Promoting Your Book - The Power of Just One Recommendation
We always hope for positive reviews of our books, but there is a rare and magical event that only occurs every once in a while. It is the ability of a single review or recommendation to propel a book to bestseller status. Case in point: Charles Petzold’s most recent book, The Annontated Turing which as of the writing of this post sits on Amazon.com Computing Bestseller List at #11.
How, did this happen? In this particular case it is clearly the recommendation of Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood. His single post about the book sent it flying off Amazon.com’s virtual shelves, and started a conversation that included over 100 comments on Jeff’s blog and created a viral effect as several other blogs picked up on the story.
The lesson here for authors is not only do you need positive reviews of your books, but certain reviews can be more effective than others. You need a targeted approach to get your book not just in front of many people, but also the right people.
Think about who might have the biggest impact on your book. The answer is not Oprah Winfrey - let’s keep it realistic. Who is a trusted adviser, or connector within the community of your readership? We use tools like the Author Questionnaire to help us answer these questions. If your publisher is not using a similar tool, create your own and work with the marketing an PR departments on a targeted approach to get your work in front of the right people.
UPDATE: Looks like Charles Petzold is discussing this on his blog as well.
Similar Posts
- Insights on blog marketing for book publishers, social networking, e-newsletters and more
- Long Tail’s Chris Anderson on “Free” at O’Reilly TOC
- How Book Authors Can Promote Their Work with Social Media
- Working with Charles Petzold
- Book Marketing for Authors: The Author Questionnaire
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader. You can also sign up to receive updates via email using the form at the top of this page.
[...] Promoting Your Book - The Power of Just One Recommendation [...]