Publicity Tip #44

Compétence Photo • Le Révélateur (Group), flickr

What is the secret of success for those multimillion dollar publishing contracts and viral sales in, well, any genre?

You’d be surprised at the answer.

After speaking with several authors, who publish with small and large presses, about what marketing tip and tricks they use to help their books sell the resounding response is –

I don’t know.

I don’t know? How could that be?

While it’s true that all of them do some form of social media (consistently) participate in book tours (some online, some physical, some both), attend events (like readings and conventions), and gets business cards and/or bookmarks printed to hand out like candy to the masses they have seen no spike in book sales due to any of this!

So then I asked if they had ever not done any publicity or marketing in addition to what their publisher already offered and the resounding answer was no. So there’s no base line for comparison; but each author believes it would hurt them if they didn’t do the extra stuff (and most of them enjoy it).

What then is the secret to writing and publishing those multimillion dollar deals?

Quite simply, it’s a crapshoot.

You can track upcoming trends or simply write what moves you and the outcome is the same – luck. That’s it. One thing is certain though – if you’re not putting out the best possible work you can produce, you won’t even stand a chance.

So what should you take away from this? Be active, be involved, but don’t be a sucker and keep playing until the money runs out.

Good Luck!

Categories: Publicity

Tags: author publicity, big money, marketing, publicity, publicity advice, publicity tip, traditional publishing, writing