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Welcome to
How to Help Promote
Your Book and Build
Your Brand
Paul Signorelli
June 14, 2013
Friday, June 14, 2013
www.alaeditions.org
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
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• Q and A Session at the end, type questions into
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• Note: Make sure your chat is set to “Send to: All
participants” when you ask a question.
Q and A Sessions
How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
Hear an echo?
If you are listening to the Audio Broadcast and
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Troubleshooting
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
• You’ll receive an e-mail within 24 hours of each session
giving you access to full archive, which is an audio/video
rendering of the event
• If you want your own copy of the slides, we’ll post them
to slideshare. The URL will be in the follow-up e-mail.
Materials and Archive
for Today’s Event
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
• Co-author, with Lori Reed, of the ALA Editions book
Workplace Learning & Leadership
• Trainer
• Presenter
• Social Media Strategist
Paul Signorelli
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
Writing Outside the Book
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
Writing Outside the Book
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
Writing Outside the Book
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Speaking/Book Signings
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
Speaking/Book Signings
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Speaking/Book Signings
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Amazon.com
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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LinkedIn
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Facebook
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Academic Connections
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Professional Associations
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Blogs…
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Blogs and Websites…
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Blogs and Websites…
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
Blogs and Websites…
Beyond Your Own
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
Blogs and Websites…
Beyond Your Own
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Twitter
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Video/YouTube
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Pulling It All Together
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
Pulling It All Together
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
Pulling It All Together
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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Next
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
Friday, June 14, 2013
A Visual Summary
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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A Visual Summary
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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A Visual Summary
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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A Visual Summary
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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A Visual Summary
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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A Visual Summary
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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A Visual Summary
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How to Promote Your Book and Build Your Brand | Paul Signorelli www.alaeditions.org
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For More Information
Paul Signorelli & Associates
1032 Irving St., #514
San Francisco, CA 94122
415.681.5224
paul@paulsignorelli.com
http://paulsignorelli.com
Twitter: @paulsignorelli
http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com
Notas do Editor
Once upon a time, we believed that writers wrote, editors and publishers cleaned up our act and helped us find the audience our work deserved, and we basked in semi-universal acclaim.Forget about it! If you like to write, that’s a good thing, because writing the book is only part of the process; writing about the book so you can help that wonderful book reach its even more wonderful audience is something all of us need to do to support our publisher’s efforts on our behalf. If you were lucky during that writing of your book, you had plenty of collaborators—including your publications editor and members of the marketing. Now comes the fun part—continuing the collaborations so that everyone wins.Because Dan Freeman from ALA Editions was desperate enough to ask me to walk you through this process based on my own experience, we’ll be looking at a variety of examples from the efforts I made to promote the book that Lori Reed and I co-wrote—and I hope what it inspires is thoughts about how easily you can adapt lots of these actions rather than seeing this as the ultimate act of self-promotion. (Of course, if this sends you looking for our book, neither Lori nor I are going to object overly much!)Just to be sure that this is really about you rather than about me, we’ll stop at regular intervals so you can jot down your own ideas and walk away with your own rudimentary marketing plan that supports what ALA Editions is doing in support of you and your book. Let’s start with the obvious: by collaborating with our ALA Editions colleagues, we’ve already started the process: we’ve provided them with copy that they can use on the ALA Store page for our book, and we can continue adding content as it develops.A key point: everything we’re talking about today is built up incrementally. Even what we’re looking at on the slides form the ALA Store has been added as new content became available, including…
…the podcast that came from an interview long after the book was published; an article I had written; and the sample chapter…
…and let’s not forget those bios we submitted when the book was published; that’s reusable content.And the reviews that came later; each time we heard about or found a new one, we sent links to ALA Editions so the page could be updated.With little more than the content from this site, we’re ready to building upon our partnership in a variety of ways.
Let’s start with the idea of public speaking and book signings.Yes, I know, if you wanted to be a public speaker, you would have taken more high-school debate classes instead of following a path that led you to write a book. And yes, I know: Public speaking is one of the most frightening things most people can imagine. But if we can get ourselves past that fear and engage with our prospective readers, we stand a good chance of reaching even more of them—because they’ll help us through their own positive comments after they hear us and benefit from what we have written.None of us are going to see the sort of book tours we imagine in our wildest dreams, but there’s nothing to stop us from working with our publisher and our other colleagues to create our own version of that tour—and it doesn’t have to all happen during the first days, weeks, and months that the book is available.If you’re a member of an ALA division or round table, contact your colleagues to see if you can do an event—or several events--at an upcoming conference, during an online gathering—think webinar or monthly meeting here.If you have other professional affiliations, looks for ways to make your content meaningful to them—and remember that organizations that meet regularly have a tremendous number of speaker slots to fill, so this isn’t just about you. If you can help colleagues fill one of those speaking slots with content that is meaningful to their audience, you’re doing them a favor while doing one for yourself and your work.So let’s look at what’s happening here. Lori and I managed to score a book-signing slot on the night the exhibits opened for the ALA Annual Conference, in New Orleans, in 2011.
