Author Name: Jay Thomas Willis
Book Title(s): Implications For Effective Psychotherapy With African-Americans; As Soon as the Weather Breaks; The Cotton is High; Born to be Destroyed; Paranoid but not Stupid; Why Black Americans Behave as They Do; Hard Luck; When the Village Idiot Get Started; Educated Misunderstanding; The Devil in Angelica.
Marketing Subject: Working Actively at Exposing Your Book
Exposure for your book is making people aware of your book. Chances are if you don’t personally put some effort into this process, you’re not going to sell many books. There was a time when you could publish a book and let it sell itself. If there ever was such a time it is no more. You must do all you can to promote your book, if you’re going to be successful at marketing it.
Underdeveloped exposure is the worst possible situation for your book. You must learn to toot your own horn. If you’re introverted about promoting your book, you must quickly get over yourself. It’s necessary to promote your book at every available opportunity.
There are many ways to get exposure for your book. None of them are any more difficult than the writing process itself. You must develop a well-rounded marketing and promotions plan for you and your book. It would be an endless task to list all the promotional and marketing sources and approaches possible for you to utilize. Here are just a few of them: newspapers, magazines, Internet—includes chat rooms—Web sites—profile pages—blogs, radio, television, book reviews, press releases, public speaking engagements, book signings, book fairs, seminars, newsletters, writing articles, Internet radio, blog talk radio, and networking, etc. These are only a few of the many possible ways to help give exposure to your book.
You may have the best possible book, written under the best of circumstances—dotted all your I’s and crossed all your t’s, horned it with perfect grammar, with the best of intentions, but it you don’t promote it, you still won’t sell many copies. Even if you did your research, worked hard to get it ready for publication, then hired a good professional editor to edit it after friends and family have reviewed it—if it’s not promoted and marketed, you have worked in vain.
If you don’t personally promote and market your book, you’ll be lucky to sell even a few copies to family and friends. You are the one responsible for making it happen; if you don’t do it no one else will. Sometimes it takes months, and often years of patient-hard work to get your book to thoroughly saturate the general public.
I hope you are beginning to see that along with the approaches mentioned above there are many others, and to feel more positive about your chances to utilize them in promoting and marketing your book.
Some of the ways to market and promote your book are virtually free. Authors have few excuses for not marketing their book. Ignorance is no longer an excuse. So don’t sit around wondering what to do after you’ve put all that energy into writing your book. If it’s as good as you think, your book deserves a fair chance on the market. Not all of the possible approaches will work for you, but learn to utilize what works best for you. There are enough promotional and marketing approaches to go around. You might even find some approaches not mentioned in books, if you search your soul. It is necessary to search yourself for some creative ways to market your book.
