Emdashery Blog

Does self-publishing hurt your cred?--

Robert Bly asks the question and gets plenty of answers--most of which are "yes." Maybe that's still the case, but probably less so than in the past, and more so than in the near future.

The 30 Best Ways to Market Your Book--

John Kremer is the author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books and Do-It-Yourself Book Publicity Kit. Here he offers a free audio stream of an interview on The 30 Best Ways to Market Your Book. It's full of interesting promotional tips on bookstore sales, publicity, speaking, internet marketing, and direct marketing. You need to sign up for a free book marketing newsletter, but you can unsubscribe if it's something you don't want.

Take a listen...

Where is the right home for your book?--

In the midst of marketing a book, one big promotional decision is sometimes overlooked: on what bookstore shelf should your book be placed? In this Publishers Weekly article, Sara Nelson takes a look at the impact of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces on the shelving decisions of booksellers and librarians.

But while industry folk and the people who love to talk about them—at least once in a while—ponder the bigger questions, a cooler head might see them all as one spectacular manifestation of a very old and really rather simple publishing problem: How do you define and market books, and what are the up- and downsides of doing so?

Fiction or nonfiction? Novel or memoir? That should be the easy part, and we can only hope all the recent hand-wringing will clarify the distinctions that have gotten blurry of late. But a far more common—almost everyday—problem for publishers and booksellers is determining which books should be aimed at which niches, and which niches are most likely to buy.

How do you want your work defined? Should you go broad or for a narrow niche? Is your work easily defined? Or will it get misshelved on some back nether aisle because booksellers can't figure out who it is intended for? All of those are important promotion questions to address even before you write the first word.

Orpah's holding on line 2 (or not)--

So, you've come out with the greatest book of 2006, and it's the perfect vehicle to get you a spot on Oprah? Well, I'm sure no other author has thought the same thing. But just in case there might be a bit of competition, Meg LaBorde at the Big Bad Book Blog has a quiz you can take to determine if you're Oprah worthy. The quiz will attempt to either:

(a) save you from becoming a cliché—you need to know if you’re making people’s eyes roll behind your back—or (b) validate your belief that you are indeed a good fit for Oprah

Before getting started, be sure you've determined if you're famous, if your book is inspiring, if you've been on Oprah before, if your book is about your famous self, if you've been on national television before, and if you're, like, very well known.