We decided it might be fun to invite a few friends, so we made sure that Maurice Coleman, who wrote the foreword to the book, was on hand to celebrate with us.
And just when things were settling in nicely, with several colleagues joining us and doing their best to act as if they were really interested in what we had written, we managed to attract a couple of other visitors who agreed to display their interest in the book.How we managed to rope them in is a story all its own, and I’m going to return to that in a few minutes when we talk about the value of being visible within the professional organizations we have joined.
If it’s all about selling books, we certainly can’t ignore one of the largest booksellers out there.Amazon.com allows for some interesting twists, and this is another case where branding is important and reusing content extends your reach.You have an opportunity to write something about yourself—I used this as an opportunity to make the connection between the content of the book and the work I routinely do in workplace learning and performance (staff training)—and you can and certainly should do something that is consistent with what you have on your ALA Store page.You can also set up a connection between your twitter feed and blog posts so they will appear--as you can see on the right-hand side of the screen.And, of course, there’s the all-important sales pitch, prominently featured on the page.All of this at no cost other than the time it took to prepare it and the few minutes a month it takes to check to be sure it’s still up to date.Some additional tips from our ALA Editions colleagues:Place your bio and photo prominently on the page.Ask contacts to write a review of your book on Amazon.Ask contacts to link to your book from their website.Ask fellow authors to write a one- or two-sentence endorsement that includes their name and book title.Post any book reviews of your book here.Post articles tied to your book(s). You can duplicate content from your blog or Facebook page – don’t assume that Amazon visitors are aware of your other outlets.Include any and all titles that you’ve worked on.Blog about your other accomplishments/events.Include a link to your Facebook pageMake the most of your author page at Author Central at Amazon (https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/landing?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0)
LinkedIn is another great resource—particularly since it is designed to help professionals reach and keep up with their colleagues. You have that great space, at the top of your profile, where you can promote yourself as you want to be recognized and as your colleagues are most likely to expect to find you. You can post updates that can be linked to your Twitter account, so one post goes into both places as long as you remember to stay within Twitter’s 140-character limit. You can even extend that post directly into Facebook or, as I’ve done, set things up so that what starts in LinkedIn goes to Twitter and, from there, is forwarded to Facebook, so each post appears in three different places. That’s a great way to draw attention to your work and any upcoming promotional events you’ve scheduled.Best of all, of course, is the LinkedIn app for your publications, as you can see in the lower right-hand corner of this excerpt from my own account. Best of all: there’s a little arrow to the write of the title, and when a viewer clicks on that arrow, they’re taken to a place where they can buy the book. I’ve set mine up so it goes to the ALA Editions page for the book.
Lori took the lead on carving out a space for us on Facebook with this page. Although we certainly could be doing a better job of utilizing it, the fact that it’s there just places us in one more location where friends and colleagues are likely to be reminded that the book remains available.Some tips from our ALA Editions colleagues:Consider choosing the “Entertainment” page type where you can select the category ‘Book’ from the Entertainment category list. This page will include the option of including your ISBN number.Rework material that did not make it into the book into articles for your page.
This short article from the University of North Texas alumni magazine—published before the book came out—is a reminder that the colleges and universities with which we are affiliated have a vested interest in featuring stories about successful alums. Staying in touch with people on campus and submitting updates about what you’re doing—including publication of a book—is certainly something that will be of interest to them and to your extended family of colleagues in those settings.
Let’s circle back to that earlier picture with Darth Vader to see how something like that happens…and how we can extend the life of those wonderfully unexpected magic moments that we have to grab before we miss them.As you’ll recall, we were doing a book-signing in the ALA store on the night the exhibits opened for the 2011 ALA Annual Conference, in New Orleans. Things were going nicely—always at least a few people stopping by to chat and be convinced that they really needed a copy of this book. And then, at virtually the same moment, Lori and I looked up in time to see a small parade of people in gorgeous Star Wars costumes walking past the store.“My kids are going to kill me if I don’t get a picture of myself with Darth Vader,” Lori thought as soon as she realized what was passing by.“I’m going to kill myself if I don’t find a way to get them to join this book-signing, I was thinking. I dashed out of the booth, threw myself in front of the procession, explained what we were doing, and asked the costumed guests if they would join us for a few minutes. Within moments of their arrival at that table within the store, we were surrounded by people, and the flashing of bulbs from cameras gave the illusion that we were staging an enormous press conference.Never overlook the power of appearing—with your book—at the professional gatherings of any association to which you belong!
