Book publicity, Part 3

The second part of publicity, after generating reviews, is trying to get visibility, attention, and awareness for your book in other ways. The most accessible way for people to do this, these days, is on the Internet, and there are bunches of web sites full of suggestions ranging from the general (start a blog, set up a newsletter, join Twitter groups) to specific things like price-pulsing and freebie teasers that are really ways of trying to game various systems and algorithms like the ones Amazon uses to determine “hot sellers” and placement in “people who bought this also bought…”

There are three things to remember about all these recommendations: first, that timing is important. Getting a lot of high-visibility exposure in blogs and forums won’t do you much good if it happens a month before the book is out, or even a week before. Internet publicity is all about instant gratification; if most people see something interesting and can’t click through to buy it right then, very few of them will remember to check back a day or two later to see if it’s available now, especially since there are always new books coming along that are available right now. Timing is especially important if you have a publisher, because publishers pay a lot of attention to early sales numbers. If you are self-publishing, it is up to you whether you’re going with a “big initial push” strategy or a lot of smaller, more spread-out pushes to maintain your visibility over time.

Second, doing Internet publicity takes planning, effort, and set-up. If you have a publisher, see if they have a list of blogs and Internet sites they recommend you appear on. If they do, you probably want to invest at least a little time and energy in showing up on them, if only to make your efforts visible to the publisher. If you’re self-publishing or don’t have a helpful publisher, spend some time making your own lists of places that you think you can get a mention in, or be part of a blog tour or get a guest post, and then start setting them up. The good news is that all the blogging and interviews and podcasts and so on is stuff that you can continue doing long after the book is out. It will probably have more initial impact if you bunch it around the book launch, but again, that’s a matter of strategy that is most important if you are not self-publishing. The bad news is that it is easy to let your publicity efforts eat your life.

Third, all this stuff – blogging, hanging out in “reader communities,” compiling mailing lists and Twitter followers, blog tours, guest posts, giveaway contests, interviews – all of it is stuff that nearly every writer who is trying to do Internet publicity is also doing, whether they’re pushing a hardcopy book or an ebook. This means that a) if you’re doing Internet publicity, this is the sort of stuff that you’re expected to do as a minimum, and b) doing it isn’t terribly effective in most cases because there’s already so much of it out there. How much do you pay attention to blog posts and tweets and so on when you’re looking for something new to read? The same logic applies to a lot of the older non-Internet publicity gimmicks: cheap giveaways like bookmarks and postcards, more expensive giveaways like mugs and T-shirts. If you really want effective publicity, you need to find things that everybody else is not doing that will get your name and your book in front of people’s eyes in a positive way.

That last – the positive bit – is really important. It is annoying when someone on a panel begins every remark with “In my latest book, I Wanna Be a Bestseller, I…” It is equally annoying when someone has five or ten tweets a day announcing the same thing. Annoyed people are not potential readers.

So what should the writer who feels a need to do publicity do? Darned if I know. In business school, they always said that 80% of all publicity was useless, but since nobody knows which 80%, everybody has to do all of it in order to be safe. That’s still true, especially for writers, but there are a few recommendations I can make.

I’ve said this a couple of times, but it’s worth repeating: if you have an actual publisher (ebook or traditional hardcopy), check and see if they have a publicist you can talk to. This costs you nothing but time, and you can pick up recommendations for what your publisher hopes/expects from you, at the very least. Unless your book is a really major lead title, you aren’t likely to persuade them to invest in anything major (like a book tour), but you can often get a surprising amount of assistance with lesser things, like extra Advance Reading Copies or support for a bookstore autographing you’ve arranged yourself, or even a few bucks to buy chips for your book launch party.

Tell the publicist (or your editor) in advance if you’re going to conventions or book fairs or if you’ve arranged an appearance somewhere. Even if they don’t help directly in any way, they will put it on their official list of “publicity for this title,” which is one of the things bookstores use to decide how many copies to order.

Among other things you want to consider: bookmarks are relatively cheap to make, and you can take them to book signings and conventions (many SF conventions have a “freebie giveaway table” where they will put out a handful of your bookmarks even if you aren’t attending). This gives people an actual physical reminder with your name and your book’s name. Book plates are also cheap to print up, and they’re handy to give out when you are doing a signing and people haven’t got copies of your books.

It is well worth making friends with your local booksellers, independent or chain, and to stop in periodically and offer to sign stock. Ditto local librarians – friendly booksellers and librarians can “hand sell” your book in surprisingly large numbers. If you are going on a road trip for fun or for your day job, try to allocate at least a few hours to stop in at bookstores in whatever cities or towns you’re in and offer to sign stock. If you have enough advance warning, call ahead and see if they’re interested in doing a signing (or see if the publisher’s publicist will make the call – they’re a lot more open to this sort of thing when they’re not the ones paying for your travel expenses, and they might even be able to arrange for you to do a presentation at the local library).

This kind of thing is less important if you’re self-publishing in ebook, but even ebooks sometimes get print-on-demand orders. I wouldn’t make this a major publicity focus, but if you have time and opportunity, it’s worth at least considering. For ebooks, though, your primary focus should probably be on Internet publicity, because that’s where the vast majority of your readers are.

All this is basic grunt-work publicity. As I said, lots of other writers are doing it, too. The real bang in publicity comes with being creative…and that’s difficult, because the whole point is to be unexpected and not do stuff that other writers are doing. Next post will be on that.