Help others, help yourself by Eric Beetner

 We all have to promote our work if we want to succeed, but there’s a lot of ground between hiding one’s light under a bushel and being that pushy author people hide from at events. What are your best promo ideas and what’s the most egregious hard-selling you’ve come across?

How to get your book out there is the million dollar question facing authors. In the absence of a marketing budget and the unwillingness to pay out-of-pocket for PR (it's a hard sell to my wife to convince her that me spending thousands of dollars to earn back hundreds is a wise business decision. Go figure) we can only rely on our own wits and hustle to get our books seen.

I have always seen parallels between publishing and the music biz. As a former indie musician and a punk rock youth, I came to publishing with a similar mindset of building a scene and a DIY mentality I got from my indie band days.

Consequently, I have always been a guy who tries to set up readings myself rather than wait for someone to hand me an offer. I started a podcast which ran for 4 years and invited hundreds of authors on to talk about their books. I've hosted the Noir at the Bar series in L.A. for 13 years now and given space to more than 350 readers. I've tried things that didn't work, sure, but I keep trying new things and inviting others along for the ride.

It's all about community for me. I never try to schedule a solo event at a bookstore. Why not get a group  together and we can all share each other's readers? Promotion doesn't always have to look like promotion. I prefer it when it looks like a party.

It helps that I'm not afraid of speaking to a crowd, something many authors abhor. But we all need to be a squeaky wheel at some point.

The inverse of that is someone who only promotes with no other goal aside from "Buy my book". If you're not offering some other incentive – writing advice, free short stories, other great authors, a good night out – then you might as well be going door-to-door like an old-time encyclopedia salesman. We all loved them, right?

I've heard from many readers that it's often the author, not the actual book, that will sell them on a purchase. And also drive them away. If you show up to a conference panel to see Big Time Author A, but I can charm you with a funny story and a good anecdote about my writing, that will sell a book much faster than reading you the synopsis or telling you it will be your favorite book of the year.

We've all fallen victim to the over-seller. Maybe I'm too much of an under-seller, much more adept at shilling for other people's books over my own, but I can live with myself easier with that style. I'm not ever going to push a book on you, or at least not one with my name on it.

So I'd say, promoting others is a great way to promote yourself. I've seen other writers like Beau Johnson or our own Gabriel Valjan do it to great effect. Their tireless boosting of other author's only endears them to readers and gets them out in front of potential new readers for their own work.

I've certainly seen my books moved much faster and easier by other authors. Once, at a conference, I was called out on stage by the keynote speaker as a writer more people should read and that day I sold out of books in the signing room. I'm forever grateful to that author (Stephen Mack Jones, author of the fantastic August Snow series) and it never would have happened if I'd gotten on stage and told the same crowd they should be reading me. So there's hard evidence that my approach works. 

Now if I could just get that coveted Stephen King blurb...