5stars5 of 5 stars
“Packed with Wonderful Information!For anyone who has written a book of any kind - this is a must-have, and must-keep guide! Every chapter is filled with insights and how-tos and a whole bunch of where-to-finds!” ~Feather Scwartz, author
The Frugal Book Promoter:
How to get nearly free publicity on your own or partnering with your publisher (Third Edition)
From the HowToDoItFrugally
Series of books for writers
Early Edition Awards: Winner USA Book News, coveted Irwin Award
Award for Second Edition: USA Book News winner, silver medal from Military Writers Society of America, honored by Global Ebook Awards
ISBN:978-1-61599-468-7 (paperback)
978-1-61599-469-4 (hardcover) Hard cover: $36.95: Ebook: $6.95: Paperback: $24.95 Library discount:per distributor Sales Channels:INGRAM, Midwest Library, Follett, Brodart To order paperback, e-book or hard cover on Amazon: http://bit.ly/FrugalBookPromoIII
This multi award-winner, now in its third edition, celebrates its 16th Anniversary as flagship of Carolyn Howard-Johnson's HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers. For only a few cents a day the third edition of The Frugal Book Promoter assures your book the best possible start in life. The author was inspired to write this book full of nitty-gritty how-tos for getting nearly-free publicity for her UCLA Writers’ Program class. A former publicist, journalist, and retailer, Carolyn shares her professional experience as well as practical tips gleaned from the successes of her own book campaigns. She tells authors how to do what their publishers can’t or won’t and why authors can often do their own promotion better than a PR professional.
“[Carolyn Howard-Johnson is] an incessant promoter who develops and shares new approaches for book promotion.”
~ Marilyn Ross, founder Small Publishers of North America and coauthor of The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing
“. . . until now I didn’t have many other staples to recommend to new authors looking for publicity.”
~ Jenna Glatzer, author of Make a Real Living as a Freelance Aut
“Your willingness to help truly touches me. The Frugal Book Promoter helped me so much while marketing my first book and I never could have imagined how personally it would assist me for my second.”
~Karina Bartow, fiction writer
“At last—a solid, sensible, systematic guide to the ins and outs of promotion and publicity. Written by a writer, for writers—Carolyn Howard-Johnson proves that she’s not only an accomplished poet, essayist, and novelist, but also a marketing maestro!”
~ JayCe Crawford, Cup of Comfortauthor, copyright professional
Excerpt
Before We Get Started
Knowing the rules of promotion is like knowing the rules for writing. When you have mastered them, you have the confidence to break them when you need to. ~ CHJ
Don’t misunderstand the above quotation. I’m not suggesting that an author run willy-nilly breaking the rules of public relations (PR). That will not benefit her reputation as either an author or someone who knows how to brand herself. Many books give you PR essentials, but once you know the rules, you are better able to let your writer’s imagination loose so you can promote yourself and your book with confidence. When you do that, even our rule-oriented culture will appreciate your creativity rather than criticize you for it. Rather than the tinkle of bells, your efforts will be the sound of timpani to the ears of gatekeepers—you know, folks like editors, producers, and anyone else able to help you get your message out there.
In some circles it appears to be stylish to eschew promotion as vocally as possible. However, it is a myth that authors—especially the greats—lack the ability to promote. Many famous and literate authors were very good promoters, and some did it without PR classes (or books!) to tell them how. Mark Twain is an example.
Laura Skandera Trombley, president of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and a noted Mark Twain scholar, says the image we have of this American icon is the one we have “because that’s the image [Twain himself] wanted people to have,” and that Twain was a man “so gifted at marketing himself that nearly a century after his death, his name still evokes his white-haired likeness.” Branding works so well that Trombley was moved to add, “And [Twain’s image has] been so co-opted, it sells everything from pizza to banks to luggage. You know, Twain and Elvis, two symbols of American cultural life that are just indelible.”
As important as branding is, building relationships (that might be read as networking) is even more important. Certainly networking is part of branding, but it can obscure the definition. Branding is everything you do to encourage people to think of you favorably and often.
We all know what building relationships is. The thing is, with the advent of the web the possibilities for relationships are so much greater than they once were. Relationships have become—if not a more important part of a good promotion campaign—at least more widespread. “Social networking” is the new term for some of that relationship building and I don’t neglect that concept in this book. Having said that, the basic concepts and tools of public relations are still the drivers behind promoting with new media.
Marketing and all it encompasses (PR, branding, promotion, building relationships, and more!) works. And it works better if the author is proactive. A publisher’s publicist can only do so much without an author’s cooperation. Further, most publishers assign no publicist or, if they do, she may have access to a very slim Rolodex, an even thinner budget, and hardly any experience or none at all. It is up to you to overcome these drawbacks.
This book is for authors who want their books to soar and do not want their careers to languish. It is structured so authors can select chapters that address aspects of their marketing plan most needed at any given time.
