I have a new book coming out tomorrow, so I’ve been thinking a lot about book publicity.
Book publicity is different from marketing. Book publicity is the more grassroots effort to get attention for your book. While authors and book publishers pay for marketing, book publicity is the free publicity that everyone hopes a book will garner.
“That’s so exciting!” several friends—who aren’t writers—and one very supportive family member have been saying.
My writer friends have a different reaction.
“Prepare for the calm before the calm,” one particularly astute writer cautioned me months ago.
You work on something for what feels like a thousand years, interview two million people, log 34,000 nights of insomnia, read hundreds of scientific studies, and go back and forth with your New York-based publishers a trillion times.
Your book is as perfect as you can make it, despite some very embarrassing will-be-corrected-in-the-next-printing-perhaps-unavoidable mistakes. But instead of feeling like doing a happy dance all you feel like doing is throwing up.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one…
If a book is written in Oregon and no one…
See what I mean?
Don’t you feel like throwing up now too?
Whether your new book charges out the gate to become a bestseller in the first week or sprains both ankles and is only purchased by your grandmother, writers wonder what book publicity actually works. That is, how does someone go from hearing about a book, reading about a book, seeing a book in a bookstore to actually buying the book?
I’m someone who buys books and loves to give books as gifts. I just bought five more copies of an outstanding memoir called Daughter of the Drunk at the Bar by Ilonka Michelle O’Neil, and three more copies of The Thinking Moms Revolution.
But there are often books that I hear about and mean to read but that I don’t actually purchase until months, or even years, later.
I can write until the cows come home (these gloriously mixed metaphors notwithstanding) but selling books is not something writers, myself included, are naturally good at. If we were, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about book publicity. And we wouldn’t be writers. We would be salespeople, marketers, CEOs.
And those folks hire ghostwriters to write their books.
To get good book publicity you have to be an “authorpreneur”
But we live in the 21st-century whether we like it or not and the new paradigm is that it’s not enough to be an author.
You have also to be an “authorpreneur.”
Translation: it’s not enough to hope your book will sell and these days you can no longer play the “I’m an artist not a marketer” card.
(Unless you have a trust fund or someone else paying the bills in which case it really doesn’t matter if your book sells a single copy and if that’s the case, my friend, you don’t need to be reading this book publicity blog).
Instead, you have to get off your sorry [insert skin tone or optional self-deprecatory ethnic slur here] ass and sell your damned book your damned self.
The problem with being an authorpreneur is the more you study the market, the more you get the impression that the book publishing industry isn’t really sure anymore how the fuck to sell books or do book publicity.
In our post digital age when people like to read around instead of read and even those who were born when the telephone still had something called a cord are tending to surf the web for quick information and believe that what they read on Wikipedia is accurate, one can’t help wondering whether reading as we once knew it (reading, say, a bona fide book like the one I spent the last three years writing and the last ten years researching) is, um, dead.
One of the books I wrote, that came out from a small publisher in Wisconsin, Why Babies Do That, sold over 20,000 copies.
I credit my mother-in-law with singlehandedly selling about 10,000. Her sister, my husband’s aunt, bought more than a dozen copies to give away as gifts.
When it comes to book publicity, never underestimate the power of in-laws!
My mother-in-law went to practically every gift store in Atlanta, spoke to the buyers, and moved a serious amount of merchandise.
Though bookstores have an agreement with publishers to return unsold books, gift stores and clothing stores and travel stores that carry books usually don’t have that agreement so every order placed is a book sold.
I’ve been asking everyone I know what inspires them to buy a book.
The answer has been surprisingly consistent: either because someone recommended it, they read about it on the internet, or they heard the author interviewed on NPR.
Word of mouth.
That elusive concept that companies like Klout are rather ridiculously trying to quantify. More power to you.
NPR.
I’m looking forward to that Morning Edition author interview and a nice long chat with Terry Gross, whose work I absolutely adore.
What author isn’t?
But instead of curling my hair and filing my nails while I wait for the paparazzi to descend, to help this horse get legs, I’m doing some guerrilla book publicity by sending myself on a book tour in cyberspace.
My book publicity strategy includes a book tour in cyberspace
A few months ago I started contacting bloggers I admire to ask if they’d be interested in hosting me on their blogs: either by doing a Q & A, publishing a short excerpt from the book, or writing a review. I am hoping to go as far away as South Africa (Tertia, are you reading this?) and I also plan to be in Hawaii, Australia, Canada, and across the United States.
Close to home, Literary Ashland asked me who my favorite writers are and what surprised me most in this Q & A with me (click on the link, will you? Show these bloggers some love!)
I’ve also been to San Francisco: Debbie Abrams Kaplan at Frisco Kids reviewed the book on Sunday:
“This is a book every woman should read. It’s an awakening. And it’s a weighty book (though easy to read). I’m someone of “advanced maternal age” whose womb is hopefully closed for business. My kids are way beyond the baby stage. But the book opens up insight into a medical system that is not always on our side, sad to say…”
Today Frisco Kids published a Q & A with me.
In the southern part of the state, Jessica Gottlieb, a professional blogger, L.A. mom, and one smart lady (if you haven’t read her post about pretty vaginas, it’s not to be missed) and I duke it out about sex, cigarettes, and epidurals.
