How'd You Find Your Audience, Lisa Teasley?

Lisa Teasley is the author of the novels HEAT SIGNATURE in 2006 and Dive in 2004, as well as the short-story collection GLOW IN THE DARK, which earned the 2002 Gold Pen Award and the 2002 Pacificus Literary Foundation Best Short Story Writer award for fiction. Her writing has been called “fiercely intelligent” in Elle magazine and “poignant, affecting and true” in the Los Angeles Times. She is a native of Los Angeles, where she currently lives.

What single marketing strategy best helped you spread the word about your book to people who would be interested in buying/reading it?

Seven months before the release of my first book, Glow in the Dark, my partner and I put together packages for bookstore buyers consisting of my bio, the little bits of press I already had, a copy of the book jacket, blurbs, and a sample story from the collection. We then drove up the California coast from Los Angeles to Sacramento, stopping in bookstores along the way—we made a vacation, an adventure out of promoting the book. I would go into the stores, cold, and ask to speak with the book buyer. When they weren't available, I would leave the package there for them, but the ones who were there ended up being mostly quite supportive. If the clerk was open to it, I would talk to him or her about the book. I ended up being invited for book events because of that initial contact, and there were readers who found my work as a result of that.

What surprised you or was most unexpected when you first set out to help promote your book?

I thought it might all be a drag—after all, most of us are used to and probably prefer the solitary life at the computer. But I'd fallen in love around that time, so because my partner made my book promotion part of our adventure—the bookstore visits were all his idea—I had fun with it, and because of that spirit of fun I believe it opened that many more doors.

What challenges did you face during the first months of your book's release?

I didn't realize that the amount of books ordered by the stores for book events were so important—for example, my first L.A. reading where my friends showed up, there weren't enough books and they sold out quickly, then at another, they had ordered too many, so all of those were eventually returned to the distributor. So, as a small example, the 20 or 30 more that may have been sold in L.A. might have made up for those that were sent back from the Santa Cruz store. This is the way you begin to think when the book event coordinators sum up the success of the event by how many books are left on the table. And eventually you see the big picture on the royalty statements from your publisher. I've been using examples from the California market, but I toured with that first book everywhere from Alaska to Tennessee. And I was grateful for the five, 10 or 50 who showed up. It's an honor, if that one person makes their way from the comfort of home to an event to hear you read. That's how I try to look at it.

If you knew then (when your book first published) what you know now, what might you have done differently?

I don't really know what I'd have done differently since I was lucky enough with Glow in the Dark to get great reviews and a couple of awards, which encouraged me to meet the next challenge in promoting the second book, my novel Dive. I do advise, however, not to worry yourself sick over what store is not carrying your book, or what kind of real estate you have in whatever stores are thankfully carrying your books. Let yourself be pleasantly surprised, rather than terminally disappointed. When my third book, Heat Signature, came out, I never ever went out of my way to see if a store was carrying it as I did with Glow in the Dark and Dive.

Any other advice for newly published authors?

We all know that the life of a writer can be full of rejections, discouragement, that's why it's important to celebrate every triumph. If you can somehow hold onto the excitement you had when you got that book deal in the first place, this will feed you during the long road ahead of promotion. If you were happy with the process of writing the book, then try to be happy during the process of your book making its way out into the world.

If you’d like to know more about Lisa Teasley or her books, visit her Web site at http://www.lisateasley.com.

(Author photo credit goes to Ibarionex Perello)

How'd You Find Your Audience, Kat Martin?

Kat Martin is a New York Times bestselling author who has built a reputation as a master storyteller in the genres of historical romance and romantic suspense. With this month's release of SEASON OF STRANGERS by Mira, she concludes a trilogy that delves into fresh territory: paranormal romance. The trilogy began with SCENT OF ROSES, followed by THE SUMMIT. Since the former real estate broker took up writing in 1985, she has published 41 books in more than 17 countries and has more than 10 million copies in print.

