Earlier this summer, we looked at BookCrossing, a website that allows users to “catch” and “release” books around the world and track where their books have gone. Now author Laura Harrington is using BookCrossing in an unusual promotion for her novel, Alice Bliss. Writes Harrington:
Where’s Alice Bliss? is a campaign to send copies [...]

My friends who are literary agents have told me about the many ways authors try to catch their attention: packages of cookies sent with their manuscripts; queries tucked into oven mitts shaped like sunflowers (of all things). But this might be the ultimate guerrilla book promotion: faking a kidnapping to promote your book. [...]

We’ve written several posts over the years about the emergence of DIY book tours, marketing and self-publicity (read them here, and here, and here). Not only do self-published authors need to get their hustle on, but writers who publish with small presses, or find themselves mid-level (or lower) on a big house’s list can find [...]

On the NYTimes‘ Opinionator blog this weekend, Dick Cavett reflects on the role of author as salesman in “I Wrote It, Must I Also Hustle It?” Cavett writes:
I just did 12 — or was it 14? — back-to-back radio interviews from New York to Seattle and, so it seemed after five of them, all points [...]

“Stopped hanging other people’s art.”

— a journal entry by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)

Imagine you’ve walked into a bookstore, browsing for something new. Besides an explicit recommendation, how do you decide what to read? If you’re like most people, you reach for a book that looks interesting… based on the cover. Mokoto Rich of the New York Times discusses how the e-book era may prevent [...]

Jeremy recently posted about Allison Amend’s tips for a do-it-yourself book tour. Author-arranged promotions are becoming more and more common as publishers cut back on marketing and publicity, and the L.A. Times has some firsthand accounts of what such a book tour can be like:
A cat peeing in an author’s bag? A writer waking [...]

Step 1: Wait for a celebrity to buy your book.
Step 2: Be sure the book is in the celebrity’s backseat when he crashes his car in the middle of the night.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: PROFIT!

Have you met The Nervous Breakdown yet? Founded by author Brad Listi, this new website is intended as a new space for authors to promote their work. The fiction section’s aim, as explained in an open letter, is
not only akin to that of all good literary magazines–to showcase some of the most vibrant [...]

First came blog-based books like Julie and Julia. Then came books based on Internet memes like LOLcats. Recently we’ve seen a spate of Twitter-based books, ranging from Matt Stewart’s novel The French Revolution to TwitterWit to Justin Halpern’s Shit My Dad Says.
How far will the trend go? Now, even your Facebook status [...]