These notes are from the Q&A session following the Shameless Self-promotion panel.
Reading groups are often affiliated with local bookstores. Create a list of book club questions. There's a site, http://www.readinggroupchoices.com, where you can get your publisher to submit your book to it and then book clubs will see it.
Can you make your effort less time-consuming? Can you make it something that feeds your spirit? Find FUN ways to drive traffic to your blog, like Twitter.
Propose yourself as a writer/reader for reading series. Write to them nine months or so in advance of your publication date. Leave the crumbs through the forest--it might seem weird to take the initiative and invite yourself over, but they can't invite you if they don't know you.
My idea: have a petition for people to sign who want your book published.
Think of how you can be of service to your potential readers.
Pre-publication blog: countdown, contests, interactive stuff--make the publication a highly anticipated event. Don't post excerpts before selling the book because they may change a lot!
Make sure you editor/publicist knows some of the places that are personal to you where he should send press releases, places that wouldn't be on his normal list--your hometown paper, other places you've lived, places your family lives.
Before publication, don't tell too much of the story because then reporters and other media folks won't have anything new to tell. OR, the more you tell and share and offer, the more readers you'll get. Two schools of thought.
You learn from everything. At the very least, you learn what interests you, and a writer gets to use everything.
#1 way to get your book known: get in trouble.
Make promises you don't know if you can keep. Make mistakes. Be game all of the time. Have real conversations--people are more likely to read or buy it if they've spoken with you. Promotion is human connection, not entry into a great national machine called publicity. It is rendering service. When you render service, the ego's out of it and the fear's out of it. Big global plan. A little promotion each day (writing a fan letter counts!) Micromovements.
Sit down with a librarian to talk about how to promote your books to librarians. They might invite you back for a reading. Librarians will know about book clubs. Stores will send employees to readings with a portable credit card machine and books to sell. Mail copies with letters to your literary heroes. Or to your peers, equals. That's where collaboration might happen--collaborate with established artists in other media, and their platform can market you. Nonfiction and other writers have expertise. We are authorities about things. That's a platform too. Market with what you know, apart from the book as a product.
Here are some things they mentioned:
http://www.booksense.com
Drive by Daniel Pink
The Gift by Lewis Hyde
http://tribalauthor.com. They said the blog section of this site includes a post that helps you figure out Twitter.
http://www.4over4.com lets you print your own business cards, stationery, etc.
That's it for the Squad 365 panel, the first and perhaps best one I went to this year. Stay tuned for more AWP rehashing as I try to stretch the love out a little bit longer.
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