Does Author Book Promotion Do Any Good?

My new year's goal for 2019 is to do a bunch of NEW THINGS. One of these NEW THINGS is to make my first serious effort to promote my books.

I haven't really bothered with book promotion before. Once upon a time (back when I first became an author), no authors did. We wrote the books; if we were lucky, they got published; if we were very lucky they got lovely reviews or end-of-the-year honors, and that was that. Once in a great while a publisher sent us to a librarians' or booksellers' convention. There were no book launch parties, no cover reveals, no social media boasting (there was no social media), no begging for Amazon or Goodreads reviews (there was no Amazon; there was no Goodreads).

It's tempting to think of these as the good old days. But that is how good old people tend to talk. If you want to sound old, this is an excellent way to do it.

I've also been skeptical, however, that author-generated book promotion really does any good. If you hand out bookmarks with your books, how much of a difference, in the end, does that make to sales? If you sell even fifty copies at a book launch, that's still only fifty copies. Ten online reviews that you bully your friends into writing are only ten reviews. Oh, what's the point?

But in Erin Entrada Kelly's Newbery-winning middle-grade novel, Hello Universe, one character, known for her wisdom, says this: "Of all the questions you ever ask yourself in life, never ask, 'What's the point?' It's the worst question in the world."

Besides... I mean . . . what's the point of ANYTHING? If you just lie on your bed surrendering to nihilism, you'll have a pretty dreary life, and a pretty short-lived career as a children's book author.

So this year I'm trying to promote my new book, Nixie Ness, Cooking Star.

My guiding strategy - and it is an excellent one - is to concentrate on doing things that are fun for me to do, anyway. Or just things that add little tiny bits of joy to the world.

I've never made bookmarks for my books before. But bookmarks are fun! People LIKE bookmarks People USE bookmarks. So now I have them! Come by one of my events and I'll hand one to you!

Writing is fun. Writing blog posts is fun. So I organized a little blog tour for myself which starts today. Here's the schedule:

Friday, May 31, 2019  Bluestocking Thinking

Monday, June 3, 2019 Pencil Tips Writing Workshop

Tuesday, June 4, 2019 Clara Gillow Clark: Writing from the Inside Out

Wednesday, June 5, 2019 Unleashing Readers

Thursday, June 6, 2019 Elizabeth O. Dulemba: Living Life outside the Lines

Friday, June 7, 2019  Cracking the Cover

Parties are fun. Giving talks is fun. Cookies are fun. So I organized two bookstore events for Nixie, where I'll talk about the book and cookies will be served.

The first is next week, on Tuesday June 4, 2 p.m., at  Second Star to the Right in Denver.
The second is this fall, on September 10, 6:30 pm, at Boulder Bookstore in Boulder.

SO: the point is . . . fun. And maybe I'll sell a few books. And I'll keep a new year's promise I made to myself.

That's enough for me, for now.