Promotion: Your Role As An Author

One comment I see a lot in query letters is something along these lines: "I do want you to know that I will do all I can to promote my book."

I hate to break it to you, but this is expected.

If your career takes you into traditional publishing, will you have the support of your marketing, art and business team at the publisher? You better believe it. These people work really hard to make sure your story gets into the right hands. But with that said, remember you are just one of many authors with the publisher. So what does that mean?

You get to do a lot of work on your end as well.

Publishers know you have connections they might not have. They can take care of those bigger bookstores, but what about those smaller ones? That is up to you.

This is one of the struggles a lot of new authors face. Writing the book was one thing, but now, on top of the writing, your time now has to go to marketing. Now, instead of creating that rocking scene in chapter 12, you get to spend half of your day on social media, promoting that last book. Now you are running contests, heading to the post office to mail books to your reviewers, getting on Zoom for chats with your readers... the list is endless.

I really do hate this term while we are still in this Covid-19 thing, but, when it comes to marketing, "We are all in this together." The more you do and the more you get your name out there, the better the chance people will be reading your books and buying future books!