I'm going to use the publishing of my Book, Two Gun Hart, as an example of the promotional methods I used, along with my suggestions on how to promote your independently published book.
You should have your book mostly done six months before the books release. I did not have all of Two Gun done, but I had enough to send out as an advanced readers copy, also called a galley. I clearly marked these as such so anyone who saw grammatical errors and such would know this was an unfinished copy. However, I've found that this might not have been such a good idea as I suspect that a few places bypassed doing stories about this because they ignored the "advanced" part and judged it as though it was done. I now believe it's best to have the book almost done with only a polish left to it six months out. (You still want to be flexible all the way to close to release as good ideas and suggestions might come up in time.
Most of this phase is spent sending the ARC to reviewers, or the story out to news sources that will need time to go over it, such as magazines which have long lead times. This is also a time to have friends go over it as well to find issues you may not have noticed, or to make last minute suggestions. It is also a great time to slowly start to build the buzz.
For Two Gun, I got it out to reviewers, and because it was such a huge news story, I started sending it to news sources that would require some time to look over it. I did not send it out a mass press release yet as I wanted that to be closer to the actual release time. Also, bear in mind, the book is not available for pre-order until three months from release, so anyone who reads about it during this time cannot order it. So everything I did was intended for future results.
The one thing I largely ignored were magazines, which was more or less a mistake. I didn't intend to ignore them altogether, but I put them as the lowest priority as magazines don't have as large a readership as other sources. This still holds true, however, a large number of people who read about history get magazines, so this is something I should have made a larger priority.
Also during this phase I did a lot of my research. I started an Excel sheet that had all the different types of media color coded along with the names of the various stations, newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc. So, for instance, all the radio stations were color coded blue, and they had the station's name, any contacts I might have, their email address, their phone number, etc. Newspapers, the same thing, but I color coded them white. Blogs had just the web address and email address and was color coded yellow, and so on. These will be used in the next couple phases.
#selfpublishingpromotion
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