Authors Build Careers by Promoting Books Online

How Internet Marketing Promotion and Advertising Help Writers

Feb 28, 2009

Interested in marketing your book? Publicist Penny Sansevieri shows how Internet marketing promotion and advertising can help writers succeed.

Through her book publicity firm Author Marketing Experts, Inc. literary publicist Penny Sansevieri has met and helped promote many authors using effective Internet marketing promotion tools. Yet while many of her clients have aspirations of appearing on the New York Times Best Seller List, others have different definitions of success.

Suite 101 interviewed Sansevieri over the phone on January 28, 2009 and discovered the different ways online web marketing can help an author’s career. The following is an edited version of the interview.

Suite 101: Can you share some success stories of authors who have really benefited from online web marketing?

Sansevieri: People always ask us about our success stories. And I think the easiest stories to refer to are the authors who hit the New York Times Best Seller List or USA Today Best-Seller List. But to me, the best stories are authors who come to us wanting to do more speaking and who, because of our efforts, are getting speaking engagements.

These authors may never make the radar screen of the New York market. They may never hit the bestseller list. But they are getting more speaking engagements and they’re getting them by build their platform and going after their specific consumer online.

Sansevieri: Well sales are always great, but many of the folks we work with are looking at the long term. They may be looking at future books, consulting, speaking, or building their business.

So the success stories really range – one author contacted us and said, “Oh my gosh, I’ve been contacted for my first speaking gig and they found me online!” And somebody else got contacted by an association that said, “We want to buy 8000 copies of your book, we saw your articles online and we love your stuff.” So again these authors may never make it into a bookstore but that’s fine with them because they’re hitting their goals elsewhere.

Suite 101: But can Internet marketing promotion and advertising help books sell in bookstores?

Sansevieri: Yeah, it absolutely can. The one thing your readers should know about bookstores is that bookstore shelf and table space is bought and paid for by publishers – the publishers want to keep pushing those books into the frontlines of the bookstores.

And New York publishing is really struggling with the Internet. I go in to a lot of companies and try to talk them through the way the Internet works, but it’s tough to focus on single titles when they’re managing two or three hundred books a year.

So yes, I think an author can win his or her way into a bookstore – but be cautious because a lot of the shelves you see when you first walk into a store are taken and it’s going to be hard for your books to wiggle their way onto their shelves.

But by creating a demand online, while you may not be on that table when the customer first walks into a store, you may be on a shelf, and that may be all the author wants.

The copyright of the article Authors Build Careers by Promoting Books Online in Web Advertising is owned by Michael Jung. Permission to republish Authors Build Careers by Promoting Books Online in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.