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Book Promotion Advice

The following brief articles provide you with the best book promotion advice from the book promotion guru, John Kremer. If you have more book promotion advice to share with your fellow authors and publishers, email them to JohnKremer@bookmarket.com. Thanks!

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Promoting Your Books:
The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Promote Your Books

In a recent teleseminar, I shared the following 10 things you can do in the next week to sell more books. Here is a short summary of what I covered:

1. 90% of marketing efforts are wasted. This is not a bad thing. Learn how to use this insight to set better priorities.

2. Book marketing is all about creating relationships. The only reason to hire a publicist is to hire them for their relationships. Ask, “Who do you know?” It’s all about creating friends.

3. You can’t do everything. Prioritize what you do best.

4. Packaging is important. As an author, this offends me, but the reality is that if a book isn’t packaged well, it won’t sell. An instant judgment on your book is based on the packaging. Packaging not only includes the cover, but also the title, the contents, and the interior design.

5. Build a brand with your books. For example, consider the Dummies brand or Chicken Soup of the Soul.

6. We are in the business of creating and selling rights. Licensing rights can make the difference between a profitable publishing operation and a losing operation.

7. Remember that small presses can create bestsellers. In fact, they’ve created more than 400 bestsellers in the past 20 years.

8. New standards are coming for submitting info to booksellers. You need ONYX compliant data. Get familiar with it. This information allows retailers to pull up information immediately about your book.

9. What was your strength can become your weakness. For example, New York publishers depend on chains and have almost lost touch with the independents.

10. Make no little plans, because they have no power to move the hearts of men and women. So many books are published that don’t come to their potential because the publisher didn’t have the confidence. Let your vision shine through. Don’t let the media sell you short.

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Less Money, More Stories

Seth Godin always has interesting points to make. In his blog, he made the following point, one that I've been trying to get through to people for a very long time:

“The art of marketing is not finding more money to do more marketing. It's figuring out how to tell a story that spreads with the resources you've got.”

So many self-publishers and new authors want to throw money at marketing or hire someone else to do the marketing for them when they should be spending the time creating great stories. By great stories, I mean, marketing messages that move people, get people talking, get people telling others about your story, etc.

Before you do anything else to market your book, decide what your story is — what message will move people to act.

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“Someone once asked me how much I made for my first Guerilla Marketing book. The answer I gave was $10 million. The book itself only paid me about $35,000 in royalties, but the speaking engagements, spinoff books, newsletters, columns, bootcamps, consulting, and wide open doors resulted in the remaining $9,965.000” — Jay Conrad Levinson, author, Guerilla Marketing series

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Celebrate Today Special Events Database — Features 18,290 holidays, special days, weeks, months, and historical anniversaries. Searchable by subject interest. Includes contact info and website in most cases. Great for setting publication dates and doing PR tie-ins. Use these days to help you promote your books in media interviews. Updated for 2008. $30.00.

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Top 700 Independent Bookstores Data Files — This list started out as 500, then 600, then 700, and now almost 800 top general bookstores. It includes names of the book buyers and event coordinators, address, phone, fax, email, website, and other information about each bookstore. You will be able to download six different formats (your choice of one or all) as well as an information sheet to let you know what is contained in the various data files (Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, comma-delimited ASCII, tab-delimited ASCII, dBase, and rich text format). Data file download, $40.00.

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