If you want to promote your book, the first thing you will have to do is learn to be bold. No one will ever care about your book the way you do, so YOU have to tell everyone why it is worth their time. If you can’t bear the idea of collaring people and talking their ears off about the book, creating promotional products is another way to introduce people to your book.
When you have created postcards, bookmarks, business cards, samples or other products you must set about distributing them. You will have to give away many promotional items for every sale, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t see sales immediately. You never know where each item will end up. You could give it to a woman who gives it to her mother, who leaves it in a book she returns to the library, which is checked out by someone interested in reading your book.
Take Them With You
The first rule, of course, is to carry them everywhere. To the grocery store, on planes, to parties, everywhere you go. Then whenever someone says, “So, what do you do?” or “So, how have you been?” or “What have you been up to lately?” you can pull out a postcard or business card about your book and hand it over. Find any excuse to do this. If they mention that they’ve been stressed lately, say, “What you need is a good novel. Here…” and hand over the card before they have time to say, “I don’t have time to read”. If they mention something that relates in any way to the topic of your book, whip out those promotional items and hand them over.
Freebies At A Book Signing?
If you have arranged a book signing at a bookstore, mall or any other venue, make sure you take plenty of giveaways with you. Henry James Warren, author of the novel “Storm Keepers” says he always makes the most of his book signings by taking along hundreds of specially printed bookmarks. He stands in front of the table that displays his book and reaches out to everyone who walks by, saying hello and giving them a bookmark. He gives out 600-1000 bookmarks at each mall signing! Giving away freebies gives Warren an excuse to talk to passersby in the malls. He says,
“Fifty percent of my book buyers are not heading to the bookstore in the first place—I bring them in. Sometimes they end up buying other books—but most of the time they buy mine.”
In The Mail
Yes, you can use postcards for special mailings to everyone you know, but you can also make use of every other piece of mail you normally send, to include promotional materials about your book. Slip a bookmark or postcard into every piece of mail you send, even bills. You never know whose desk it will fall on and what they might like to read. And since you’re spending the postage anyway, this counts as free advertising.
See if you can arrange cooperative mailings with other authors, or anyone who might be mailing information to a large group of people. If you have a non-fiction book, find a business that complements the subject of your book and ask if you can include a piece in their next mailing. If you write novels, you may still be able to find a hook. Perhaps your novel’s hero is an insurance broker. Perhaps your broker would be willing to include information in a mailing to his clients. Businesses may charge a small fee for this or you may be able to ‘sell’ it to them as a free gift to their clients, especially if your giveaway is a sample chapter of your book. You may even be able to barter some services with the business in lieu of payment: perhaps you can contribute an article to its newsletter, whip up a press release, ghost-write an article for their CEO to contribute to a trade magazine.
Lying Around
There are hundreds of places you can leave a stack of cards carrying information about your book. The most obvious might be bookstores and libraries, but there are many other places that allow you to post information or leave giveaways. Supermarkets, cafes, beauty salons, barbers, craft shops, gift shops, convenience stores and any other store with high traffic volumes are good bets even though they may not, at first, seem to have anything to do with books and reading. Approach the managers of these places and point out that you are a local author and you would like to leave some information about your book. You’d be surprised how often people will respond to the idea of having a local author represented in their store. And it costs them nothing.
If you can leave postcards or bookmarks by the register, that is ideal. Simply take along a stack and check up on the inventory every week. If the establishment has a bulletin board, you can still leave a supply of giveaways. Simply create a holder by stapling a piece of card slightly larger than your giveaway to a piece of 8.5” x 11” paper. You can fill top of the background paper with an eye-catching image of your book and basic information about it. Then fill the holder with business cards, bookmarks or postcards, pin the whole thing to the bulletin board and stop by every now and then to restock the holder.
Back Of The Room
If, in the course of your promotion, you find yourself giving talks about your book or about the writer’s life, make sure you leave promotional giveaways at the back of the room for your audience to take. If they don’t buy a copy of your book that night, make sure they take something away with them.
At a recent conference appearance I was talking to a room full of people interested in self-publishing. Whenever I an on this kind of panel I always end up fielding the majority of the question because once people hear about Print On-Demand they are fascinated, skeptical or outright suspicious and they always have a lot of questions.
For this conference, I took along a few CDs with my e-book (21st Century Publishing: An Author’s Introduction to Print On-Demand Publishing) but I wasn’t sure I would have a chance to make my sales pitch to many people. Instead, I took along a CD-ROM business card and left them, with information about my e-book at the back of the room.
Because my book is available online it made more sense to create a CD-ROM business card than to hand out printed supplies. Since I wanted people to order my book, the CD-ROM provided them with live links to online sites where they could buy the book immediately. Also, CD-ROM cards are still new enough to be a novelty and people are quite likely to pick them up.
Following Up
When giving away freebies, it is a good idea to try to get people to provide you with a way of contacting them in future: an email address or a mailing address. Put a sign-up sheet next to the freebies, and promise them two things:
- An informative, fun communication once in a while (with the opportunity to win more freebies, if you can manage it) and
- That you will not sell, rent or in any other way abuse their personal information (this is very important, and you must mean it).
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