Spread the Word: Promote Your Book, Find Your Readers, and Build a Literary Community

By Eleanor C. Whitney

So you've written a book—now what? Your next step is to find your readers and get that book into their hands.Eleanor Whitney, author of Quit Your Day Job, offers perspective, practical advice, and checklists for shepherding your book baby out into the wider world. Traditionally published, self-published, and hybrid authors alike will benefit from these tools and frameworks. No matter what kind of book you've written or where you are in the writing or publishing process, you can always build a community of readers. Whitney interviews other authors and publicists about what worked for them and what they learned the hard way and walks authors through creating and executing a plan to promote their book their way, with whatever resources and time they have available. She provides a timeline of promotional activities to consider before and after publication, and she also reminds us that publicity is a long game that you can begin well before your book is finished and continue well after its release. Ultimately, promoting your book is about connecting with a reader through ideas that inspire you both. And that is something we can all do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Release date: Nov 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781648412493

Eleanor C. Whitney

Eleanor Whitney is a writer, editor, and content marketer. She is the author of Riot Woman, a collection of feminist essays examining the impact of the Riot Grrrl movement, and Quit Your Day Job, a business workbook for creative people. Throughout her career she has worked to build communities, education programs, and content strategy at museums, art organizations, and tech startups, including the Brooklyn Museum and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hailing from Maine, she divides her time between Brooklyn and the Mojave Desert. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Queens College, a Master’s in Public Administration from Baruch College, and BA in cultural studies from Eugene Lang College. She also enjoys playing guitar, walking around the desert, and lifting heavy things.

Book preview

Part I:

Building Literary Community

Chapter One: Finding Your Literary Community

Promoting a book is an act of service. First and foremost, it is a way to honor your own creativity and tenacity of being able to put a book into the world. A book is yours, but to truly live its life and do what you hoped it would do, it needs to live beyond you. It is also an act of service for your readers. It has the potential to change their lives, just as writing the book changed yours. If you have a hard time motivating yourself to promote your book, do it for your readers, your community, the people you haven’t even met yet.

Over a million books are published in the United States each year, but, on average, Americans only read fourteen books a year, a 2022 study by Michelle Faverio and Andrew Perrin for the Pew Research Center found. Perhaps even more distressing for writers, a 2021 study (also for Pew Research Center), Who Doesn’t Read Books in America? by Risa Gelles-Watnick and Andrew Perrin found that about one-third of Americans don’t read books at all. Another study, Success in Books: A Big Data Approach to Bestsellers from 2018 found that of about a hundred thousand hardcover books published each year, less than five hundred will make it to the New York Times Best Seller List, which is about 0.5 percent for those who want to run the numbers. But why start off so discouraging when you are about to hold your very own book in your hand?

A book is more than just a book for its readers. Readers read for so many different reasons: to learn something new, gather insight, solve a problem, engage their imagination, explore a new world, gain self-awareness, and to feel less alone. These are just some of the reasons people read, and of course, many of the reasons writers write. Your book doesn’t need to be a bestseller to have a profound impact on your readers’ lives. Your job, once your book is written, is to find those people who need your book, and connect with them. You owe it to the people you don’t even know yet whose lives are waiting to be changed by your words. But here’s the thing: The people who need your book most don’t know that they need it, yet. It’s your job to find them and tell them. And that’s why this book exists: to help you identify, connect, and communicate with the readers that need your book.

The hard truth about writing a book is that no one will care about your book as much as you. Even if they are paid to do so. Even if they are the publisher. Even if they are a publicist. The book is ultimately a product of your unique vision and passion, and you need to extend that vision and passion beyond the writing into the public phase of your book’s life. In addition, your book is yours, and no one understands it as deeply as you do. As you prepare it to live free in the world, you need to give it a leg up to go forth and fulfill its potential. That is, you need to promote it.