And let’s carry that story a bit further. If you already have a blog, this is exactly the sort of story that belongs there. Readership in my blog leaped tremendously within the 24 hours after I posted this piece. My own readers forwarded it; the people in the Star Wars costumes forwarded it. And tremendous numbers of conference attendees forwarded links to the article. When it was all over, I turned to Lori and asked, “What next? Got any connections to Harry Potter?”
And let’s extend that even further…Many of us who use Wordpress use it either as a primary or secondary website—for me, it’s a secondary website that is less formal and reaches a somewhat different audience than my main website does.The “About” page on my blog serves the same purpose an “About” page on a website serves: It draws attention to my writing, connects that writing to the larger playing fields I inhabit, and creates links back to the ALA Store page so potential readers become actual readers. I do something similar on the “Publications” page of that same blog.
And Lori has done a nice promotion on her own website, as you see from this additional graphic element.Some tips from our ALA Editions colleagues:Sell from your website.ALA Editions can provide a cover image and marketing copy.We can also provide a link to ALA Editions bookstore.Create a “buy it here” button that links to our website.
There really is no reason to even stop at that point.If you think about the other groups you’ve joined, you’re likely to find additional writing and promotional opportunities.I’ve written pieces for American Libraries, for theALA Learning Round Table blog and newsletter. I’ve also written articles for an American Society for Training & Development online publication.
And I’ve established a bit of a presence on a writing site called Red Room. There’s no reason why you can’t be pursuing similar opportunities.Tips from our ALA Editions colleagues:Search for related blogs/websites and volunteer to write a guest column on the topic of your book.Provide the site with your bio, a cover image of the book and a link to ALA Editions bookstore.
Adding yet another plug for branding: you’ve probably seen the consistent use of a logo—which comes from my own website—throughout much of what I do. Adding that logo here to my Twitter account and drawing upon the same keywords I’ve used elsewhere, I’ve made the connection between the various elements of my work in ways that call attention to the book and other writing that I continue to do.One very creative idea from a social media maven I admire: When he wrote a book about using social media for marketing, he actually tweeted out 200 140-character excerpts from the book. What a great way to connect a subject to the very tools being used to promote a book about that subject!
I’ll admit it straight up: I have a terrible case of video envy.I’ve always admired the series of short videos done for the book Rework a couple of years ago. They had style. They were well-scripted. They had a tremendous sense of humor. And they made me want to read the book.Each built upon that balled up piece of paper on the cover of the book and worked it into scenarios that connected the image to the content of the book.Tips from our ALA Editions colleagues:Create a video about your book. Post it on Amazon, your sites, and forums. It need not be slick; a homemade quality using a webcam or digital video camera is part of the charm.Examples: Have someone interview you. Read an excerpt. Discuss the book’s topic and why the book benefits the viewer. Or, take a book-trailer approach (similar to a movie trailer, combining graphics, written and spoken words, and music).Upload the video to YouTube, then embed a link on your site, Facebook, Amazon Author’s Page, blog, etc.Copy and paste the “embed” code form the video’s page on YouTube. When you upload the video, include important keywords in the title, description, and tags. Include your Website address E-commerce site.
Let’s look at one final example of how to take one small fortuitous moment and milk it for all it’s worth.Returning to the ALA Annual Conference in 2012, I was still thinking about how much fun Lori and I had with the whole Darth-Vader-reading-the-book event in 2011. Knowing I was going to do another book-signing while at the 2012 Annual Conference, I decided to cruise the exhibits floor the evening before the reading—and there it was, another opportunity. Spiderman was nice enough to spend a couple of minutes reading our book while we were photographed together.
Later that evening, I tweeted out the picture as a way of promoting the event the book-signing the next day.
And I gave us another small burst of visibility by blogging about it after the book-signing…and even managed to drop in that small Darth Vader photograph to give it an extended bit of life.Now if I could just get that Harry Potter kid to show up!
Let’s circle back to the beginning.Every one of you has a page similar to this—or will have one when your book hits the market.Let’s think about how we can use this as a starting point, and get a few comments into the chat window summarizing what initial step or steps you can easily take to extend this page into any of the venues we’ve discussed today.
Start with the ALA Store page for your book.
Think about who might be interested in hosting a book-signing for you, or having you present on your topic. And don’t forget to draw the right people into the event.
Draw upon existing content to create a presence on Amazon.com.
Don’t forget LinkedIn and Facebook…
…and blogs….
…and other websites.
Most importantly of all, don’t miss any opportunity to make it easy for readers to obtain copies of your book.Best of luck.
