Blogger: Rachel Kent
Location: Books & Such main office, Santa Rosa, Calif.
Marketing a multi-author project can be tricky because so many different personalities have to work together to get the effective exposure. I suggest voting for one person to be in charge of keeping the marketing organized. This person should be someone who isn’t overwhelmed with his or her current workload and is good at keeping a calendar and sending reminders.
Next……have a meeting to brainstorm marketing ideas. Make a calendar of when each idea will take place and who will be in charge of what. Then the team marketing leader needs to make sure each person keeps his or her commitments. This is best done by sending reminders a few days ahead of each “event.”
The great part about a group of authors is that each person will bring his or her audience to the project and each author will have quite a few marketing ideas. These days you can set up group calendars to email reminders to the appropriate people too. I know that Google Calendar and iCalendar do this.
Even with nifty tools, it’s a good idea to have someone make sure everything is done on time.
Thankfully, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook make it easy for all the authors to be involved in the same promotions. Creating a project website or blog can also be useful while running certain promotions. That way links can all go to a collective site rather than a website for one of the authors.
Remember to keep your publishing house informed of all your promotions so they can step in to help when possible. Most publishers love to post about promotions on Facebook and Twitter, and some will even help in more extravagant ways depending on the promo.
What is your favorite part of marketing a book? What kind of trouble have you run into while trying to market a book?
I am one of 5/6 coauthors for two books. We met online in a writers forum and our relationship over a few years grew close enough for us to consider the projects. Your hints for marketing are good and also applicable to putting the book together in the first place. That’s what we did. Chose one person to head up the project and be a point of organization. When we pooled our resources for a blog tour, we came up with over 50 blogs to visit. It was a great start for our Christmas book and now we are looking forward to our sequel-A Scrapbook of Motherhood Firsts. Since we are scattered all over the country, we also have the advantage of different areas in which to market. It’s an adventure.
Since I work in book promotion, I enjoy this aspect, but it’s not easy even if you are in the business. There’s no magic formula that translates into sales.
I most enjoy networking with people and meeting someone I might not have met if not for my book. I’ve depended a lot on bloggers to help promote my book, but the trouble was local interactions suffered. I’m trying to find a better balance.
Thanks for another informative post, Rachel.