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Give Yourself a Promotion Begin your efforts with the simplest and likely easiest to accomplish activity, which is to enlist your network of friends, acquaintances, business contacts, and so on to each provide their input on ideas and further contacts to help you. They will, of course, ask in a polite way for a free book. Remember the caution given previously about handing out your book without first establishing a perception of its value. If this style of marketing and promotion is not your forte, there are certainly other methods. Your printer will possibly offer some options for marketing and promotion. Many book publishers also make available packages of announcements, postcards, posters, and such. Similarly, you will be offered press release services, mailings, fax announcements, and a web page for your book. Before you select any of these options, consider whether these items will actually be useful to you (not just sound good or could possibly work), and the costs to produce these yourself. Whatever methods you select, make sure they are things you can successfully undertake. By this we mean activities that you can not only do well, but can do well over and over again. Any promotional activity has the potential to produce results; this is not the point. What is relevant to your success is what will likely produce the greatest results at the lowest investment of time and money. Then, if you decide to do mailings, for instance, be sure you are prepared to do all the necessary mailings to gain the results you want; targeted, repeated mailings to each segment of your potential markets. Offers of excerpts, articles, and interviews for magazines and newspapers need preparation and follow through, and often multiple contacts, if they are to be effective in creating publicity. Personal appearances, book signings and such require that you secure bookings or space at location after location, prepare publicity materials for each, travel to each, and repeat essentially the same presentation and answer the same questions over and over and over. This is not to be negative toward these or any methods of publicity and sales generation; many people thrive on finding a method and honing it to maximum effectiveness, or meeting new people to whom they can provide tried and proven answers to common questions. The key is to be honest with yourself as to what you are effective at doing, and about how much time, energy, and resources you have to devote to these activities. |