Attention Authors!

• Trends
• May 28, 2015
• by Merrie Spaeth

Last year, I worked with an about-to-be-published author and realized that today’s authors face special challenges due to the changes in the media landscape and book publishing world.

I have a few words of advice. First, the “media” doesn’t exist anymore. Even if you’re doing the traditional book tour, look for websites and blogs where you can start a conversation.

We’re finding more domains that were started to provide a venue for articles to benefit a company or issue but have now turned into respected digital publications.

Spread around as many excerpts of your book as you can.

Next, the proverbial book reading:  forget everything you think you want to do. Look at book tours and appearances as opportunities to perform, to convince people to buy the book and to enlist them to tell others. This means building in a maximum of interaction with those attending. Ask the audience questions:

• What motivated you to attend?
• What makes you read books?
• Are you looking for something useful? entertaining? a good story?

Whatever their answers are, characterize your book as meeting those needs.

It’s something of a broad overstatement, but authors may need more training and coaching than any other group we work with today. Just because you’re a published author and know how to write dialogue does not mean you couldn’t benefit from incorporating some memory capturing techniques into your readings and interviews. Consider including elements like props, storytelling and a bit of humor.

And speaking of that newly published author? She had a brilliant idea and created a LinkedIn group around her book to keep the discussion going long past the first read through.