Jessica asked me the. best. questions. ever.
On the other side of the country, Brette Sember in Buffalo, New York, whose blog is called Putting It All On The Table, wrote this review in which she concluded:
“Some of her views might shock you, but others might hit home. This book is going to start a national conversation about our preconceived notions about pregnancy, birth, and baby care. You want to read it so that you can form your own opinions.”
My book also made it to a newspaper in Houston, Texas. In an article that came out in the Houston Chronicle called “Advice for new parents is big business,” reviewer Steve Weinberg writes:
“Pregnancy and childbirth and infant care seem like they should be out of bounds when it comes to greed and corruption. There is no harm in physicians and hospitals and providers of baby products earning a profit. But unconscionable profits, particularly when the health of the unborn, infants and mothers might be harmed? In addition to its investigative aspect, “The Business of Baby” qualifies as a parent guide. In easy-to-read, nontechnical prose, Margulis shows how to avoid safety traps and greedy salesmongers.”
I wrote the book to make pregnancy and the first year of life safer, gentler, and more enjoyable. It’s the book I wish I had when I was 29 years old and pregnant for the first time. A lot of people, especially pregnant mamas on a budget, can’t afford to buy books. Those are arguably the folks who could most benefit from reading it.
So next time you’re at the library, ask them to order a copy.
Readers and writers, I’m curious to hear from you about book publicity and book buying. What motivates you to buy a book? Do you think the publishing industry dead?
First published: April 15, 2013
Post Updated: August 15, 2019
Beautiful and enlightening essay. I am clicking over to share it on my facebook page immediately. My book was published in Sept of last year and I continue to get asked, by friends and family, “how are the book sales?” They assume because I stirred up some media coverage in a few small places (with a lot of hard work) that I’m close to making those millions that ‘all’ writers make. It’s a tough question to answer, even if they do care to hear an answer.
Thanks for this post. I, for one, will find your book and read it. My womb is also ‘closed for business’, as our four children are ages 12 and up, but I am fascinated by this subject and some day hope to be a grandma to a baby, which means I’ll be navigating this topic once again, second hand.
The BEST of luck to you, Jennifer!!
Judy Johnson Berna
justonefoot.com
I usually buy books on impulse, right off the co op tables at the book store. I very rarely buy them off the regular shelves. Or I get them for book club or because a friend told me about it.
I buy books because of friends’ recommendations and really compelling reviews.
Hey Jen,
Do you ever plan to retract the lies you keep spreading about the hep b vaccine? That the diseases is fifty times as contagious as HIV? That the younger you get it, the more your chance of liver failure? So that’s why we vaccinate?
Do you also plan to keep seriously arguing the home birthing is safe in Oregon . . . as long as you leave out Portland?
You and that nitwit Hababus are a menace to the health of our families. Do us all a favor and shut up and go away!
Oh, how sweet. Maybe you should write a book.
Boo! Perhaps there are better uses of your time?
There is evidence for the perspective that Ms. Margulis presents in her new book. See her post about fact checking if you have any doubts about her integrity and commitment to using factual information in her work.
NJ can’t wait for your visit, Jennifer! There are lots of intelligent moms here who are grateful for an evidence-based conversation about risks, outcomes, and choices. We can spot corporate propaganda from miles away. We’re also willing to stick our necks out! And ad hominem attacks slide off our backs because… well, really, is that the best they can do? I love this quote from Psychology Today: “…the last gasp of anyone with a limited skill set – social, emotional, physical, or otherwise — is to lash out.” http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/enlightened-living/200911/ego-insecurity-and-the-destructive-narcissist
I do not have a motivation problem when it comes to buying books. I have the opposite problem. I will run out of time before I run out of books. I am incapable of throw a book away. What if I want to read it again? I buy books for every possible reason you can imagine. I troll Amazon, bookstores, libraries, flea markets, and my friends’ bookshelves. My favorite feature is Amazon’s Look Inside—that’s usually all it takes. And I read the reviews… it’s democratic, the readers are fair, and the mean-spirited ones are so obvious, it’s easy to ignore them.
A friend described this perfectly when I asked her if she was so psyched that her novel was out. She said, “It’s not like you walk down the street and people are singing the lines of your book.” It’s such a crazy feeling.
Congratulations,, Jennifer!
I spoke to you at the County Hospital in Chicago about the Centering Pregnancy model.
Amazon has let me know that my books have shipped-should be at my home tomorrow.
I buy books-I have a large collection of birth-related books which I lend, but since I want them back, my friends then buy them. I live in a community which still supports wonderful bookshops and authors, and my local library will buy anything in this area that I recommend.
The more media, the better.
Hope to see you in Chicago!
If I love a book, I have to own it. Usually, when I have time, I get books from the library. Then, if I love them, I buy them. I will buy books, too, when I hear an interview of the author that tells me the book is one I will enjoy. I also buy books as presents.
I’ve bought more than one book after hearing a great interview on NPR or a snippet of it featured in a weekend paper. So how do we do a write-in petition to get Terry to interview you? Or Diane Rehm often features authors in her second hour? Steve Inskeep in the AM?
I think your book would make a great gift for an expecting mom too.
I just picked up my copy today. I’m very excited to read it. Congratulations.