She lives in Missoula, Montana, with her husband, Larry Jay Martin, who writes western and mystery thriller novels.

What single marketing strategy best helped you spread the word about your book to people who would be interested in buying/reading it?

I like Romantic Times ads, even small ones, as a means of getting out the word on your book. Local book signings will get word to your town and surrounding areas. The Internet is incredibly powerful. I have tried to use it as much as possible to promote my latest book, SEASON OF STRANGERS.

Since the book involves UFOs, I have tried to get promotion on those sorts of Web sites. A writer should also make as many Internet contacts as possible, blog, etc., and be sure to have your own Web page.

What surprised you or was most unexpected when you first set out to help promote your book?

It surprised me how much work it was to promote a book. It seems as if it should be enough to research and write a book without having to try to help sell it.

What challenges did you face during the first months of your book’s release?

Trying to get the book reordered is a very big challenge, one I am still fighting even after 40 books!

If you knew then (when your book first published) what you know now, what might you have done differently?

One thing I didn’t understand at first was how important a cover is. The cover and store placement are *the* most important factors. Try to get those two things for your book.

Any other advice for newly published authors?

Mostly, write the best book you can and hope you can get publisher support. Aside from the Internet, it is almost impossible to reach a large enough audience to affect book sales. It takes publisher commitment to make that happen. My last word -- don’t get discouraged! It takes time to build readership. Good luck with your books!

To learn more about Kat Martin or her books, visit her Web site at www.katbooks.com.

How'd You Find Your Audience, June Casagrande?

June Casagrande is the author of the recently released “Mortal Syntax: 101 Language Choices That Will Get You Clobbered By The Grammar Snobs – Even If You’re Right,” which follows on the success of “Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies: A Guide To Language For Fun And Spite.” She also writes a weekly grammar column titled “A Word Please,” which appears in several of the community sections published by the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Pasadena with her husband and their three cats, Tibor, Smudge and Maddie (pictured with June).

Here’s what she has to say:

My advice to newly published authors: Think back to something that was going on in your life three months ago: watching the Super Bowl, going on vacation, buying that well-chosen pair of shoes. Now consider this: When your book comes out, that’s exactly how long it takes to flop completely. To go out of print. To die. Publishers work in quarterly cycles and, to an extent, the rest of the book business follows suit. That means that you’re the flavor of the month for only three months, then you’re old news to your publisher and the media.

That’s why you need to get really energetic about book promotion long before your book comes out. There are many, many things you can do to promote your book, but whatever you choose, have all the tools in place before the stores receive their shipments. You need to hit the ground running, and that requires preparation.

An example: Write as many press releases as you can targeted for specific publications and have those ready to go, along with contact information for the editors at the specific publications. If your book is about a steamy romance between septuagenarian backpackers, you need a targeted press release for backpacking publications, a senior-focused press release for the AARP magazine and a sex-obsessed one for Cosmo. And you need the editors’ names, numbers and e-mail addresses in a file so you’ll be ready to send to them. Another example, try to establish and build “platform” long before your book comes out. “Platform” refers to the established venues through which you *already* reach members of your book’s prospective audience. A blog, a radio show, a newspaper column, speaking gigs, teaching gigs, a known presence on an issue-specific Internet message board. “Platform” is why Jon Stewart got a much bigger book advance than a nobody with an equally wonderful book could have possibly landed. It’s why someone like Robert Half can publish business books. It’s why Steve Lopez at the L.A. Times is already successful with his new book (and movie deal) “The Soloist.”

What single marketing strategy best helped you spread the word about your book to people who would be interested in buying/reading it?

Hmm. That’s hard to say because it’s hard to measure the sales attributable to any single promotional effort. And, I should preface my answer by saying that I think nonfiction book promotion is much easier than fiction. With nonfiction, your book already sort of targets your reader. When you walk into a bookstore, you might see a book called “Grammar is Fun,” another called “Web Design for Dummies” and another called “Confessions of a Video Vixen.” And that fast, you can know which, if any, of those titles is for you. Fiction writers don’t have it so easy.

