Book Marketing Buzz: Book Promotion & Publicity Tips: How to Promote Your Books with Thriller Author James Hayman
Posted by pumpupyourbook on October 26, 2009
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.
Today’s guest blogger is James Hayman author of The Cutting.
Guest Post:
As a debut author I was lucky.
I got a lot of help promoting my first book
My first thriller, The Cutting, was bought by a major New York publishing house, St. Martin’s/Minoaur, in a two book deal. Minotaur made the book their lead title for July 2009 and assigned a staff publicity person to help promote it.
In the month before publication, Minotaur sent nearly two thousand advance reader copies out reviewers, bookstore owners and other key influencers. That paid off. The Cutting was named to the American Booksellers Association IndieNext list for July and was named a pick of the week by the Boston Globe. I also got reviewed by a half a dozen online reviewers as well the two major newspapers in my home state of Maine (The Bangor Daily News– http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/111054.html –, and The Portland Press Herald– http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=274367&ac=Audience&pg=1) and one in the near neighboring state of Rhode Island. I was featured on a major interview show called 207 that follows the evening news with Brian Williams on my local (Portland, Maine) NBC affiliate. I appeared on a debut authors panel moderated by best selling thriller writer David Baldacci at ThrillerFest 2009 in New York. I had successful readings and signings at a bunch of bookstores in Maine and a few elsewhere. I’ll be appearing on a panel at CrimeBake New England in November.
So what am I doing here?
While it all helped, and The Cutting is doing pretty well, it still wasn’t nearly enough for the book to really break out and head for best-sellerdom. And the St. Martin’s publicity folks had other authors to help.
It quickly became apparent that the gods of commercial success in book publishing would help those who helped themselves. It was up to me to push the book further.
I looked into hiring my own book publicist. But that was way too expensive. I was on my own.
The first step was a good website with a blog. www.jameshaymanthrillers.com. I got that finished even before the book came out on June 23rd. The second step was a Facebook fan page for The Cutting. I got that done about a couple of months ago. To take a look, just log onto Facebook and put The Cutting in the little search box on the upper right. I’ve got about eight hundred fans on the page and would be delighted if you want to add your name to the list.
One of the great benefits of Facebook is that it is a classic viral marketing tool. Viral as in virus. One Facebook fan catches the excitement for your book from another. Every time you post something on the fan page and one of your fans likes it or comments on it their comment goes to all their Facebook friends who can then click on it and be taken to my Fan page. Try it. It works.
I also did spend a little money running an ad for The Cutting on Facebook. You only pay for the people who click on your ad so its pretty efficient advertising and it seems to have worked pretty well so far.
The next step was to get more reviews from online reviewers and guest posts on other people’s blogs. For that I turned to Dorothy Thompson’s Pump Up Your Book Promotion. She arranged a virtual book tour for me that started October first and runs through the end of November. This post is one of the first stops.
Like the hero of The Cutting, James Hayman is a transplanted New Yorker. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manhattan, he spent more than twenty years writing TV advertising for clients like The U.S. Army, Lincoln-Mercury and Procter & Gamble. He moved to Portland, Maine in 2001. Four years later he decided to scratch a lifelong itch to write fiction and began work on his first suspense thriller featuring homicide detective Mike McCabe. St. Martin’s/Minotaur bought rights to The Cutting and published it in July, 2009. Hayman is currently at work on the second McCabe novel which is due to be published in July, 2010. The tentative title is The Chill of Night.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/thecutting