Before you start making a promotion plan for your book, it’s important to connect with your intrinsic motivation and to remember why you wrote it. Grab your journal and ask yourself the following questions:

1. What was my initial motivation or spark for writing this book?

2. Why did I feel it was vital for this book to exist?

3. What kept me going during the writing and editing process?

4. What did I learn from writing this book?

Once you’ve had a chance to reflect on and write about these questions, start thinking about your audience. Ask yourself the following questions and write down the answers:

1. Who did I have in mind as a reader or readers when I was writing this book?

2. Why would someone want to read this book?

3. How will reading this book help a reader achieve their goals?

4. What are the big ideas that guide this book (try to limit this to three to five)?

Throughout this book we’ll explore the above questions more in-depth and break them down further, but for now they’re an important starting point. From these questions, you can start to get a sense of who your audience for your book is and how you can start building a community around it.

Audience and Community Defined: What’s the Difference?

Throughout these pages, I will be discussing your book’s audience and your community. In many ways, these terms overlap and can even be synthesized to a single theme, Overall, it’s about creating and maintaining relationships. Tend those with care and it will help you when it comes to selling your book, says Ayun Halliday, the author of many books including most recently, Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto, and creator of the long-running zine The East Village Inky. Even so, these terms are distinct enough that they warrant specific definitions.

Your community is the people with whom you share interests, passions, and values around the big ideas, subject, or theme of your book. You are already part of many different communities: where you live, what schools you went to, your profession, hobbies, and interests, specific aspects of your identity, are just some communities you are part of. A community is an exchange—it is a place for forming bonds of friendship and mutual aid, and sharing ideas around a common point of connection. In communities, bonds form between multiple people and connections are interdependent.

The audience for your book can and will be drawn from your larger community, but won’t only be them. In many ways, your community will be authors similar to you, and while they may be there to support you, they won’t necessarily be the ones your book is written for. Your audience needs to extend wider than your community. However, like building a community, in defining an audience, it’s important to be specific. Your audience is the people whose goals, interests, and needs intersect with the specific information your book provides and are people who are already primed to be interested in what you have to say. The bonds that are formed are more one-way than community—they flow from you as the author to an individual audience member by way of your book.

Building an audience without building a community is a difficult and unfulfilling task. Community is what sustains you: Your community is there to celebrate your wins and support you when the going gets tough, to help you try out new ideas, and give you critical feedback as you explore different paths. Community is not something you can take for granted, nor is it a guarantee. Before we delve into specific book promotion tactics to connect with your audience, we need to take a deep dive into finding a community and your place within it.

Where to Begin: It’s Never Too Early to Cultivate Community

Community is incredibly important for everyone, but especially for creative people. Communities happen when, A group of people have a web of bonds between each other and those bonds happen when they care for each other, or about each other, explains expert community builder Danielle Maveal, who has done work building and sustaining communities at Etsy, BarkBox, and Airbnb. Maybe you are already an active member of certain communities and have strong bonds. Even so, it’s always beneficial to remember how to be a good community member. Above all, follow the golden rule: treat others as you want to be treated.

You want your approach to community to feel organic and authentic and not forced, not like ‘I’m doing this because I have to sell my book.’ So you want to start before you are selling something, says writer and community builder Amy Long, author of Codependence and the creator of the Taylor Swift as Books Instagram account. As you set out to build a community around your book and yourself as a writer, keep the following in mind: community is your currency, and you need to save and spend it wisely. In this spirit, the first step of building community is to put yourself out there. Not to get anything in return, but to get to know the community, what’s important to them, and what their needs are. Danielle explains, Especially when you’re interested in building community around a topic or yourself as a creator, you should first go be part of relevant communities in a valuable way. So you go, you listen, you understand how people interact in this space, you contribute, you help out. By doing this, you’re not only becoming part of a community, but you’re learning a lot about the people in this space.

Community building is the most effective and cost-effective way that you can find an audience as an independent author because there’s very much a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ mentality in the indie publishing community, and a lot of our readers are voracious, explains Jessie Kwak, who authors nonfiction how-to books for creatives and self-publishes a series of science fiction novels. However, it’s important to understand the difference between the community you want to build and the audience you want to buy your book. So much of community is going with your gut, but a huge rule in the indie author community is to not be a shark among the minnows, other authors are not your customers, emphasizes Jessie. You are there to help and support each other, not sell.

