Next, you'll write the Promotions section. In this section, you will show your
publisher that you intend to go all-out to promote your book. You can do this with an
investment of money, or of time. If you can do both, you should.
Promoting with money
Company CEOs, sports figures, celebrities and other well-heeled people often write
books, or have books written for them by ghost-writers. It's understood that any celebrity
will hire a public relations agency, and will spend a lot of money nudging the book up the
bestseller list. If you have money to spend on a public relations agency, mention this in
your proposal. Your publisher will be pleased that you intend to get behind the book.
Promoting with time
If you don't have swags of cash lying around that you can use to promote your book, you'll need to invest time. You can promote your book a million ways -- from pasting magnetic letters onto your car and building a Web site, to calling bookstores all over the country to talk them into stocking your book. You can even act as your own PR agency, and without anything other than an Internet connection and some time, can do a lot of work to help sell your book. The publisher will appreciate any marketing you do.
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Sample Promotions section -
Here's the Promotions section from Writing to Sell in the Internet Age.
My primary focus will be on online promotions. For two reasons: I'm located in
Australia, which means I can't go the usual book store/ speaking venue route to promote
the book. And I've been online since 1992, pre-World Wide Web, and know how to
promote online. (I wrote a book called Making the Internet Work for Your Business, which
is about setting up a small business online (1998, Allen & Unwin)). Also, it's appropriate to
promote a book about selling in the age of the Internet on the Internet.
I have a popular Web site (http://www.mywebsite.com/) and three email ezines, and
I'll be promoting Writing To Sell In the Internet Age heavily in all of them. I now spend ten
hours a week working on my site and my ezines, and on promotional activities for them, so
I'll increase that to 15 hours, so that I regularly spend considerable time on the book's
promotion.
My offline focus will be on getting press coverage and radio interviews.
My plan outline
1. I will create a mini-Web site for Writing To Sell In the Internet Age. This
will be a three page sales site, the name of the site to be taken from the book. Such
mini-sites are called "buy, bookmark or leave" sites. The entire site is similar to a direct
mail letter: its only purpose is to encourage the reader to buy the book. The beauty of such
sites is that if they're efficiently linked from other sites, such as my business site, Digital-e,
and other sites in which I have an interest, they quickly rank #1 in the search top search
engines, that is, in Yahoo! and Google.com.
2. I'll write a long sales page on Digital-e for Writing To Sell In the Internet
Age. (See an example: http://www.mywebsite.com/ecourses2.html)
3. I'll develop an email newsletter for the book's buyers, and prospective
buyers. This monthly newsletter will update the information in the book, and will include a
link for readers to buy the book online.
4. I'll subscribe to a press release Web site, so I can send out monthly online
news releases for the book to thousands of media outlets in the U.S., and if the book gets a
Commonwealth sale, in the UK and Australia. With the phone, email and fax, doing
long-distance interviews for newspapers and radio will be easy. Several of my books have
attracted radio and newspaper interviews, and I'm comfortable doing them.
5. I'll interact in online chat rooms, conferences, and in mailing lists, subtly
promoting the book.
6. I'll create a private discussion group for the book's readers in the "Talk"
forums section of my Digital-e Web site, so that readers can ask questions and interact with
me directly. As this forum grows, I'll appoint reader-moderators for the various discussions.
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Write the Competition section
On Day Two, you did a lot of work on assessing the market for your book. Here's
where you use all that information. Choose anywhere from three to five books which you
estimate will be your book's main competitors. Describe how your book is different from
these books, and how your book fills a niche in the marketplace.
Include the names of the books, the authors, and the year of publication. If these
books were published several years ago, this is all to the good.
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