SURPRISE PLACES TO PROMOTE BOOKS (at least to me)

My first book, Crush and Other Love Poems for Girls, came out in 2008. At that time, social media was still relatively new. When I opened my Facebook account, I used the cover of my book as my profile picture. Now, the book has its very own Facebook page.

Last year, I published my second book, Missing Emily: Croatian Life Letters, and, by that time, the options for promoting books had grown exponentially. I have the ability to learn a new way to marketing books every day if I want. Other than the classics such as John Kremer's 1001 Ways to Promote your Books, Carolyn Howard-Johnson's The Frugal Book Promoter, Angela and Richard Hoy's 90 Days of Promoting Your Book Online, or one of the other several hard copy book-marketing books, there are dozens of websites, blogs, and enewsletters devoted to the subject.

But some of the ways I've discovered of marketing my books came by chance. For example, on Wednesday, August 28th, Missing Emily was named the Book of the Day by First Chapters. I found that option when an author Facebook friend posted her book as the one of the day. The best part was, it was FREE!

There are dozens of paid outlets for listing books but there are also some good free sites including Goodreads, IndiePENdents, and Author Marketing Club. AMC also has a free widget you can put on your website or blog linking to your Amazon book page and Freebooksy has a free Facebook author app. If you have a YA book, you can list it on YA Books Central for a mere $4. If you are holding a free book promotion, there are may places that will list your book for free. If you are on Pinterest, try to talk everyone you can into pinning your book. Of course, these ideas may be old news to some, but, to me, they were new. If you have any book promotion/marketing ideas that seemed new to you when you heard about them, please share them in the comments section.

Happy Book Marketing!
-the Wordsy Woman

MY NEW PUBLISHED WORDS

Even though my "official" launch date will not be until November 24th when I'll be physically selling, signing, and reading from Missing Emily: Croatian Life Letters at an event for Midwest Writing Center at Southpark Mall in Moline, Illinois, I'm excited to announce the book is now for sale at Amazon.com. As everything gets uploaded, it will be for sale at other online sites as well. And as I pound the pavement, hopefully, it will be for sale at more and more stores in the Quad Cities USA area.

I started thinking about this book about four years ago when Biljana came to work at the same law firm where I was then-employed. I began researching and outlining about a year later. The rough draft was completed about a year and a half ago. And then rounds and rounds and rounds of revisions and editing before starting publication late last spring.

MissingEmily: Croatian Life Letters is the story about how two teenage girls living on opposite sides of the world, one in the United States and one in Croatia, who are dealing with their own turmoil, one of deep depression and one of civil war, find comfort and solace by writing letters to each other in the early 1990s.

The format of the book combining narrative with letters is different from many books and I am not aware of any book which links someone from the United States with someone from Croatia. It is historical in that it covers historical events, namely Croatia’s civil war, but it is was only 20 plus years ago which is part of the point of the story – civil wars or historical events are occurring right now. The book is also different in that it doesn’t neatly fit into its young adult genre; one of the characters is approximately fifteen to sixteen during the story and one thirteen to fourteen which put them into the traditional category of young adult and middle grade, respectively. The subject matter, however, would be categorized more as older young adult by traditional publishers. This is also part of the point of the story – death, depression, and war don’t fit into neat little packages, either. They are messy and sometimes ambiguous. Thus, part of the target market for the book is other adults, like me, who enjoy reading YA books.

To read an excerpt, click here to access the Look Inside feature on Amazon. If you review books for a blog, magazine, e-zine, newspaper (print or web), or other online or print publication and would like a free review copy, please send an email to me at jodie@wordsywoman.com with your name, publication name and URL (if any), physical address, email address and phone number and indicate if you want a paperback or e-book.

Thanks and happy reading!

The Wordsy Woman