Paul Krupin's Trash Proof Marketing and Publicity Blog

Hot topic.  This question has been posed to me by hundreds and hundreds of authors and publishing companies.  Of course, over the years I’ve specialized in book publicity tactics, but many of these strategies are most effective and produce the most ROI when they are carefully integrated with all sorts of other book promotion activities. 

At least in my opinion,  …

At least in my opinon, these days, at a minimum, you can really begin to actively promote and sell your book as long as you have:

 1. a web site and 2. your book is available at Amazon, and possibly with BN.com.   If you are focusing on the book trade and library sales, then you need book trade distribution, either a national wholesaler or a book distributor.  But I’m not a fan of the book trade.  I am really into seeing authors succeed using direct, quantity and special sales.  So item’s 1. and 2. are really all you need.   That plus a really good book.   

If you have these things then you can go into the marketing stage and take any number of steps designed to sell your intellectual property in a lot of ways.   That can be the subject of another article since once you are an author with a book, you can and should look at growing multiple income streams off what you have created and can do.  But for books ready for publication and promotion, the steps below are all you need.  The timing of news release actions initially depend on when the books are actually available so you can provide them to the interested media. You can provide galleys, advance review copies, finished books, or new editions.

For your normal book publicity campaign cycle there are five major periods of opportunities:

1. Pre-publication reviews (one dozen galleys needed) – four to six months before book publication. 2. Magazines (100 to 300 advance review copies needed – four to six months before media and book publication) for reviews and feature stories.