Why authors are the best people to promote their own work
With a book coming out later in the summer ( Home Matters - You can pre-order here!),I am getting my head into PR mode. So when
asked me to come and speak to her membership here on Substack, it was a great time to reflect on what I’ve done in the past and what I’m planning to do for this next book, and get in to the nitty gritty of getting the word about your book out there.In this conversation Nicola and I talk about the reality of being an author - which is that authors need to sell their books. You can have great support from your publicity team but NO ONE can sell your book like you can. I like to think of it as a collaborative effort. The publicity team is there to support you (and hopefully they are supporting you well) but they cannot do all the work for you.
I have had a really good experience with publicity teams, but no one knows your work like you do. No one knows the nuances, or the conversations that it will start or the timeliness of your book in the same way that you will. In an ever increasingly saturated market, publicists can’t make miracles happen and get your book visible everywhere just because you want them to. We need to rely on our relationships and networks and we need to know how to pitch our book in ways that helps others to understand it.
In this hour long chat we go over all sorts of aspects of book marketing, from social media and networking, to charity partnerships, as well as figuring out how the hell to find the time to do any of it in the first place. I am not a book publicist, this is very much about my experience as a very busy parent carer who has to promote my work amongst everything else I do (paid work, writing, caring etc) and as a podcast host who has a lot of conversations with other authors about their publishing experience.
You can watch the full conversation by joining Nicola’s substack membership which is a fantastic, low cost way of getting social media support specific to writers. Nic is someone who comes and speaks to my non-fiction book proposal programs, so it was fun to do it the other way round for a change!