That said, I think that radio is a great resource. Again, that’s easier for a nonfiction author to say, since radio interviews are usually topic-oriented. But radio is lots of great exposure.

Overall, I think the best marketing strategy is just pure energy. Commit to harnessing your energy and enthusiasm in whatever way you can. Write interesting essays tied to your topic for your local paper and submit them for publication with a tagline mentioning your book. Post on message boards. Submit to literary magazines. Do stock signings at your local bookstores. In fact, do lots of stock signings. Call first whenever possible.

My main goal in publicizing my books could be described as title recognition. My goal: To make sure that as many people as possible have heard the titles “Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies” and “Mortal Syntax.” And what better people to be aware of your book than the people who work in bookstores? It doesn’t matter that they’ll forget the title two minutes after you leave, it doesn’t matter if they only have one copy in stock and you feel embarrassed that you came all this way to sign it. The point is that they heard it once and had a positive and pleasant experience with a very courteous and grateful author. That’s a start.

I threw a book party and told my friends in the invite: “Do *not* feel obligated to buy the book. If you really want to help, the best thing you can do is just go to your local bookstore and *ask* a salesperson for it. But there’s no need to spend a dime.”

Never do anything that feels icky or sleazy to you. But harness your excitement however you can. That could mean sending e-mails to a hundred community college writing instructors saying, “I think you might like to know about a new grammar book by me, a former community college student.” (I actually did that). Read books that get you jazzed: “Publicize Your Book” by Jacqueline Deval, and “The Frugal Book Promoter” by Caroline Howard-Johnson (disclosure: she’s a friend). Get jazzed and spend that energy however you can.

Don’t assume that just because your publisher sends out press releases and sets up media interviews that you can’t duplicate those efforts. Two years ago, I e-mailed WUSF radio in Tampa, a college station at my alma mater, to say, “I’m a grammar book author/USF grad in town and available for media interviews.” They interviewed me on-air. When I told this to my publicist at Penguin, she was surprised because she had already pitched them and they had blown her off. There’s no harm in asking twice, especially if you can add a sense of timeliness or urgency.

Don’t feel bad if no one shows up for your bookstore appearances! As far as I’m concerned, that’s not the reason you’re there. The reasons you’re there are these:
1. For the blurb in the bookstore event calendar/newsletter,
2. For the media mentions that can be hinged on it (i.e. a blurb in the LA Times Calendar saying “Joe Yodude is signing his book, ‘Spunkytown,’ on Tuesday” means that likely tens of thousands of people have now heard the title),
3. To make yourself known to bookstore staff, and
4. To sign copies, which will then sell better and which also cannot then be returned to the publisher (if I understand it correctly).

What surprised you or was most unexpected when you first set out to help promote your book?

I thought I would love going on book tour. I love to travel and I like the spotlight. But I hated it. I was nervous/sick with butterflies the whole time. The publisher was booking me into beautiful hotels in towns where I was doing great media interviews, and the whole time I felt lonely and tiny and adrift and scared. For the second book, my husband was able to come along and it was much, much better.

What challenges did you face during the first months of your book’s release?

Finding the best possible ways to harness my energy and my desire to make it successful.

If you knew then (when your book first published) what you know now, what might you have done differently?

I would have put in more energy sooner. Then, when it came out, instead of waiting for one book to secure my fame and fortune, I would have stayed more focused on continuing to write, learning about grammar and perfecting my craft. As Martin J. Smith made clear in his Q&A for DeAnna, it’s a long haul.

If you’d like to know more about June or her books, visit her Web site at http://www.grammarsnobs.com/. Her grammar blog is at http://conjugatevisits.blogspot.com/.

How'd You Find Your Audience, Eric Stone?

