Tips for helping the right audience find your book

When I visited my friend Tim McGuire last month, he was awaiting the publication of his memoir and we briefly discussed the challenge he faced in promoting it.

The conversation revived a blog-post idea that had been rattling around on my to-do list for more than two years, since Mimi published her novel, Gathering String, and I helped her promote it. I’m not sure I’m the best person to help Tim with this challenge. While we had some success, I wish we had done a better job on Gathering String. So I’ll share my advice as well as inviting yours: How have you promoted your own books successfully? How would you promote a book, if you had published one? How have publishers succeeded in getting your attention about a book that you later bought and read?

I also asked for advice from some authors I know, and I’ll share tips below from Robert Mann, Doug Worgul, Patricia T. O’Conner and Dan Buttry, as well as some of my own. Novelist Buffy Andrews and author Chuck Offenburger both gave me so much advice I’m breaking their responses out into separate guest posts for tomorrow.

I’m not sure what’s the best path for publishing a book today: self-publishing, as Mimi and Tim did (and keeping a bigger share of the proceeds) or getting a traditional publisher to handle your book (a difficult and not always successful path). Either way, you need to promote the book. An agent, who was willing to handle Mimi’s book but said it might take too long to get published going through traditional publishers, told her that, with rare exceptions, the author is responsible for promotion even when you get a traditional publisher.

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What if I don’t get published? ‘Keep writing,’ says ‘Mr. Author,’ Doug Worgul

“Dear Mr. Author,” started a letter recently from an 11-year-old boy to my cousin Doug Worgul, author of the novel Thin Blue Smoke.

With Doug’s approval, I share the child’s letter and his response:

Well said, Mr. Author! Good advice for adult writers, too.

FYI, Doug‘s other books are The Grand Barbecue, Kansas City Quiltmakers and A Table Full of Welcome.

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Francena H. Arnold (Grandma) has her Wikipedia entry — finally

Francena H. and Frank M. Arnold, my grandmother and grandfather

Whenever I’m getting a little too full of myself, I can find some humble pie by recalling or looking up what my grandmother accomplished. I ate a lot of humble pie recently learning in greater detail than I ever knew about her achievements.

Grandma wrote her first novel, Not My Will, at age 58 (my age right now). And her books have sold more than 1.2 million copies. But until recently, she didn’t have a Wikipedia entry. Now she does. I wrote it.

Writing a Wikipedia entry – or at least editing a Wikipedia page – had long been on my someday-to-do list (a list on which I make meager progress). I was thinking I might write one about Bob Moore, a World War II hero from Villisca, Iowa, whose life (and the lives of some family members) I chronicled in 1997 for the Omaha World-Herald and updated in 2008 for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. He’s certainly worthy of a Wikipedia entry, but no one’s written it yet (and few know more about him than I do). But I hadn’t gotten around to it. Maybe I will someday.

My prod to become a Wikipedia contributor came in a series of emails starting last October. First an academic researcher contacted me (having found a brief mention of Grandma on my blog). The researcher’s work hasn’t been published yet, so he asked me not to use his name. So I’ve edited his email slightly to respect that request:

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