Taking the Mystery Out of Promoting Your Book

P.M. Terrell
Palari Publishing (2006)
ISBN 1928662439
Reviewed by Kathleen Dowdell for Reader Views (11/06)

“Taking the Mystery Out of Promoting Your Book” is a wonderful guide for promoting and selling your book. P.M Terrell has put together a detailed step-by-step plan that will benefit new authors who are trying to promote their books as well as authors working with publicists and agents. Chapters are written in mystery terms (planning the crime, casing the joint, breaking and entering) with the goal of getting you to “counting the dough,” the money you will receive from all the books that you sell. It’s a fun way of working through the book but don’t be deceived, there is a lot of work to be done before you can count the dough.
 
First and foremost, you need to learn how to promote your book by becoming your own publicist. Tips about writing press releases, press kits, grabber sheets and bios are outlined to help you gain notoriety. Who better than you can write about your attributes!

Terrell stresses that as an author you become a brand. Once you’ve written a best seller, readers are more likely to remember your name so it is important to sell yourself as well as your book. Many of the tasks you will perform will be geared to consumer marketing such as reviews by other authors, institutions, and publications, with the ultimate goal of creating “buzz” for your book. Planning publicity and speaking events is often time consuming and difficult if you are doing the job yourself. Her tips will help expedite the process and make it less stressful.
 
As part of building a marketing package, the author gives a great description of how to write a cover letter touting your book as well as what kind of background information you should include about yourself. As I indicated earlier, this is your time to shine. The Q&A sheet consists of questions and answers you put together about yourself and your book. This is a great opportunity to ask and answer the kinds of questions that you hope people want to know. You can give readers a lot of information about the book or just enough to entice them to purchase the book. You can also use the Grabber sheet to literally grab their attention with highlights about your book. The chapters in this book are detailed and give concise information that will help you to promote your book.
 
P.M. Terrell, as a successful author, uses her own experiences to lay out a marketing plan that will help sell your book in a step-by-step approach that makes the whole process easy to tackle. In addition, she provides an appendix that gives links to websites for more specific information and examples. “Taking the Mystery Out of Promoting Your Book” gave me a lot of in-depth information about the publishing field. I would recommend reading it initially from cover-to-cover and then going back and targeting the areas in which you need to improve.

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