A-ha!

Build Buzz For Your Book

"Recovering publicist" Sandra Beckwith will be hosting her online book publicity workshop from June 2 to 27. The workshop is designed to help authors build buzz around their books.

Got a book coming out you want to promote? Do you want to launch your new book with the greatest excitement possible? Are you selling a book that you know deserves more media attention than it's getting? You need "Book Publicity 101: How to Build Book Buzz," a dynamic online course taught by a veteran publicist and author.

Offered June 2 to 27, the class is taught in a forum format, with lessons and homework assignments posted online in a private, password-protected forum. The highly-interactive course covers:

• How to announce your book professionally and successfully to the press and other key communities;
• Why and how you must create a book publicity blueprint that makes the most of your available resources;
• How to craft the most compelling media materials needed to generate results;
• The single secret most authors don't know about generating ongoing media exposure;
• The most effective and cost efficient publicity tactics;
• How to generate book buzz online using virtual book tours and other techniques;
• Radio and TV producer hot buttons; and
• How to bring an energizing new level of creativity to your publicity efforts

Students receive instructional materials and resources and complete weekly assignments that help them discover how easy it is to create book buzz. Student interaction on the forum offers fresh perspectives and new ideas for all participants while one-on-one instructor guidance and input takes your work to the next level. A free-for-all Q&A corner lets students get answers to questions not covered in the course materials, making this a highly-personalized learning experience for nonfiction and fiction authors.

The class is taught by Sandra Beckwith, a recovering award-winning publicist, publisher of the free e-zine Build Book Buzz and author of three books, including two on publicity topics.

Registration is $179 and limited to 20 students.

Click here to register, send course inquiries to Beckwith at sb@buildbookbuzz.com

Help us plan Publishing 3.0

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Blog to Book to Blog

And back again.

The intersection of print and online publishing is where we live (WME Books, WME Blogs). So we are very proud and excited to share this conversation from our blog-buddy Toby Bloomberg's blogtalkradio show entitled Creating and Promoting Books with Social Media/Web 2.0. Toby's guests (she calls them rock stars) are book publicist Nettie Hartsock and our own Sybil Stershic, who blogs at Quality Service Marketing and wrote Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care.

Just click the play button and get ready to learn.

Note: Because there is so much great information in the show covering both book- and blog-related topics, I'm going to cross-post this on A-ha! and WME Blogs, so please forgive. I think you'll want to listen to it more than once anyway ... and take notes!

Toby also blogged about the show and provided lists of tips from both Nettie and Sybil. Here's a taste:

Nettie: "Ask not what a blogger can do for you, ask how you, your book or your product can benefit the blogger and its readership ..."

Sybil: [on applying the "3 Rs" from her book to how authors should treat reviewers] "Reinforce their helping you with appropriate reciprocity (such as linking to their blog or website on your blog)."

There's more on Toby's blog and much more in the interview, so I'll get out of the way.

Note 2: In the interest of full disclosure (and maybe a little shameless self-promotion), Sybil is one our authors and her book is one of our best sellers since it's release last October. And she REALLY "gets" the whole blog to book to blog marketing concept.

We also have a connection to blogtalkradio, John Havens (VP of Business Development). John is co-authoring a book on business transparency with another of our clients, Shel Holtz, for Jossey-Bass and it's IABC book series. WME is acting as their agents.

Virtual Book Tours

The virtual book tour has become a successful (and easy) way to market your book. There are a number of folks who do this full-time, and a number of publishers who offer it to their authors. We are always committed to new and exciting ways to market books so we have started offering this option to our authors. In the near future, we will also offer it to other authors interested in tapping into the blogosphere for attention and connections.

Note that the virtual book tour cannot guarantee sales. In reality, nothing can guarantee sales -- except maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars traditional publishers put into books they want to be bestsellers. Mind you, that backfires sometimes, too. But, if a book gets mega-attention, in hundreds of places, it's more likely to find buyers.

