The Author’s Book Promotion Strategy

Given that The Steiny Road to Operadom is now published in a limited release and not yet in bookstores, the publisher is encouraging the author to decide what strategies to use in promoting the book. Beyond the obvious strategy of announcing the publication to individuals known by the author is identifying groups of people who are interested in the subject matter of the book. Such groups might include speaking opportunities in an educational setting. For example, I spoke to a college class studying women’s literature recently. Visit professor Joanna Howard's blog to see her assignment to the students who heard me speak. Although this is a satisfying experience and one that ripples out into the future as your book is usually purchased for the college library, one has to do a lot of work for this kind of book promotion and realistically few books are sold.

What seems like a better idea is to find Internet List Servers where you can manage to let subscribers know about you and your new publication. Since most List Servers have rules of etiquette, one has to be cautious about promoting new books. Each List Server culture has accepted ways of letting others know but you have spend time finding out how to do this. Books with multiple subject areas, which by the way are hard to get published by big publishing houses, lend themselves well to Internet promotion. In the case The Steiny Road to Operadom, subjects include opera, classical music, Gertrude Stein, feminist literature, poetry

Another idea is to get someone to help you promote your work to reviewers. Most authors cannot afford to pay a publicist but that is the kind of help that is needed. One professional in this field told me that this kind of work is hard to monitor and so you are better off devising your own plan for promoting your book and getting a friend to help you do it. Sounds like a Catch-22!