Eric Stone is the author of the Ray Sharp series of detective thrillers set in Asia and based on true stories. FLIGHT OF THE HORNBILL, the third book in the series, will be out this fall from Bleak House Books. THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD and GRAVE IMPORTS, the first two books in the series are available in Bleak House paperback. Eric’s first book was WRONG SIDE OF THE WALL, the true crime/sports biography of Ralph “Blackie” Schwamb, the greatest prison baseball player of all time.

1. What single marketing strategy best helped you spread the word about your book to people who would be interested in buying/reading it?

To be honest, I’m not sure what works best. I tend to believe in the shotgun approach – you send out a large number of projectiles in one general direction and hope that at least a few hit their target. I’ve done a bit of everything: book tours; special events at bookstores; Web site; book trailer; e-mail blasts; MySpace, Facebook and Crimespace; attending conventions and conferences; speaking at libraries and to special groups with an interest in the topics I cover; a little advertising; hired a publicist; interviews like this one; radio shows; and a few TV appearances.

That said, not being a well-known author, the one thing I’ve done that I think has sold more books than anything else is to visit as many bookstores as I possibly can. I do my best to visit every single bookstore in my hometown – which is tough since my hometown is Los Angeles, and I think of it as Southern California in general – and I also go on a big book tour, visiting as many independent bookstores as possible, particularly mystery stores since that’s the genre I write. A good example of why that’s important is my visit to a new bookstore in the South on my first book tour. I got there for my event, and there was only one person there. The store had ordered 30 or so books. I visited with the one person, signed the books and left, asking myself if it had been a waste of time or not. A month later, I heard from the store that they had sold all the books and ordered more. Because of my visit, they got to know me and my books, and were better able to recommend the books to their customers. So it’s a mistake to underestimate the affect of personal visits to stores.

On the other hand, even if every single store I’ve ever visited sold an average of 50 books – which would be a lot, a realistic figure might be an average of between five and 10 books – at this point, having visited about 300 stores over the course of promoting three books, that still doesn’t get me anywhere near any best-seller lists.

Near as I can tell, there is no single thing you can do that works. According to what I’ve read, if you appear on Oprah, The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, that will usually boost sales. But it’s no guarantee. It used to be that the morning talk shows like Good Morning America guaranteed sales, now they seem to have very little impact. Supposedly, if your publisher pays to have your book placed on the “ladders” at the front of Barnes & Noble and Borders (85 percent of the books those stores sell come from within 20 feet of the front door), that might work. But I know a couple of authors who had that done for them, and it didn’t accomplish much at all.

I’ve come to the conclusion that once you’ve written and sold the book, you have to peel off your author suit, get out from behind the keyboard and hit the road as a salesperson, even if it’s only close to home; Arthur Miller magically transforms into Willy Loman. There are a few lucky exceptions to this, but you can’t count on being one of them.

2. What surprised you or was most unexpected when you first set out to help promote your book?

That I was mostly on my own when it came to promoting my books. I’ve had three publishers. All three were very good about sending out review copies, not just to their lists, but to the lists I compiled myself and asked them to send copies to. One publisher didn’t even assign a publicist specifically to my book. Although they did kick in $500 toward the book tour (that cost me about $3,000.) One publisher assigned me a publicist who took me out to an inexpensive lunch in New York (after I paid for my own ticket to get there) and who was very nice, but did nothing else at all for the book. My current publisher, Bleak House, has been by far the best, but it is also the smallest of the three and doesn’t have the money or resources to do as much as – in a perfect world – you’d want your publisher to do for you. Still, they are great to work with, creative, supportive, and I feel like they’ve got my back when I come up with ideas on my own for how to promote my books. (They also come up with some of their own bright ideas.) They even throw what money they can afford at promoting my books, and the publicist they’ve assigned to me is a joy to work with.

