Initial Marketing

Before your book's publish date, you'll need to bring the work to some prominent reviewers' attention. There are a few major marketing steps that are nearly essential:

Photo courtesy Clearing Skies Walter Roark created these simple counter displays to help sell his books in USA Baby stores.

• Fill out an Advance Book Information (ABI) form at BowkerLink.com before your book goes to press. Submit the form, and Bowker will include you in their directory "Forthcoming Books in Print." When your publish date hits, your book will be automatically included in "Books in Print," a directory that reaches just about every major book buyer, and many reviewers.

• Send advance information and copies of your book to Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal. These publications also reach a huge audience of book buyers. If you send advance information about your book, you may get a mention. If you send your book or a galley in advance of the publish date, you may even get a review.

• Pick other suitable publications and send them books for review. It's important to send books out in advance, because many magazines aren't interested in reviewing books after they've been published.

Marketing will continue as long as you're selling books. Marketing breaks down into two different areas: promoting your book to re-sellers (bookstores, for example) and promoting your books to your actual audience, so they'll order your books and seek them out in stores. There are dozens and dozens of tricks and strategies for marketing in both veins. You can find tons of ideas in the books and links on the Lots More Information page at the end of this article.

Creative Marketing Walter Roark's experience was that marketing was largely trial and error -- some things worked, and some things didn't. He shared some advice: I found that spending your time in a top-down way is better than detail work, trying to sell one book at a time. When I allocate my dollars for the promotional budget, I try to be real careful and go with what works. I found postcards are real good. That's good direct mail, and it's fairly reasonably priced, so I send those to librarians. That's something I didn't value highly enough early on -- the library market... A book in a library gets read by multiple people, so one book actually reaches many different people.