Authors Society discussion

The old saying "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" has one serious flaw. If nobody knows you've built it, nobody will be showing up at your door. Like it or not, you've got to let people know you're there. Unless you are rich enough to hire a publicist, the one most responsible for promoting your books is you.

You don't have to run out and grab someone by the throat, shake them until their teeth rattle and scream BUY MY BOOK!! But you should do whatever you can...groups like this one are a start...to let people get to recognize your name.

And one of the best ways to let people decide whether they might like to read your book is to give them a brief excerpt so they can see your style, a hint of the story, etc.

As an example of what I'm talking about, I am going to start putting up the opening paragraphs...one at a time...of each of my books. I hope it might entice one or more of you to want to read the rest of the book.

First excerpt follows in my next post.

Good luck, everyone. May 2009 be a great year for all of us.

Dorien

I have the first chapters of all of my books available on the profile page.

I agree that you have to get your name out there. Best of luck in 2009.

Well said, Dorien.
I would add one thing, well, two, maybe. There are publicists out there who are relatively inexpensive or offer various deals. second, even if you have a publicist, you the author still have to work at promoting your work. Today I wanna promote my local publisher, Nodin Press who doesn't have a web site and doesn't want one. He published the paper back of my first PI Novel, The Case of the Greedy Lawyers. And my other publisher, Echelon Press
http://www.echelonpress.com/ who/which is a hustling dynamo for promotion of her authors. It published Bloody Halls, my academic (sic) mystery.

Carl...a publisher who doesn't have and doesn't want a website? That's incredible! Does he go door to door like the Fuller Brush man, or simply print up the books, hand them to you and say "Good Luck!"?

Smaller publishers often can't afford to do much, but not even having a website?? The mind boggles.
And excuse me for asking why you might want to promote a publisher who obviously doesn't want to promote you?

Dorien

Ah ah, I didn't say he doesn't promote his authors, only that he doesn't have a web site. He knows I do, as do many of his other authors. Moreover he's been in the business for just slightly less than forever. consequently he knows every important individual who can be of use in book promotion. He works very hard at that. His business model is quite different from most other publishers and it's the main reason he's been successful for so many years. I confidently predict he will still be in business long after a lot of publishing house fail to survive our current financial troubles. So will I.