Promote A Book - How to promote your book - Ask Evan

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, John, who has launched a couple books. They're children's books, and now he's about to launch his third, and he's had a couple issues with his publisher where they haven't been able to sell the first two books, and he's wondering how can he sell those two books before launching the third book. So, John, thanks for the question. I'm researching the process of creating my own book, so spoiler alert for some of you guys. So it's definitely an interesting process. From the research that I've done, I've seen that publishers typically will give a lot of support to an author in terms of helping you edit the book and get it on a timeline and even get it into bookstores, but they don't do a lot of promotion after the fact, and a lot of that relies on the author to be able to do that themselves. So what a lot of authors have told me is they'll get you into the bookstore and maybe do a little launch party, but that's it. The rest is on you to actually go and promote. So how you can do that intelligently, uh, the first thing I would do is try to launch a blog tour. So find all the different bloggers who talk about children's books or children, a lot of the mommy bloggers, uh, give them a copy of the book, let them review it, and offer to do an interview or some kind of review on their blog and try to line up a whole series those. You want to try to get blogs who have a loyal following, people who are active, so look for ones that have a lot of comments on it and are tightly tied to your community, in this case children. And so if you can line up one of those, so try to line up say one a week for the next year, you get 52 bloggers, you know, talking about it, promoting your book, and maybe doing an interview, just depends on the style of the blog, that helps get your name out there a little bit more, especially as they build momentum. A lot of people will read one blog and another blog and another blog if it ties to similar interests. So if they see you constantly appearing in all these different blogs, the more they see you, the more likely they're gonna, you know, become familiar with you and the more likely they're gonna wanna buy your book. So if it's a review of your book or if it's an interview with the blogger, whatever format best fits the blogger, I try to get out there and get seen and set up this blog tour yourself. The second thing you can do is be a media expert for whatever type of, you know, message you're sending out there. So it's children's books, which is great. There may be an underlying theme to some of your books. Usually in books that cover, you know, some kind of theme, whether it's manners or bullying or whatever it is, you know, going goodnight, whatever those topics are, you could be seen as almost an expert. So when media are writing about those types of stories, they need experts to come on, you can go on and talk about it and talk about your book and why you created this book and how you hope that it can help with bullying or whatever issue again you're covering in your book itself. A great service that I use is called PRLeads, and every day reporters basically send their list of stories that they're working on that they're looking for experts on. So every story, people are looking for experts. So why can't you be that expert? So anything related to children, if the theme fits your book, you could go on and say you're the author of this book, you have an interesting story to tell, and you might be a potential fit for that story. So something I look at— PRLeads isn't free, it's $100 a month, but I've used it to get into New York Times and Forbes and some pretty big publications. And hopefully you'll be able to do it too for anything related to children. And so those are some, some quick tips. The last thing I would do is get a website going. I don't know if you have a website or not, you didn't include it, but maybe there's a site for your books. I try to get those going because if people like the book, then you can have a newsletter to then sign people up so when you have your new book coming out, you know, they can hopefully want to also buy it as well. I know there are some books that my son likes to read that we want to have every one in the series, so whenever the author publishes a new one, we want to know what that new book is so we can go out and get it as well and add to the collection because he loves it so much. So if you had a website where people can sign up with a newsletter and be notified when your new book's coming out, That would be fantastic. So you can go on your blog tour, media tour promoting the first book and second book and drop hints about the third book and collect people's email addresses on your website. So then when you are ready to launch, you have a whole list of people to immediately start boosting sales and get the momentum going. So I hope that helps. If you guys like the video, I'd love to see you give it a thumbs up. It makes me want to do more of these for you. And if you have a question or you have something else to add to this video or to help John out, I'd love to see it below if you want to leave it in the comments. And we'll see you on the next episode.