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 chick lit author Lisa Daily, author of Fifteen Minutes of Shame.
Publicity will make or break almost any book.
When my first book, Stop Getting Dumped! came out, I hired a book publicist to send out review copies ($5000, resulting in 7, count ‘em, 7 media hits) and built a website.
When Oprah didn’t call immediately, I started to worry. I woke up in the middle of the night, terrified that my book would not sell, that my career would be over before it had a chance to begin. I’d heard the stories, that most books only have a few weeks to sink or swim. I decided that publicity, lots and lots of publicity, would be my only salvation. So every time I woke up with nightmares of being sucked into a quicksand-fast hole of debt or obscurity, I cranked out a press release and faxed it to every media outlet I could think of.
I got booked on a local radio station. I got booked on the local TV station. B&Ns all over the country started placing individual orders for my book. My $5000 publicist managed to snag a quickie review in the New York Daily News (thank you, Alev Aktar).
Eventually, I landed enough interviews to snag a weekly spot on a syndicated morning TV show called DAYTIME, and a bi-weekly dating advice column.
I could tell you all of the things I’ve done for STOP GETTING DUMPED! and all of the things I’m doing for my new book, FIFTEEN MINUTES OF SHAME, which mostly involves pitching and pitching and pitching the media, but the laundry list of my promotional activities won’t really do you any good, unless you know one crucial thing:
How to pitch.
Most authors (and many book publicists) pitch the book, when they should be pitching a segment or story idea.
A book is a one-trick pony. If in fact, the book contains some newsworthy information, you’ll get one segment or article out of it, and you’ll be done.
But most likely you won’t get anything at all.
You have to pitch a story idea. How is your book changing lives? What is controversial about your subject matter? How is it relevant to what’s going on in the world? How can you tack it on to something that everybody is already talking about?
It’s not about the book. It’s about the story.
My new book, FIFTEEN MINUTES OF SHAME is the story of a TV dating guru who finds out on national television that her husband is cheating.
On its own, the book received some lovely review coverage. But it takes more to get solid publicity.
But when the Spitzer scandal hit, I went on TV to talk about how to overcome public humiliation.
As my book launched, I pitched the media on topics from cheating to celebrity dating, garnering hundreds of additional press mentions, from outlets that would likely not cover the book by itself.
The topics are all related in some way to the book or its title, so a nice plug for the book can be worked in, but most of the segments or story ideas are not about the book itself.
What stories can your book help to tell?
Lisa Daily is a real-life TV dating expert on DAYTIME, a nationally-syndicated morning show, and bestselling author of Stop Getting Dumped! 
Fifteen Minutes of Shame is her first novel. She’s a syndicated relationships columist, popular media guest seen everywhere from Entertainment Tonight to iVillage Liveand quoted everywhere from USA Today to Cosmopolitan, and appearsas a real-life “date doctor” on theHITCHmovie DVD starring Will Smith. For more information on Lisa, www.lisadaily.com.
Lisa Daily’s virtual book tour is brought to you by Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Book Tours at http://www.pumpupyourbookpromotion.com/ and choreographed by Dorothy Thompson.
There’s an interesting conversation happening over at one of my e-groups over whether an author makes more sales online vs. offline. 
As part of my unwinding process during the day and to distance myself from coordinating tours for awhile, I spend it in google alerts. If you haven’t discovered 