485. How to Promote Your Book Without Being a Bore
So, how am I going to promote my book, so may well ask, if the picture
is so grim? How can I get people to be invested, interested or motivated to buy
my book?
Have you ever heard of people going wild about a book where there’s
nothing to rave about?
Precisely!
So that’s your first ingredient- write a book people
will WANT to rave about.
But even so- you can’t get people to rave about your book if they don’t
know of its existence. And here we are back to square one. People who don’t
know you, are not stimulated by you and therefore they are not invested in you
or your book. So where do you start from to get known?
That’s ingredient number two. Your BASE is the
starting point to getting known.
You start right there, from home. Talk about your book to your mother, father,
sister, brother, in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins- right up to the seventh generation-
and so on and so on. They, are the ones who will listen to you, will put up
with you, and if anyone in this world is going to be invested in you, it will
be precisely those who care for you- they will be the ones most likely to get
involved and interested.
Ah, but… you may object and rightly so, Stephen King and such notable
authors had their publisher who invested real hard cash in their promotion-
such authors never had to enlist their grandmothers, did they?
I’m not all that convinced that a publisher can make a super-star writer
out of you if you don’t have a core backing of your own fans, and as I have
said, to get that you have to start from the base- your home, your kith and
kin, the guys next door, the parishioners at the church or your political party
club mates… etc. etc. etc.
Home- that’s where I started. I wrote “The Litany of Malediction” in my
mother tongue, English. But I didn’t live in a country where people spoke
English and if I was going to get people interested in my book I had to get
involved with them, talk to them and that meant talking to them in their own language,
which in this case was Italian. So, I translated the book in Italian but felt
that the title I had in English sounded too churchy for Italians. I realized I
would not get a lot of the locals invested in something that smelt too much of
incense and so we came up with something more suitable. Since the book was
about a religious person with an attachment to the Devil, we thought, “The
Slyness of a Praying Mantis” would be a good fit.
Thus, I now had my product and people interested in it- I had to launch
it. There were two ways I could do that. I could launch the book at the local
library or a pizzeria and I would get quite a number of locals and a few
outsiders who got to know about it, which for me, quite honestly, was fine. I certainly
would have got more people coming than if I launched it in an unknown place or
even virtually on Internet.
The other alternative was to involve a family member who loved organizing things- (there’s always one of those in every family!) and a fellow local writer whom I had known for years, and like myself had just published a book. The family member, who is always in the middle of things, is friends with the friend of a famous local author who, as fate would have it, had just published a book and agreed to launch his book with us if we could find a place big enough to host the event. And we did. The Mayor put at our disposal the local theatre which seats nearly 300 people.
At the top is the poster announcing the event and hopefully we will sell lots of books- all three of us!
But more importantly it will spread the word to those uncharted corners of the universe where my “creature” would otherwise have remained unknown and unseen… and this is what is called “promotion”.
