You Are An Expert
You have become an expert. Whether you have a series of PhDs from top universities or not your are an expert in your field. You are a published author and your book is about something. What is it about? Identifying your expertise is especially important for fictions writers. Is your book a Sci-fi on space travel? A murder mystery involving poisons? You have written a book on it and are now an expert in that field. Think expert in space travel, an expert in poisons used in homicides. There are radio and TV stations and magazines that want you to share you expertise with their audience. Identifying your expertise is important when you pitch your media spots and events. More on pitching the media later
Continuing Education
Educate yourself on the industry; actually three industries: publishing, promotion and book selling. Go to your local library and read sections of the Literary Market Place. Read back issues of Publishers Weekly to help you understand the complexities of the publishing industry. These references will help you with your planning giving you new ideas and possibilities. Knowledge about the publishing industry will help you in your pitches to the media. You want to talk the talk, drop key industry words, and sound professional. Busy people do not have the time to educate the initiate. Below I have listed a few of the scores of books on book publicity.
With your ideas in place you can begin to formulate a business plan.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
CHAPTER II Post # 8
Collect Your Thoughts
Gather ideas of how you are going to conduct your publicity campaign. This is an ongoing task that you will do for the life of your book. At different stages in your campaign you will need new fresh ideas. Many ideas will build upon things you do now.
FYI: A most important tool is your mind. Your imagination. Be creative in your promotional ideas.
Identify Your target Audience (Again).
Hopefully you did this before you began writing your book. Revisit it. What is your book about. In twenty-five works or less describe your book. You will use this description often as you promote.
Who Will Buy Your Book?
Ask yourself who are my core readers? Who will want to read my book? Your core readers are the people who can not live without buying your book. This obvious exercise is will help you plan your book tour.
FYI. Advice for writers beginning a project. Reader identification should be done before your write the first word of your book. Be realistic. Publishers will be realistic to the extreme and judge your book accordingly. After all it is a business.
After you identify your core audience then move out to the second tier readers and on out. These are the large percentage of the public that will buy your book. Do you have a couple thousand readers or rather book buyers? If not don’t bother writing it unless you like to write for fun.
Why Is Your Book Important?
The first question a radio programer or TV news desk person is going to want to know is why their audience would be interested in your book, your topic or you. Is there any current event tie in or news worthy aspect to your book? Can you piggy-back on a news worthy event? Non-fiction and fiction based on reality books are easier to attach to a news worthy event but fiction writers can and should piggy-back on to an event or subject. Fiction writers have to use the back door approach. More on how to do this later.
Gather ideas of how you are going to conduct your publicity campaign. This is an ongoing task that you will do for the life of your book. At different stages in your campaign you will need new fresh ideas. Many ideas will build upon things you do now.
FYI: A most important tool is your mind. Your imagination. Be creative in your promotional ideas.
Identify Your target Audience (Again).
Hopefully you did this before you began writing your book. Revisit it. What is your book about. In twenty-five works or less describe your book. You will use this description often as you promote.
Who Will Buy Your Book?
Ask yourself who are my core readers? Who will want to read my book? Your core readers are the people who can not live without buying your book. This obvious exercise is will help you plan your book tour.
FYI. Advice for writers beginning a project. Reader identification should be done before your write the first word of your book. Be realistic. Publishers will be realistic to the extreme and judge your book accordingly. After all it is a business.
After you identify your core audience then move out to the second tier readers and on out. These are the large percentage of the public that will buy your book. Do you have a couple thousand readers or rather book buyers? If not don’t bother writing it unless you like to write for fun.
Why Is Your Book Important?
The first question a radio programer or TV news desk person is going to want to know is why their audience would be interested in your book, your topic or you. Is there any current event tie in or news worthy aspect to your book? Can you piggy-back on a news worthy event? Non-fiction and fiction based on reality books are easier to attach to a news worthy event but fiction writers can and should piggy-back on to an event or subject. Fiction writers have to use the back door approach. More on how to do this later.
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