Don’t be afraid to be very specific about what kind of community you want to be a part of or build. In doing so, you are more likely to find people who understand and support your writing (and you!). Or as Danielle says, Going more niche and finding those weirdos that you relate to, that feels cool. For example, finding poets in your city might feel far too broad, but finding other LGBTQ+ poets can help you build a specific community. In a real-life example, Jessie connected with other self-published authors after attending a conference organized by the hosts of a long-running podcast about self-publishing. There, she was able to meet other like-minded authors who were just trying to write cool stories and weren’t afraid of business and was able to carry those in-person connections into online communities. She explains that for her, if she hadn’t been able to make initial connections at an event, the online connections she has wouldn’t feel as strong.

Once you’ve gotten to know people in a specific community, you will become more aware of their needs. Once you start to get a feel for the certain community you’re curious about, really start honing in and paying attention to what you hear people saying. You’ll actually start to see people ask for things, want to have conversations, or want to connect with others in ways that just can’t be supported by the community because they might serve one niche or they don’t have enough resources. So it’s actually a great way to find your first community members and find that community niche that you can help create, explains Danielle. If community members are asking for something or wishing for something that you can help provide, this is a great opportunity to participate, give back, and build goodwill. For example, perhaps the community you are interested in needs an open-mic night or wants to start a publication together—these are projects that you could help with to build bonds, get to know others, and learn more about what people in this community are making.

To make this more concrete, if you have a book coming out and you want to be more active in a community that is related to that book, whether it be other writers in your genre or people whose interests overlap with the subject of the book, seek out:

• Events

• Publications

• Classes or courses

• Volunteer opportunities

• Social media accounts of influential organizations and community members

If you are not sure where to start with community building, what communities you want to be a part of, or where to find them, get more specific: List specific interests and activities relevant to your book and then research local groups, organizations, stores, and classes that cater to these interests. Then find out how you can get involved and where they overlap with some of the ideas, themes, or subjects of your book.

Remember, community is a two-way street, so keep the following in mind as you start to engage with other community members:

• Be authentic

• Be generous

• Be realistic

• Be consistent

• Be vulnerable

Don’t just build community to get something, but show up, help out, and listen before you come with ideas and solutions. Think of this as building your literary citizenship. Danielle elaborates, I think the best thing you can do is be supportive to other members, be helpful when you can, and be consistent. So show up. That seems so simple, but what do you have to do to motivate yourself to show up right? Carve out time on your calendar, even if it’s something like an hour a week, or two events a month. Be authentic when you interact with people, understand what they are going through, and share your experiences. Show up as your full self, not as your brand, counsels Danielle. Be who you are, not who you think you should be for a certain community—people respond to authenticity and can sense it when you are being someone you are not. This goes both ways: if you start participating in a community and you don’t feel like people there are being authentic and don’t feel like they are showing up as their full selves, move on. When you’re vulnerable, you’re going to build real bonds, and we’re going to feel like we’re talking to the real you, says Danielle, If you can see someone is sharing their failures and fears, as well as their wins and the good stuff, then it’s much easier to connect with them.

Your Guide to Being a Good Literary Citizen

If it hasn’t become clear already, finding and participating in community is a long game. It will not instantly help your book sell many copies, but it will help you build a more sustainable and satisfying literary career. By attending, supporting, participating in, and perhaps even organizing events, conversations, gatherings, workshops, and publications, among others that are centered in your community, you will be contributing to the health and vibrancy of your community and inspiring other writers. Being a good literary citizen goes back even further to your own writing: are you writing what you really want to write and what feels authentic to you, your passions, and concerns, and are you making the best decisions for yourself as a writer? Nathan McDowell, who runs the Two Dollar Radio HQ bookstore—a hub for literary and creative community in Columbus, Ohio—has helped build community around the store by catering to a specific, niche audience. For authors, he reflects, You could write the book that you think might get better attention, but then you’re not writing a book you care about anymore. You could sell your book to the highest bidder, but they might tear it apart just to make it work for them. This is something that you do as a passion, so you want to be in community with people who care about it.

So what makes a good literary citizen? It’s someone who doesn’t just care about their own writing and work, but takes time to support and nurture others, and contributes not just to their friends, but to