And that's why a VBT is a good idea. A small group of niche bloggers writing about your book - can connect you to thousands of readers. Who, if they blog, could write about you and your book, and continue the connections.

VBTs take time, effort, and management. The more bloggers you engage, the more time and effort is involved.

We'll talk more about this in future posts. Meanwhile, follow our current virtual book tour (starting on Thursday, January 10th, 2008) and feel free to join the conversation.

What's your "author platform" made of?

A couple of news stories got me thinking (again) about the problem of selling your book after all the investment of time, emotion, and money to get it written and published. The message remains: the primary responsibility for marketing a book falls on the author.

This morning on the CBS Sunday Morning Show, Bill Geist did an amusing piece on his efforts to sell his new book, Way Off the Road. You can read the script here or click to watch the video.

But to me the story behind the story was Geist's enormous book marketing platform as a television journalist.

An author's platform is critical to the decision-making process in the world of big publishers, as described byWiley & Sons executive Joe Wickert in his blog:

Years ago, [platform] implied things like author visibility, speaking engagements, whether they're a regular columnist in a key magazine, etc.  These are still important pieces, but now you have to add in things like how popular their blog is, how large an e-mail list they have access to, etc.

The same point was made in a ForeWord magazine article by Patti Dickinson a few years earlier:

Simply stated, platform is what an author brings to the marketing table. ... today's authors need to demonstrate the desire and aptitude to make their name and book title known to the book-buying public. ... The truth is, the well-written book by an author who has marketing savvy and a willingness to use it, has a significant advantage over an equal book by an author who doesn't or won't. If the former is someone who can identify a core group of readers and will use the Internet to market the title, what you have is platform personified.

"Platform personified." When that was written in 2000, she likely did not have the term blog to apply to her concept of identifying a core group of readers and using the Internet to reach them.

And today our colleague Greg Bell sent me a link to a NY Times article on the use of podcasts to create audiobooks (I've seen them labeled "podiobooks") and use them to generate interest in the printed book even before it's published.

The technology to create blogs and podcasts is available to any author and can help level the playing field for small presses and independent authors. So what's your platform built from?

They're Out There: A Fifth of Readers Visit Author or Publisher Sites

[Note from Tom: I know no other bloggers experience this, but with our book publishing work directly with authors at WME Books and our other blog work, Yvonne and I feel like we don't get enough time to post in this blog and engage with our A-ha! readers. So we're very happy to have some more help ...

New to A-ha! ... introducing ... Posts by Greg!

Greg Bell, our new A-ha! blogger, is a partner in D.S. Leach Consulting, with his wife Dianna Leach. Both of them will be posting about book publishing here and about blogs at our business blogging blog, WME Blogs. Greg has much to share from his experience both in book publishing and in building and publishing blogs (check out his Jazz@Rochester blog), so let's just dive right in with Greg's first post on A-ha!]

According to a recent report on the Publisher's Weekly website, a survey of a sample of 813 readers conducted by the New York advertising agency Spier-New York found that 18% of readers have been to a publisher's Web site and 23% of those polled had visited the site of an author. A higher percentage of those who visited authors' (35%) or publishers' (21%) sites were under the age of 35 (which as the post notes, is not surprising). The survey also found that 50 percent of those asked said they purchased a book as a gift within the past year. While 89% of those who bought books as gifts apparently bought from a brick-and-mortar retailer, there were still 28% of them bought their book gift online. Also encouraging is that 86% of those buying books as gifts bought at least two books. Using the total number of books sold in a year (it was over 709 million units in 2005) the actual numbers of readers involved could be pretty impressive.

So, is there anything to take away from this survey? To start, it shows that people are still buying books as gifts. And, most importantly for A-ha! readers, an author's or publisher's website (or blog) is becoming increasingly important in driving those sales.

