For Writers: On Promotion

I consider myself knowledgeable about book promotion, but not a very good promoter recently due my inability to do much of it due to problems. But a lot of the ways that people promote their books seems wrong to me. They promote the same over and over again. It is boring. It seems desperate. These are the only times that you should EVER link to your books Amazon page: your book is released, your book is now available for Kindle, the price for the Kindle book has gone drastically down (particularly if it is now free), and if a review is extremely interesting. You should not link to it every time someone writes a new review for your book. Do not link to a review on a book blog if it is not interesting. Instead, keep a list of links to reviews on your website if you want. Do not ask people to buy your book as “a birthday present” to you.  Do not ask them to buy it to help you out financially. Unless you are more financially needy than the typical poverty-stricken writer, people do not give a shit about helping you out financially. They are more interested in reading your book.

There are a limited amount of ways to promote your book. When you run out of ways to promote it, you should start promoting yourself. Make people think, “Hey! This guy is awesome! I want to read his book!” Constantly be calling attention to yourself without being a spam king or being boring. This is a lot easier to do if you are humorous. But if you’re not, perhaps you live an interesting life that you can write about. If you do not lead an interesting life, do not write about it. No one wants to here about how depressed you are. If you feel the need to overshare, start a new facebook profile and send friend requests to people who can stand your blubbering. Do not use the same account to promote yourself and to complain about your problems.

Use different social media platforms to call attention to yourself, such as writing blog entries. Do the same thing with your talents as far as making videos for youtube or putting images on tumbl (because people seem to think jokes are always funnier when the joke is superimposed over an image). My friend, Vince Kramer, takes pictures of action figures having sex. He is a great promoter even though he may not know he’s promoting his book this way.

Keep people coming back to your website or wanting to follow your status updates on facebook and twitter. Don’t bombard them with advertisements. Write about books that you like and other things. If you’re a very social person, use this to your advantage and talk to as many people as possible, but don’t mention your book if it’s not relevant. Stop being so lame.

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