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Wednesday, November 14, 2012

How To Market Your Book – Creating Your Press Kit

I still remember the day I first sat down and said, “I want to write a book.” It seems so long ago, and back then I had no idea how much was involved in taking my idea and bringing it to life.

Writing the novel was the easy part.

After you’ve typed the last line, read over your work, re-read it a hundred times, put it in a drawer for a few months, pulled it out and read it again, got someone else to read it, edited it, chopped bits up, put bits in, put it back in the drawer, pulled it out and edited again and… you’re finally happy with it, then what?

You have to figure out a way to sell your baby.

One of the items you need to market yourself is the Press Kit, or Media Kit. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on mine. A few weeks before that I didn’t even know I needed one! So, I had to do some research to find out what a Press Kit involved, and how I would go about putting one together.

I found out that a basic kit includes:
  • Author Bio
  • Author Photo
  • Book information – including a synopsis and sell sheet
  • Book Cover
  • Press Release
  • Promotional material – such as book marks or postcards
So far I’ve managed to get the basics for the first three items on the list sorted. Thankfully, most of the information is already there from when I was making submissions. Now all I need to do is go back through it and spruce it up a little.

I've had a bit of a go at writing my own press release. It’s not quite there, but I’m hoping it will be soon. But, that opens an avenue for a whole different blog post!

As for the Author Photo, I have a wonderful friend who is great behind the camera. She took some lovely shots of me and this is the final product. Let me know what you think.


The next step… opening my media room and getting it all on line!

I found some very helpful links here:
The Book Designer
Bohemion Griot Publishing
The Savy Book Marketer

K x

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