When I refer to something I cover in depth elsewhere, I give the reader a prompt. The Index also makes it easy for authors like you to find tips for different kinds of promotions as you need them. As an example, when you look up “TV,” you’ll find information on how to get TV appearances, how to prepare for them, and how to utilize them in your promotion.
The Frugal Book Promoter is not a textbook. It contains opinions—some as black and white as the page you find them on. It is me talking to you, sharing with you. I had no desire to write a tome that would make my readers hearken back to their boring (and heavy!) high school texts.
I may not cover every possible promotional idea out there. In fact, I avoid anything I have not tried as a professional publicist, retailer, or in promoting my own books. You will, however, find some new (or rarely used) ways to promote that have not been scorched, stirred, and then warmed over.
What is important is that you find a path for promoting that fits your interests, skills, pocketbook, and your book’s title. I expect you to pick and choose. Only someone who had no guidance (like me in the days right after my novel was published) would attempt to use them all. I hope that my experiences will save you time, money, and heartache.
Novelist and political powerhouse Hill Kemp and I had a conversation about how interesting it is that writers scorn something so commercial and practical as marketing, but when they sign with a fine traditional publisher (or any other publisher!) who doesn’t market their books, they are most put out. That is one of the reasons the first Frugal Book Promoter: How to do what your publisher won’t came to be and why I expanded it in the second edition and this, the third. Marketing is essential. It is also creative. Hill suggests that both nonfiction and fiction writers can help themselves overcome their aversion to promotion with this exercise:
“Pretend you are writing a novel. Create a character who lives to market something—anything. Put that character into situations you might face in promoting your own book. You’ll then have in this character a mentor for furthering your writing career.”
Professional Reviews
From Editor in Chief of The Compulsive Reader
Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
The Frugal Book Promoter:
How to get nearly free publicity on your own or partnering with your publisher
3rd Edition By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Modern History Press
2019,
ISBN: 9781615994700
I first read, and reviewed Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s The Frugal Book Promoter in 2011, when the first edition came out. Since then it has been my go-to for ideas on ways to promote my books cheaply – which is, of course, what every author needs these days. It’s a noisy world, and no matter how well-written, or what kind of publisher support you may have, if you don’t promote well, it’s unlikely that your books will attract notice. Few of us have big budgets for promotion, and most of us have a budget close to zero. Creative and effective ideas for book promotion are more than just nice-to-haves, they’re critical, and Howard-Johnson is about as knowledgeable as it gets on the subject. Of course books like this go out of date quickly, so the re-releases are also vital, as they allow for technological and cultural change. The 3rd edition came out in September 2019, and is right up-to-the-minute, exploring new ways of branding, developing a platform, and getting your work out into the world. Howard-Johnson’s prose remains utterly clear, accessible, and warm–like having a very helpful, clued-up conversation with your best friend–and the book is as inspirational as it is practical.
The latest version of the book contains nearly 300 pages (quite a lot more than the first edition!) of high quality information on every thing from how to promote your work ethically, public relations, creating media releases and a media kit, querying for reviews (and believe me, this is a much needed skill!), making use of radio and other media, using the internet and social media (and how not to use it), including ensuring that you use online bookstores correctly, making the most of reading groups, revitalizing old titles, recycling your work, and so much more. As with the original version, the book comes with a number of handy template, scripts, codes and examples, but these have been updated so that they continue to remain relevant to a modern author. The book is beautifully structured and well indexed, so you can find what you need when you need it fast. Howard-Johnson has created a number of mnemonics to help simplify the overall promotion process:
“The Six-P maxim is the one that makes me a nag. The more organized you are, the more you know early on, the earlier you start to practice promotion and publicity magic, the more good it will do for your book. The more you learn the easier it is. And that leads me to the three most important Ps for marketing books. Platform, Publicity, Public Relations.”
Throughout the book, there is careful attention paid to ethics, which I love. The Frugal Book Promoter is most certainly not about buying likes, reviews, unsolicited mailings, or manipulating people into purchasing something they don’t want. These practices happen all too frequently, and sometimes they work in the short term, but they are unsustainable and no way to manage a lifelong career. Ethical marketing all about relationships, giving people work they will get value from, and working within carefully obtained permissions. It’s about creating a brand that people will continue to trust, so you’re not just selling one book, but yourself as a person. This kind of work builds on itself and each thing that you do increases the overall messages you’re putting out, creating a cumulative effect:
“Good PR, of course, is carefully targeted. But mostly PR is connecting with people in a way that makes them feel cared for, and those connections are made—with love and expertise—over and over again. Those are the essentials and they work. Done this way, great publicity becomes great public relations and vice versa.”
