Promoting Books

notesfromasmallpress.substack.com

16 points·herbertl··5 comments

A key thing about promotions is to write it from the perspective and for the benefit of the reader.

I'm very interested in book promotion strategies. This article has nothing. It's about the author, the authors coworkers and their books. Nothing at all on actually promoting your books.

If you want people to read your work, it has to benefit them. If it doesn't, it won't get read or shared.

And yet here it is on the front page of HN.

Really, your comment seems unnecessarily harsh and condescending. You seem to feel cheated that there was nothing about promotion strategies but I don't see any promise of that, in the headline or the intro.

Nonetheless, there were a couple of snippets in there - send plenty of emails, and get the author involved in self promotion basically. Having said that, she proceeded to... promote her books...

As the author of multiple books, I can draw a clear line between promotion and sales.

Call it slimy, call it spammy, but no one else (including your publisher) is going to do that work for you.

> is going to do that work for you

Not even the publisher? I thought they were supposed to at least help a little with promotion/marketing/whatever.

I wrote a novella in the summer and learned first hand how hard it is to get strangers to read your work. Since then, I began a substack to build up a following in hopes that five years from now, maybe I can get my stories some more attention

Obligatory self promotion—my articles about reading and writing are here:

https://barbariangrunge.substack.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com