Literary Agent Lucienne Diver from the Knight Agency in New York spoke to the Southwest Florida Romance Writers a couple weekends ago and mentioned the importance of launching a book with flair. She put into words what savvy authors have been up to as of late.
Authors compete with television (which has its own issues these days), movies, gaming, after-school activities, etc. Those of us who recognize the marketplace’s changes also recognize we must do more than offer a book to the masses and assume success will be instantaneous. The universe doesn’t owe us some kind of reward for spewing creativity upon bits of trees. We’ve got to work for it by creating an event that gets the book into readers’ hands.
I’d like to think that readers have always considered a new book launch “an event,” but I might be romanticizing something there. When Anne Rice’s Servant of the Bones hit the streets, I was in line at a scary house in Kansas City clutching my brand new sparkling hardcover copy at midnight so the queen of vamps could sign it for me. That was in 1996. We’ve all seen the news reports of kids lined up for hours for the releases of Harry Potter books. Those are cool events.
I remember the release of a book called In Search of Adam in 2007 because the author, Caroline Smailes, used online social media to set up a search for a character online prior to the book’s release. People joined the search from around the globe. When The Friday Project released the book in print, it took a week for them to run out of copies and go into reprint. In Search of Adam spent 100 days in the Kindle Top 100.
Smailes created buzz and turned her book into Event.
At the upcoming NPC 9th annual Writers’ Conference, a variety of publishing industry professionals bring tried and true ideas for branding, pre-promotion and other get-the-word-out activities to make your next book launch an event. You’ll see most of those topics in the Business & Marketing track, such as the 101 Marketing Ideas panel. Each conference attendee will receive in his or her registration goodie bag an article about online promotion written exclusively for us by Jo Linsdell, founder of the annual PROMO DAY! event. Check back during the next couple of weeks for a few presentations that are still being confirmed, or just click on the registration link to reserve your seat at the conference now.
