Floundering in the book promotion world

by Rick Blechta

I was buttonholed this past week by an author who has her first book coming up for release in June. She was thrilled to meet a real live “published author” and immediately began peppering me with questions, all of which were about promotion.

She’d gotten a one-page PDF from her publisher about what she could do to promote her book. It also included a questionnaire basically asking what she’d already done. Did she have a website? Was she on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc? Was she a member of a group that would buy her book? Could she think of alternative places to sell her book? Did she know any broadcasters or media people? And so on.

The poor thing was completely confused and stumped about how to do all these things. She’d first told her publicist this and was (nicely) told that with so many authors to promote, there wasn’t time to hold her hand. “Ask another author for help.”

And then I came along.

First of all, when I’d heard her tale of woe, I was annoyed at the publicist. So it’s expected that other authors will help out? Come on!

But I also felt very bad for this nice lady, and couldn’t bring myself to turn my back on her. She was pretty darned desperate.

She’s not too computer savvy, but her daughter and granddaughter are. She knew how to search for things on the Internet, so we talked about that. “There’s a lot of free help out there. You just have to find it. It will take time to get good at searches, but you’re smart. You’ll get the hang of it.” If we’d had a computer handy, I’d have done a bit of quick work to get her started.

For the website, I suggested one of the sites that offers good, ready-made templates and great customer support. “Maybe your granddaughter could help you design something simple. You don’t need a complicated site.”

She was on Facebook, but only sporadically used it to find former classmates, childhood friends and the like. You need an author page.

After nearly an hour-and-a-half, I felt as if I’d barely scratched the surface of author self-promotion. I did have to extricate myself from the situation because I could have spent a week showing her the ins and outs, but at least I’d given her a small box of “tools” with which she could start off.

Now, this is not an isolated case. There are lots of authors, new and old, who desperately need help in this regard. I’ve never heard of a publisher who gives much help, and honestly, they really don’t have the time to help authors through this quagmire. But they also should be able to point their authors in viable directions. After all, the publisher will benefit from the sale of every book, too.

The Internet is a good source of help, but there is a hell of a lot of information out there. It would take multiple hours to wade through — and in the end you wouldn’t know what is good advice and what is bad.

She could always hire professional book publicist to help, but there are a lot of sharks in those waters and I felt obliged to warn her away from that unless she got personal recommendations. Since she doesn’t know any other authors, that’s not likely to happen. I don’t know anyone and I got horribly burned in this regard several years ago.

Does anyone out there know a source of good, reliable information on the Internet or in a book to help my new friend out? Suggestions will be gratefully received and passed on immediately.

Thanks!