How to use this Page

Guest Expert: Phyllis Zimbler Miller

It helps to have a roadmap to follow when promoting a book, whether it is your first book or your 15th. And if you want to use social media effectively to promote your book, you need to go through some foundation stages before you even get to using social media:

Stage 1: Identifying Your Brand

Now before you say that’s easy – it’s the title of your book, let’s think this through a moment. The title of a book is usually not the brand of an author – even if that author ever only writes one book.

Your brand is what makes you as an author – and by extension the books that you write – stand out from the crowd. Here’s an example of what I mean:

Years ago a mystery bookstore owner told me that people would come into her store and ask for the next book in the alphabet mysteries series. What I at first found incredible is that fans of this series neither remembered the name of the author – Sue Grafton – or the very distinctive book titles, such as “A Is for Alibi,” “B Is for Burglar,” “C Is for Corpse.”

Sue Grafton has a very distinctive brand – alphabet mysteries. What’s your distinctive brand?

Stage 2: Your Book Author Website

Your book author website is your home base for all your book activities regardless of whether your publisher also gives you a page on the publisher’s website.

It’s important that you have a site that you completely control. This way you can make changes at a moment’s notice (for example, when you get a last-minute invite to do a radio interview or book signing). I recommend a self-hosted WordPress.org site for this (which can include a blog) (note that this is not the same as a hosted WordPress.com site).

Whether you have an existing site or are planning a new one, be sure that the site is up-to-date. In other words, do not have any outmoded web design elements such as a slow-loading Flash introductory page.

People today want their information instantaneously. When they land on your website, they want to know what is this book (or books) about, fiction, nonfiction, who’s the author?

You want also to be sure to have such elements as an email optin system that will enable you to keep in touch with your book fans.

Stage 3: Your Social Media Activities

Now you are ready to have an effective and active social media presence in order to connect with prospective fans. I recommend starting with one of these sites and then adding in the others:

• Facebook personal profile
• Facebook (business) page about your book or books
• LinkedIn profile
• Twitter account

And as you are a book author, you will also want to take advantage of the book promotion opportunities on BookBuzzr.

Be sure to use the same good headshot across all these sites to help in recognition. And you’ll want to learn as much as your time allows on how to effectively participate on each of these sites.

For example, it’s important to remember that Twitter is NOT about selling your book. Twitter is about sharing information and occasionally mentioning your book.

Of course, if you have a blog, which is definitely a good idea if you are a writer, then you can post the links to your new posts on all of the above sites.

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Getting Past the Arguments and Past the Gatekeepers
Guest Expert: Carolyn Howard-Johnson

An excerpt from the introduction of The Great First Impression Book Proposal: Everything You Need To Know To Sell Your Book in 20 Minutes or Less with seven basics to get you started.

Those who haven’t learned to write a book proposal are haunted by that gap in their knowledge. It lingers much like the first horror story your counselor told you as you roasted s’more over a campfire at summer camp, and it becomes more frightening every time the prospect of a new book looms.

Book proposals are not something that are going away any time soon. In fact, they have becoming more omnipresent. Once only writers of nonfiction needed to write proposals to get their ideas past gatekeepers, the editors, agents and publishers. Now some publishers ask their novelists to write them. That is especially prevalent for novelists under contract for more than one novel, genre novels, and novels that are part of a series.

Many writers are put off by books on proposals. “It takes a whole book to learn to write one?” they say. “First we have to read a whole book, then we have to write a proposal which is practically like writing a whole book and then we have to write the darn book?” They’re right. It all seems like too much.

And it may be. There are lots of books out there on how to write a book proposal and I recommend a few at the end of this short piece. But it is easy enough to learn all that you absolutely have to know in a nutshell and that’s what this article seeks to do for you.

It’s easy to make short stuff of the subject of writing book proposals simply because there is no one way to write a proposal. You need to know the basics but every proposal will vary with the project depending on the author’s style, the genre he or she is writing in, and the way he or she visualizes the book. In this article, I give you a detailed version of a proposal for a nonfiction book, one that works because it makes it easy on the agent or publisher to find what he or she needs and digest it. Obviously, those writing proposals for fiction (and keep it mind it is rarely required that the writers of fiction books use proposals) will need to adapt these guidelines.

So, what is a proposal all about and why are we so uncomfortable with them?

A book proposal is a marketing tool and a tell-and-sell document. Writers tend to be artistic or academic or reclusive and probably never pictured themselves hawking any kind of product, much less something that they’re so invested in. That doesn’t mean they won’t have to and it doesn’t mean they can’t learn to write a real kick-butt proposal. In fact, most already have the instincts for it, they just think that they must switch from real writing to brazen or boring. And know that once past the query letter, if your proposal doesn’t impress a gatekeeper, all is lost.

So I’m giving you the seven top rules for writing a great book proposal. For details you’ll want tosplurge on The Great First Impression Book Proposal: Everything You Need To Know To Sell Your Book in 20 Minutes or Less.

Rule #1: Don’t slide into your business-letter writing mode. In fact, don’t do that when you write business letters. Let your per