Seth Godin's Advice for Authors

What Seth calls a "short list" of advice for authors reads a lot like the chapter outline for another great book! Nearly every one of his 19 items could stand more elaboration. Maybe we'll get the chance to revisit the list items individually, but for now we especially recommend these excerpts:

2. ... build a blog ...

3. Pay for an editor ...

7. Think really hard before you spend a year trying to ... get your book published by a 'real' publisher ...

8. Your cover matters [i.e. pay for a professional cover designer] ...

12. Blog mentions ... matter a lot.

And the one that should crystalize the most important and valuable ROI a nonfiction author should be focused on (hint: it's not cash in the form of advances or royalties):

19. Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message with authority. You should write one.

Read # 19 again, slowly, line-by-line, and let those benefits sink in:

Writing a book is a tremendous experience.

[Wtiting a book] pays off intellectually.

[Wtiting a book] clarifies your thinking.

[Publising a book] builds credibility.

[Your book] is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message with authority.

You should write one.

Now GO! Read the rest of Seth's tips . . . and follow some of the trackback links, too (some good ones here, here, and here, but the list keeps growing every time I go back, so explore).

Some Left-over Chicken Soup

Many authors we talk with struggle most with the realities of marketing their book after the long struggle and great achievement of writing it.

Here's some tough love style authors helping authors advice from Mark Victor Hansen:

"When you've finished writing the book, you're only 10 percent done. Then you're doing the other 90 percent — marketing, selling, hustling and promoting it."

The quote comes from an article in our local Gannett paper, the Rochester [NY] Democrat & Chronicle. You can (and, we suggest, should) read the entire article here.

Lunch with a Book PR Expert

Yvonne and I had lunch today with Sandy Beckwith, a fellow author and self-described "recovering publicist" (among her many writing and speaking related former and current career activities). Since figuring out how to promote and sell books is the challenge we hear about most from authors, Sandy's experience and her willingness to share are a wonderful combination.

Yvonne will likely treat you to a more in-depth interview of Sandy soon, but we didn't want to hold back on encouraging authors to find out more about her on your own. Her website is filled with full text articles and links to lots more. With titles like "12 ways to keep your nonfiction book in the news" and "Get paid to promote your book!" -- well, she got our attention.

Not surprisingly, one of Sandy's books is Streetwise Complete Publicity Plans, which focuses on how small businesses can develop effective PR campaigns. (Note: if you're an author with a book for sale, you're a small business.) She also teaches an online 4-week course specifically for authors who want to learn how to create buzz for their books: "Book Publicity 101: How to Create Book Buzz" (note: the correct dates for the next course are listed on her website as April 3 - 28; the registration form has the wrong dates, but should still work).

As most authors quickly discover, even with a traditional publisher, much of the responsiblity for promoting and selling books falls on the author. Even if you have a publisher that's willing to work with you, it pays to be an effective partner in the book marketing effort. Sandy Beckwith is a great resource for learning how!

Can Self-Published Authors Get Noticed?

We're asked this question a lot. Most authors want their work to be noticed. It's the first step toward selling, of course, but in some cases getting the author noticed may be a major goal in itself.

Usually, we respond with examples down through history, from William Blake to Mark Twain to John Grisham, sending people to Dan Poynter's extensive list.

But today we can't help but point to one of our own: Dr. Stephanie Siegrist. She's quoted and her book, Know Your Bones: Making Sense of Athritis Medicine, is mentioned in the holiday issue of Woman's Day magazine (Dec. 6, 2005; pg. 54).

It's also worth noting that the connections that lead to Stephanie being interviewed for this article came through her and Yvonne's blogs.

So yes, self-published authors and their books can get noticed. The trick is in

1. Producing a book worth noticing (Know Your Bones qualifies; check the sample chapters for yourself); and then

2. Using the available tools to help promote it (do we need to say it again? Blogs work! Check the Wall Street Journal article "Book Publishers Build Buzz Early, Hollywood Style," online version, or print version, WSJ, 12/1/05, p. B1, col. 5).