Promotion is a challenging thing for a writer to get right. You want to get word that your book is out there (or in my case, that it’s available for pre-order), but you don’t want to be that person who’s just “BUY MY BOOK!” Because that person is obnoxious.
Seriously, that person isn’t just hypothetical. There are people out there like that, and they are obnoxious. I once knew someone whose twitter feed would auto-tweet one of ten different “BUY MY BOOK HERE’S THE LINK” messages every few hours, like clockwork.
I never bought that book.
But you have to do something, of course, else no one knows the book is out there. The trick is getting the word out there without annoying the people you want to be enticing. Of course, the best way to do that is for someone else to be the one talking about your book. That way it’s not you doing obnoxious self-promotion. It’s someone who’s genuinely excited about your work and wants to talk about it!
And sometimes you get blessed with a bit of serendipity. In my case, it tied to Book Country. See, I was one of the initial beta-testers of the writing-critiquing community, which was designed and owned by Penguin. Thorn of Dentonhill was one of the first books available on the site for critique– at least, its first few chapters. So when Thorn was bought by DAW– part of the Penguin group– the folks at Book Country were eager to talk it up.
Of course, I’ll still be talking it up plenty in the months to come. Have no doubt about that.
All right, off to the word mines. See you all down there.