Press releases seem to have gone the way of the dodo bird with most press releasing services focusing on search engine optimization rather than connecting with the media.

What new book announcement strategies have you employed with success?

Build the audience first. Then tell them directly.

Kinda brute force, but when you have a mailing list of fans, it’s pretty easy to drop them a line to give them heads up on an early release and reward them for their loyalty, as an example.

Not only that, but if they’re really rabid fans, they’ll take up the early release and blurb your new work all over teh interwebz so that the buzz is out there before the book is.

Key is having a few thousand people to prim the pump with.

Since I was publishing my first book and didn’t have a previously established fan base, I did a similar thing on a smaller scale with Facebook. I spent a few months leading up to the book release cultivating my friends list (going through other friends’ lists and reconnecting with anyone I knew even tangentially), and posted regular updates on the publishing process. By the time the book came out, many of them were excited to buy it, and pimped it to their friends as well. One guy I hadn’t seen since high school bought twenty copies wholesale to sell at events he puts on in SF.

Obviously, selling to family and friends is a pretty limited market, but it can be a nice little kickstart.

I didn’t have a fanbase when I started either, but podcasting it as a serialized audiobook gave me entree to a fanbase within a couple of months. It cost next to nothing to produce, served an underserved market niche (hungry mp3 players), and was part of an established community so that I had a starting point beyond my living room.

Three years later. A lot has changed, but if you’re looking for an audience, I still recommend this. write your book. podcast it first. see if anybody likes it. If you have an audience after 3 months, they’ll be asking for it in dead tree mode.

What approach should one use when trying to create excitement? Would people want to read about writers in the editing process and writing process?

As you can guess, I’m still trying to figure out which way to go with my advertising.

Ariel Ceylan

Look at http://podiobooks.com and http://community.podiobooks.com for active communities dedicated to podcasting longer works (novellas or bigger). If you produce a podcast of your book, you’ve got a ready made audience right there.

Cool.

Ariel Ceylan

What approach should one use when trying to create excitement? Would people want to read about writers in the editing process and writing process?

As you can guess, I’m still trying to figure out which way to go with my advertising.

There’s a lot to be said for networking. At a Pacific Northwest Writers Association workshop attendees were advised to have an email list of 100 contacts who were interested in (a) You; (b) or your genre; (c) books in general – you get the drift. So, loving Excel, I built a worksheet with the columns (1) date contacted; (2) Name; (3) eMail address, etc. And, every. single. person. I met for the year I was finalizing my first novel went into a category of that worksheet. It now numbers over 600 – I get The Best results from a staged-send ‘Hello, this is what my book is doing now’ note to that list.

News releases that offer a free-something – like my news release on how to embed a linked TOC into an eBook does well for introduction to my self-publishing eBooks, but nothing beats actually making internet ‘friends’ connecting with your readers often and writing to their tastes (ala John Locke).