What I had to learn to contend with is that there are nearly 200,000 books a year published in the United States and not even the big publishing houses have the money or resources to promote all of them. Generally they spend the most money promoting books by the authors who they already know will sell a lot of books. (The ones like Janet Evanovich who you would think need the least promotion at this point.) In most cases, promotion is much more the author’s job than the publishing company’s job. That was a bit surprising – they are trying to make money after all, aren’t they? And a bit depressing. But I’ve learned to live with it and even to enjoy the promotions side.

3. What challenges did you face during the first months of your book’s release?

Exhaustion, both mentally and physically, from trying to visit and talk to as many different people in as many different places as I possibly could. Then there’s also distribution. You just can’t count on your books showing up where and when you want them to. Most of the time they do, but sometimes for any number of reasons they don’t. I quickly learned to keep a box or two of my books in the trunk of my car so that when I got to a bookstore and they hadn’t got their shipment yet, I was able to loan them books for my event. When I traveled by plane, I tried to pack as many books as I could or check a box of them with my luggage.

A lot of the work also needs to be done before release. After a book comes out, there’s no more than about a six-week, maybe two-month, window of opportunity to run around doing whatever you can to promote it. If you haven’t set up most of your events, interviews, media appearances, etc. well before the release date, you’re not going to be able to set up many on the fly afterward.

4. If you knew then (when your book first published) what you know now, what might you have done differently?

Spent even more time online – on blogs, chat rooms, social networking sites. It’s something you can do from anywhere, and that is increasingly important at getting your name in front of potential readers.

I probably would have concentrated my efforts more heavily in the first few weeks after pub date on one region, hoping to somehow shove my way onto some local best-seller lists and get a large number of good local reviews that might be noticed elsewhere.

I would have made a bigger effort to promote my book to non-bookstore groups. My first book was a biography of a baseball player. I mostly hit bookstores for events and only a few baseball organizations. I should have tried to get in front of a lot more baseball organizations. My most recent book is a novel, but it deals with the theft of Cambodian antiquities. I made an effort to give talks in front of arts organizations, as well as at bookstores, but I probably should have made more of an effort to do that.

5. Any other advice for newly published authors?

The one thing that most authors find scary is the whole sales and promotional aspect. By nature, most writers are pretty solitary, spending hours and days and weeks in front of their keyboard with little human interaction. Get over it. You’ve got to embrace the social side of being an author. There is never going to be a better salesperson for your book than you. Even if you are published by a huge house and they pull out all the stops to promote you, readers still want to meet you, see you, hear you, get a little piece of you. And that can be gratifying if you relax about it and convince yourself that it’s just as much a part of the job of being an author as writing the books. Don’t be shy. You’ve been published because some company thinks your book is good enough that people other than your mom are going to want to read it. And good enough that they’ve got a chance of making some money off it. As soon as it’s in a store or on a library shelf, you’ve accomplished something great, and that you can be proud of and that will interest other people. Use that knowledge to boost your self-confidence. A lot of writers are attracted to the profession because it means they can work on their own. And it does mean that, up until the moment a publisher buys your book. Then, unless you want to rely on sheer dumb luck, you’ve got to get over the alone thing fast.

Get to know booksellers. As an author, they are your partner, you couldn’t be doing what you do without them. And because they are the retail end of the business, they know the customers (readers). They know what people like and don’t like. They have good ideas about what does and doesn’t work in the way of marketing, because they often talk with their customers about how they found out about a particular book. (Or they can recommend your book to their customers.) By and large, you’ll learn more from independent booksellers, rather than the big chains where there’s a high turnover of employees. But if you cultivate the right friendships, you can learn a lot from anyone who sells books. Plus, people who sell books tend to read and love books, and it’s just plain fun hanging around with them and chewing the fat.

Seek out other authors to hang out with. You need someone to talk shop with. Writers’ organizations like Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of America, etc. are where you’ll find your chance to have some good “water cooler” time with colleagues.

Want to know more about Eric Stone and his books? Visit his Web site at http://www.ericstone.com/.