I won’t give away too many of Howard-Johnson’s marvelous tips here, but suffice to say that the book is full of them—many of them inventive, and all of them focusing on credibility and multi-tasking – getting impact for your effort. As the title suggests, most of the ideas here are either inexpensive or free, though not without effort. There are a few chapters which are worth the whole cost of the book. These include, to my mind, chapters on querying and pitching–something I repeatedly see done badly—and the chapter on creating a media kit. I have not seen either of these topics covered in such detail, or with such clarity. Even seasoned self-promoters will learn new things from these chapters. The reviews section too, is particularly thorough, with plenty of current links and samples. There are also lots of tips about what doesn’t work and where to save your money, your time, your sanity, and how to best manage your all-important networks–for the long run. Put simply, The Frugal Book Promoter is one of the best all-purpose books for developing a promotional plan for your work that won’t break the bank or destroy your relationships. This is a book keeps on providing practical, easy to apply ideas to get your work noticed, and to create a viable, sustainable, ethical platform that will continue to create valuable promotion for authors of all genres. It’s one of those guides that should be on every author’s bookshelf.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Magdalena Ball is an award-winning novelist, poet, reviewer and interviewer, and is Managing Editor of Compulsive Reader, one of the internet’s most respected and long-running review sites. She is the author of several novels and poetry books, the most recent of which, High Wire Step, was published in 2018 by Flying Island Books. Find out more about Magdalena at http://www.magdalenaball.com.
By Jim Cox, Editor-in-Chief of Midwest Book Review
Reviewed by Jim Cox, Editor-in-Chief Midwest Book Review
Synopsis
Simply stated, this newly updated third edition of "The Frugal Book Promoter" by Carolyn Howard-Johnson assures even the most novice of authors to get their book gets the best possible start in life, whether their publisher assigns zero dollars or thousands to their book's marketing campaign. Carolyn is a former publicist and draws upon her years of experience to enable authors provides no-nonsense basics to build the essentials needed to build a time-saving social media campaign and knock'em dead lists of influencers that will be more effective than anything paid advertisement you could buy. Authors can pick and choose from dozens of ideas for promotions that Carolyn developed or refined through extensive (and award-winning) book campaigns of her own. There are campaign ideas, techniques and strategies to match any pocketbook and personality considerations.
Critique
It should be noted that the Midwest Book Review is positively cited three specific times as a valuable and valued resource for an author's book marketing campaign, along with a positive endorsement citation for Carolyn's work on her previous 'how to' books for authors and publishers. That said, this new third edition of "The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher" continues to be an unreservedly endorsed and recommended addition to personal, professional, community, college, and university library Writing/Publishing instructional collections. Thoroughly 'user friendly' in organization and presentation, it should be noted for personal reference and reading lists that this new edition of "The Frugal Book Promoter" is also available in a paperback edition (9781615994687, $24.95) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $6.95).
Editorial Note
Carolyn Howard-Johnson brings her experience as a publicist, journalist, marketer, and retailer to the advice she gives in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers and the many classes she taught for nearly a decade as instructor for UCLA Extension's world-renown Writers' Program.
The books in her How To Do It Frugally series of books for writers have won multiple awards. including from USA Book News, Readers' Views Literary Award, the marketing award from Next Generation Indie Books, and the coveted Irwin award among others
Howard-Johnson is also the recipient of the California Legislature's Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment Award, and her community's prestigious Character and Ethics award for her work promoting tolerance with her writing and Diamond Award for Achievement in the Arts. She was also named to Pasadena Weekly's list of "Fourteen San Gabriel Valley women who make life happen."
Of particular interest for the publishing community is a complete listing of her published works which can be found at:
Admitting to carrying a pen and journal wherever she goes, Carolyn's website is www.howtodoitfrugally.com. Those interested can subscribe to her free #SharingwithWriters newsletter by sending an e-mail with "subscribe" in the subject
Poetry Review by Betty Jo Tucker
Ode to Carolyn Howard-Johnson
By Betty Jo Tucker
Helping authors she loves to do.
Reaching many, not just a few.
Her books show how promotion works
and where to go for review perks.
Reprints and launches faze her not.
She’s eager to share all she’s got.
Her great newsletter takes the lead
with writing tips authors should heed.
Thanks, dear Carolyn, for your time
and for reading this little rhyme
----
About the poet:
Betty Jo Tucker is a memoirist and considered the poet laureate of film with two poetry/film review-books to her credit. Her memoir is now a film called "Cake" and is available on Amazon Fire, a lovely story about a "second time around" with the same man.
MORE ABOUT THE POET
Betty Jo Tucker is the author of two editions of fun poetry reviews and her memoir was made into a love moved about marriage the second time around called "Cakes." Find her on Facebook and Twitter at @MovieAddictRevu .
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Reviews for "The Frugal Book Promoter, Third Edition"
This looks like a book that many authors here on AD could benefit from. I get many questions from authors, but not many on promotion. You are right about networks, it seems like the only way that I have been able to promote myself as a writer is through the networks that I've established. Unfortunately, my physical condition (quadriplegia) makes getting out in public more difficult with each year. Some use it as an angle for publicity, and I do, to a point. But I find that I don't write about disability and therefore that doesn't shape who I am as an author.
I have a book, 99 Ways to Promote Your Book in 99 Days, by my publisher. I only got to day four or five, because I'm so lax at promotion. I would rather write than promote. I've always been a terrible salesman.
