Over the weekend, second-time novelist Paul Malmont cracked San Francisco’s bestseller list, despite the fact that the recession has choked publicity and marketing budgets around the country. GalleyCat asked Malmont how he promoted his novel, Jack London In Paradise, in this age of shrinking publicity budgets.
Malmont explained: “I’ve been using Facebook and Twitter to broadcast the details of my book tour to my friends (and their friends, and so on and so on) — reminding them of appearances, letting them know when I’m on a radio show, and passing along event invitations. The hope is, of course, that the small core of awareness will achieve a critical mass of self-perpetuating awareness that spreads the news of the book beyond the limited reach of my personal network.
“It worked incredibly well in California. I was able to turn out larger than normal crowds at every event in cities where I don’t know a lot of people and all the bookstore owners were thrilled. The downside is that friends can get tired of an author’s self-promotion and just tune out the twitters.”
Malmont continued: “Even with the benefit of the publicity strength of a powerhouse publisher behind an author (as in my case with Simon & Schuster) the challenge is still how to reach beyond the hundreds or even thousands possible with social networking and get to the attention of hundreds of thousands. And that means getting on the radar of mass media. A single magazine or news article, and especially a book review, will be seen by a lot more people.
“As an indication, my Amazon ranking bumped up slightly on the day I announced to friends through blogs, twitters, status updates and every other online forum I could reach that my book was out. However, it skyrocketed on a rave review from the San Francisco Chronicle.
“My Google analytics reporter also indicated a substantially greater difference of my website traffic between my own efforts and that one article. But attracting that kind of attention for every book is frustratingly random and I don’t know what any author can do on their own to get it. You just never know what’s going to catch the fancy of a journalist, critic or editor. I guess the same can be said for the reading public as well.
He concluded: “Some things remain out of our control, as always, but as I’ve seen for myself, at least I’ve got the illusion of a little more control than I had with my last book.”