Book Marketing Buzz

Book Marketing Buzz: Book Promotion & Publicity Tips: How to Promote Your Books is a continuing series to help authors learn how to promote their books. If you would like to be a guest blogger for our book promotion and publicity series, click here.

Our guest blogger for today is author Karin Abarbanel, author of Birthing the Elephant.

The approach that I and my co-author have used to promote Birthing the Elephant has been comprehensive. We both made a major commitment to publicizing the book using all our contacts and resources. In analyzing my own promotional activities, I’ve basically adopted a 9-step strategy outlined here:

1) Set a target: It’s important to give yourself an actual target number of books that you want to sell. As the peak performance expert Rob Gilbert, one of the experts interviewed for our book says, “Make a commitment, make it public, make it happen.” My personal target for first-round sales for Birthing the Elephant is 200,000. With 200,000 women launching new ventures every month across the country, I think this figure is reachable. It gives me something to aim for in my promotional activities and keeps me focused.

2) Go online and off line to promote: We are pushing forward with plans to tackle just about every channel possible. We are pursuing any and all print leads, we funded a radio campaign, we are using alumni publications, I have written stories for Internet sites like Work It, Mom and Beliefnet.org, and World Net Daily. I just completed 2 segments for a major online small business site and conducted a teleseminar. We have found that the impact is cumulative.

3) Keep a log: It’s important to keep a record of all your activities – otherwise you can quickly lose track of what you’ve done. Borrowing a strategy from the wildly successful Chicken Soup authors, I’ve committed to doing at least 5 promotional activities a day (they actually did 7).

4) Follow up: This is challenging for me, but I am improving every day!
 It’s very important to stay on top of the contacts you make through friends and networking. The more leads you follow up on, the better your results.

5) Tell everyone you need help: This is key! A lot of my leads have come from talking to people about my book and asking them if they know anyone who can help me get the word out. I found a contact at Working Mother this way and one at Columbia University. People are happy to help, but you have to
let them know you need it. As one friend said, “You don’t ask, you don’t get.”

6) Move quickly: “Success likes speed” – that’s a saying I’ve adopted as my mantra for this book. When I get a flash of intuition or a contact name, I move quickly to follow up – momentum is important.

7) Be creative: Come up with new ideas and ways to repurpose information in your book so that you can keep it fresh and newsworthy. I’ve taken materials on pitfalls to avoid and strategies from the book and turned them into short pithy stories that have been circulated on the Web. When I found out that one of the women I interviewed shopped at Costco for her supplies, I pitched a story about her to Costco’s monthly magazine.

8) Be persistent: Like the intrepid women entrepreneurs in Birthing the Elephant, I’ve found that persistence is vital. I push myself to keep pushing at promotion each and every day, even when I don’t feel like it.

9) Hold your vision: It’s very important to stay in touch with what I want to share with people about my book. This gives me a sense of urgency that really helps keep me motivated to get out and promote.

Karin Abarbanel is co-author of Birthing the Elephant.  You can visit her website at www.birthingtheelephant.com.