Best-Selling Author Offers Promotional Advice - writing tip

Best-Selling Author Offers Promotional Advice

As most of you know, we are still working on author payment. One author sold more books this quarter than any of our authors ever had. Her series is very popular and customers seem happy to search for it and glad to find it. Getting the word out is the key to e-book sales. If there is no publicity or promotion (usually done by the author) then sales are few.

Since Elizabeth Eagan-Cox has been so successful in getting the word out, we asked her to pass along tips on how she manages to do that.

Promo tip? I have always believed that is it never a good idea to market/advertise/promote to other writers, as the old saying goes, don't preach to the choir. Hence, I do not participate in writer's groups, I rarely ever follow another writer on Facebook or Twitter (we have to have more in common than writing) and I zero in on readership circles in my genre.

As you know, I am not real keen on getting book reviews (I tend to ignore them), I think a book will speak for itself in time and time is what it takes to build a good rapport with readers. I have a stand-alone website that is my name (no fancy catch words, just my name, so I can be found in a "Google" search) and readers know they can write to me through it. I always answer personally. I let friends on Facebook and Twitter know that I have a website and advise them to please contact me through it.

I prefer radio talk shows to personal in-person appearances (I really do not care for book signings). However, for a radio agenda to succeed, a writer must feel exceptionally comfortable with the medium that radio is. And by radio, I mean Internet radio as well as traditional AM/FM broadcasts. I was once a columnist for the now defunct Radio Digest, so you see, radio is a natural medium for my platform and my personality.

I offer radio talk show hosts a talking-point agenda that is on a subject that will benefit them and their show's platform, in fact, so very often the show is not about my books.

To do this, I study that radio show, I listen to a selection of past shows to get a feel for the host and their agenda, then I draft a talking-point agenda that can be tweaked for each different host.

I plan radio appearances for 3 of the 4 quarters of each year: spring, summer and autumn.

Addendum from Arline:

Many authors do not realize that Internet Radio shows can often be done on the telephone from the convenience of your own home office. Elizabeth indicates that she does travel for some radio, but most are done on the Internet. Also, once an Internet interview is completed and stored, it can be revisited again and again, and will come up whenever someone searches her name or the subject's key words.