Customer Reviews

How to Market You and Your Book

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Whether you sell out to a large (New York) publisher or publish yourself, the author must do the promotion. Publishers do not promote books; they only produce them and place them in bookstores. Those books remain in the stores for one selling season: four months-then they are returned to the publisher. Authors must encourage buyers to visit the stores. Buyers pull the books through the system.

(From page 95): The real meat of "How to Market You and Your Book" is to make writers more successful through a working knowledge of marketing . . . specifically so that the writer becomes a "Marketing Author." This book delivers.

FX is an author and a publisher; the ultimate insider, he has been on both sides of the desk. He knows what you are facing--and he reveals what to do about it. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com.

I think that, if authors spend a little time thinking about it, they can come up with great marketing ideas on their own, especially if they understand the web. The suggestions in the professional reviews printed above, that a new author must either buy this book or "get into a new line of endeavor," are completely absurd. This book is interesting, or at least the inside-the-industry stuff is interesting, but O'Connor's suggestions are nevertheless geared toward a mass audience and have a prefabricated feel. An author can devise, thanks to the web, an almost-free marketing strategy well-suited to his own book without the help of O'Connor's book. I mean, get a free website, and put a link to it in all the e-mails you send to people. That sort of thing.

The book is worth $20, still, if you have $20 to blow on something. But it's not essential.

Considering all the man's claimed wealth of experience this book is short of everything necessary. In aiming to be all things to all writers, published or not, it covers none of the bases in any depth at all. There was really very little of any substance, and plenty of it was so obvious to make me squirm at his 'insider tips' parts.

Some of the chapters were 4 pages long, which just isn't good enough. In the whole book there is one decent anecdote about Bob Hope. There are ideas here and there + some information of note, but when you open a book by a guy with 35 years of experience you kind of expect things to interesting and enlightening on every page. It isn't.

I expected so much more from this book and was left feeling staggeringly short-changed. There are awful typos too, even one on the back cover - 'myultiply' for example. Laughable.

I found some helpful hints in How To Market You & Your Book and
used them to promote my own book, Slices of Sunlight. I wish author O'Connor had shared more from his wisdom. I found the book to be in need of more content. Perhaps the next edition
will contain extra pages and extensive resources.

As head of a PR firm that works with 500 authors a year- I know that the publisher usually does very little to promote most books. All authors (self published too) need this book. It has great information and great tips on publicity and promotion.

Rick Frishman President PLANNED TV ARTS (NYC)www.plannedtvarts.com Co author GUERRILLA MARKETING FOR WRITERS (Writers Digest Books)