Go Forth and Pimp: Self-Promotion 101

I promised on Friday that my first “official” post would be about promoting your book(s), and by extension, yourself. Some of you are probably already thinking, “Well, this has nothing to do with me, because I don’t have a book to promote.”

To which I say, “Au contraire, mon frere (or soeur, as the case may be).” The perfect time to start thinking about how you’re going to promote your books and your “brand” as an author is before you sell. (And I'm betting that most of you who have blogs have them, at least in part, because you know there's self-promotion value in them, so it's not like you haven't thought about this already!) Having sold something, however small, I’m already behind the eight-ball and have to play some catch-up.

Before I go into any specifics, however, I need to credit the source of this information and send you to her website. Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a multi-published author who has made a sideline career out of teaching writers how to promote their work in ways their publishers just won't. If you visit her other website, http://howtodoitfrugally.com/, you can order her book, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't, which goes into a lot more detail about this stuff than I'm permitted to do here without being accused of plagiarism!

Now, Carolyn shared a lot of different ideas with us during her presentation, but the one I want to talk about because I think it's most applicable to writers at the beginning of their careers is the Media Kit. Your Media Kit is exactly what you think it is--a group of materials you send out with a media release (not a press release, folks; this is the age of multi-media, remember!) to introduce yourself to a story editor and make it easy for that editor to choose to do a story about you and not someone else.

Building a media kit is a significant endeavor. You'll need to write two bios, one long and one short. You'll want a list of your awards (yo, contest finals) and publications (and blogs count :>). You should try to get some reviews of your work from other authors or experts, again one long and one short, to include in the kit. If you have any areas of special expertise related to your writing (think Kalen Hughes and costuming), consider putting together seminars or podcasts on the subject and including that in your media kit.


And that just scratches the surface. There's more. Go get Carolyn's book for the details. (Should I mention at this moment how well Carolyn's self-promotion efforts worked for her? She came and gave a talk to about 40 women at an RWA chapter meeting. Today, I'm here pushing her book to you, my blogosphere friends. Can you say snowball effect? That's what you want for yourself and why being able to give seminars on writing-related subjects can be very effective.)

I think you can already see that there's quite a bit of work involved in getting all that stuff written and compiled. In addition to the actual materials, however, you also need to start scoping out media outlets to which you'll want to send your kits when you've actually got something cool to announce (your first sale or, for those who've sold already, your next sale or next release).


Here, you need to be thinking not only of the obvious places (RWR, Romantic Times, etc.), but of places outside the romance-writing-and-reading community. Sure, you want to sell your book to people who already read romance, but how about broadening your audience by attracting more readers to the genre? So look at your local newspapers, both where you grew up and where you live today (that's your hook into them), the little freebie papers that you often find in delis and restaurents (which people actually read because they're there eating alone, and so can be even more effective than traditional newspapers), as well as radio stations, online media, etc. Carolyn's recommendation is that you have a list of at least fifty different media outlets along with the names of the story editors.


But the beauty of doing this before you sell your first book is that when it happens, you're ready! You write your media release, tweak the details in your media kit to appeal to particular media outlets, and package and send your releases to the folks on your media list.


Of course, there's no guarantee that any of these news outlets will ever pick up your story. But if you don't send it, they certainly never will. Your goal is to get your name out there and eventually, the effort will probably pay off. You just never know.

Carolyn told us a great personal anecdote that illustrates the value of sending out these media kits, For two years, she sent media kits to a local paper in Pasadena and they never printed a story about her. Not one. Then, early this year, she was recognized by that very same paper as One of the Ten Women Who Make Life in Pasadena Happen. So, they were paying attention, even if it didn't seem that way!


Since I don't have a media kit but I do have a release coming up in August, I have to get cracking!