Before Your Pub Date

What should you do during the months between handing off your finished manuscript and date your book lands on the shelf? Did you know that the majority of my work as a publicist is done during the eight months before the book is out? When your book is hitting shelves, the results of my work should be starting to crop. As an author, you need to be using this valuable time too.

Here's some suggestions:

1.) Start a Mailing List: When your book arrives, you want as many people to know as possible. And you'd be surprised at how effective that book-cover-post-card is. To date, I've received two, and both times I was flattered that the person thought of me (not angry that they were trying to sell me something.)

2.) Build a Website. We live in a day and age where people google to learn more about someone. If you garner interviews and coverage, people are going to hit the net to find out more. What will they find?

3.) Start a Blog and blog. Ha, ha, I know. If you've visited mine, you know that I’m not following my own advice. However, I have no pub date. Hopefully those of you who do, are becoming active in the blog-o-sphere. The blogging community is an amazing group of people, and you can learn a lot here. This week and last week, two of my author's books were in the top five position of Technorati because of blog alliances. I'll see if I can garner an interview with these alliances.

4.) Gather your Talking Points and Angles to reach media. As I've stated before, just having a book isn't necessarily going to be what sells you. For example, I represent Ginger Garrett, and I am prepared to pitch her as an expert on biblical times, a holistic beauty expert, as a guest who can share insights on the evil women in the bible, her heart-touching story of how she became a writer, and of course, I can pitch her as an acclaimed biblical novelist. Your publicity team can better pitch you (and more often) if they know what you’re prepared to talk about.

5.) Determine the outlets where you want to have hits. Where do you hope to reviewed or featured? You need to find out if your publisher can accommodate that. Did you know that some magazines have a lead-time as long as one year? So for example, if your book is perfect for a certain magazine and your book releases in Oct 2007, you must secure that spot in Oct 2006. One of my authors is on a nine-month waiting list right now. If you want to try Publishers Weekly, they require your galley three to four months in advance. Find out if your publisher is going to provide galleys. If they're not, you need to decide if you're going to take charge of this.

Any one else want to throw in a few ideas?


--As a side note, I had hoped to comment further on the Sony Reader, but have had such a busy week, I've been unable to pursue that topic. Hopefully we'll revive it. I was surprised at how much interest that post received.

--Also, J. M. Hochstetler is planning to establish an independent publishing house. Please visit her Publishing Dream Blog to learn more. We'll ask her on for an interview too.