a book. If you’re unwilling to invest in your book’s success, then it will never be a success. Today more than ever, unless you’re Stephen King or Dean Koontz, an author is expected to bear the bulk of promotional costs for his or her book. Publishers just don’t stick their necks out anymore unless they know a book will be a guaranteed success. Things were even tougher in the days before the Internet. Now it is virtually inexpensive to run a banner ad on a few web sites that tout your type of book. At least its inexpensive compared to the cost of print ads in newspapers and magazines, which generally have a much smaller reader base than most major web sites. (Unless you’re The New York Times or USA Today, and we’re not even going to talk about what they charge for an ad!)

In my opinion, though, word-of-mouth is and always will be an author’s best sales tool. There is no better advertising apparatus out there than a reader who loves your book and tells people that they love it. After all, people are more likely to invest in a proven product—and that’s what your book is. A product. Also, ask your readers to review your book at Amazon.com and other on-line retailers. Good reviews, and lots of them, will drive up your ranking in the search engines.

My most “unique” marketing strategy, I guess you would say, didn’t even start out with that intention. I wrote a play for our local community theatre. It received rave reviews and, consequently, people wanted to read my books. After the second performance, I set up a table outside the theater and sold nearly fifty books to theater patrons at the last four shows. Not a lot by some standards; but, hey, it was good enough for me!

Jean is the author of the literary fiction novel, CHECKMATE.  You can visit her website at www.jeanhackensmith.com.