Effective Promotion

By Mary Rosenblum

Success in today’s brave new publishing world requires effective promotion – you have to make your book visible to readers. Award winning, career author, Mary Rosenblum, the Literary Midwife, uses her two decades of market experience and work with new authors to help you connect effectively with the readers who will love your book – without sacrificing your writing time!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Rosenblum
• Release date: Sep 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989737838

Mary Rosenblum

Mary Rosenblum attended the prestigious Clarion West Writers workshop in 1988, where she sold her first SF story to Asimov's Magazine editor Gardner Dozois and her writing career took off. She published 8 novels with NY publishers as Mary Rosenblum in SF and Mary Freeman in mystery, was a Hugo and Nebula finalist, won the Sideways and Compton Cook awards, and received a lot of critical acclaim for her fiction, both short stories and novels. She began teaching writing, fell in love with that, and now works one-on-one with novice writers as a 'literary midwife' taking authors through drafts, final editing, publisher-matching, and self promotion of their books, to make sure it gets done well. She has twice returned to teach the Clarion West workshop and lives in rural western Oregon where she flies a small plane to as many cool faraway places as she can.

Book preview

Why You Need This Book!

Success in today’s brave new publishing world requires effective promotion – you have to make your book visible to readers. Award winning, career author, Mary Rosenblum, the Literary Midwife, uses her two decades of market experience and work with new authors to help you connect effectively with the readers who will love your book – without sacrificing your writing time!

The Literary Midwife Presents:

Effective Promotion

by Mary Rosenblum

Copyright 2013 Mary Rosenblum

Published by New Writers Interface

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Table of Contents

Once Upon A Time: Where we started.

Let Me Entertain You: How do we acquire fans?

Say Who? Identifying your fans.

The Website: First order of business.

That Critical Email List: Coin of the realm.

Keep It Up: The key to promotional success.

Blog Effectively: The breakfast menu doesn’t cut it.

Social Media: Keep the family off the stage!

Reaching Out: Acquiring new fans.

Free Is a Very Nice Price -- Sometimes: Pricing strategies that work.

The Chapter by Chapter Giveaway: Building sales in unexpected ways.

How Much is Too Much: Posting your book online.

Keeping Track: What you need to know.

Balancing Act: Promoting without going nuts.

Highs and Lows: Sustaining the spirit.

About the Author

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Once Upon a Time

I sold my first novel to Del Rey, an imprint of Random House in 1990. Back then, you could only publish through the big New York publishers and a handful of recognized small presses. Publishing yourself was going ‘vanity press’ and it earned you scorn and a universal sneer, since clearly, the book wasn’t good enough to sell to any publisher. You didn’t worry about that annoying ‘promotion’ thing. That was the publisher’s job. After all, every time you sold that $6.99 paperback, you got a whopping 56 cents. Yep, that’s an 8% royalty on the cover price, the standard royalty of the New York publishing world for paperbacks at the time. The publishers used the remaining $6.43 they took from that sale to pay for the editing and publishing and to promote your book. Oh yes, and to make a profit, too, once those initial costs were paid back. So you saw nice full page ads in the trade mags, the book was submitted for review to Kirkus, Library Journal, and of course, the New York Times Review of Books. You maybe set up some reading and signing gigs at your local bookstores, sent in a PR release to your local paper, and called it good. If you were the lead book for a major imprint, that is, they thought your book was going to be their top seller that year, they sent you on a book tour at their expense, but that was only for a very very few books they thought would go ‘blockbuster’.

Times have changed.

The New York publishing world is struggling and they’re struggling at the expense of their authors; cutting payments, offering minimal royalties on their lucrative ebook releases, and taking books out of print very quickly, so that new fans have to buy your earlier books second hand, with no earning for the author. This has resulted in a huge shift to publish elsewhere. Many established New York authors have found they make better money publishing their next books themselves, and the majority of the aspiring authors out there either publish their books themselves as ‘Indies’ or find a home with one of the many small press publishers who are springing up.

That’s great, wonderful. Right?

Well, yes, but right now, the internet publishing world of small press and Indie authors is missing an essential piece of the original book-sales picture. What’s that?

It’s the ‘New Release shelf’.

When everybody bought their next read at the local bookstore or one of the big chain stores, those readers walked in the door and headed for the ‘New Release’ sign. There, they found all the books that the store had recently ordered, books that had come out in the past months from various publishers. They browsed those books, maybe asked the bookstore staff for their opinions, and mostly bought or did not buy from that shelf or table. Oh, of course they got recommendations from friends or co-workers,