TIP: Put your books in the trunk

But don't drive them off the cliff.

Having a few copies of your book is an essential marketing task, whether you're the author from a big or little or no publishing house. Best of all, these techniques are evergreen, and can be done well after the book's publication date. A few ways those books will come in handy:
• Sell-outs at a reading. Particularly if it's a non-retail setting, i.e., library or reading series, chances are the few copies the venue pre-bought might not suffice.
• Chance conversation with a co-worker who knows someone in charge of booking that killer venue you've been seeking.
• You ran into Jonathan Yardley in the grocery store parking lot and he agreed to review the book. True story.
• Last-minute inspiration to put on the preacher persona, and hand-sell your book at the Farmer's Market. Or along a traffic jam. At a subway station.
• On a day-trip, see that cozy independent bookstore, and decide to drop off 5 copies on consignment.

Would you let B&N bully you?

Some of the more loyal readers to Obie Joe note the, uh, primitive nature of our blogroll. In some ways, the intent reflects the loyalty to a few sites, and in another way, it's an avoidance of paying the devil its' due for return favors.

If you're an author with an involved site/blog intended to gather your audience and move sales, you've had to consider the bargain of referral links. As well as the balance of these referral links to your own e-commerce goals. Does the inclusion of an Amazon button take sales from your e-cart? Plus, the heavy-handed suggestion from B&N to include their button has worried several more of the entrepreneurial authors.

The answer is do a bit of both. To place your book in the most comprehensive marketing plan, it's best to include all buttons, including, Indiebound (to refer to a local bookstore to handle your sale). But here's the thing: make your deal the best. Grant the best discount (at least 40% off retail price), throw in swag (free bookmarks, gumballs or stickers), and decent customer service. Most people don't mind clicking on your shopping cart, if the price and convenience is about the same. So, go ahead, welcome all buttons, but make sure to make yours the prettiest.

Blackhatting your book on FaceBook

Technically, this could be another Tip from Mr. Obie Joe, but since it's just evil, perhaps not.

Tag the name of every one of your FaceBook friends on your book cover, and just like that, your book cover appears on hundreds of pages in FaceBook.

How cool! What little time needed on a nifty marketing technique.

Except -- leaving aside the possible revulsion your friends feel -- it's a get rich quick kind of promotion. If you're in the game of developing your career beyond one book, it's not a technique used for gathering an audience for keeps. Tagging doesn't cultivate your audience; other, more content-rich, individualistic techniques do.

Remember, most social media tools are only enhancements, not the thing. Use FaceBook to cultivate your already burgeoning audience (which probably got its start with your real-life F&F). FaceBook can't create your audience; only you can.

(The icon is from "booktag," a Shelfari type application in FaceBook, which might be a good way to build new FaceBook fans for your book.)

Swing by the Salon today, why don't you?

Obie Joe Media is sponsoring two panel discussions, both possibly essential, at the 14th annual Baltimore Book Festival. Check out these conversation makers on Friday, September 25:

Black Money-Why the Urban Genre is Remaking the Book Business
3:30PM - 4:15PM, Literary Salon
• Troy Johnson, founder, aalbc.com
• Christopher Herz, publisher and author, Canal Publishing
• Tracie Howard, Random House author, urban marketing expert
• Ellis L. Marsalis, III, founder, Obie Joe Media

• Will Online Save the Printed Word?
4:15PM - 5:00PM, Literary Salon
• Kevin Smokler, noted as a founding father of online book promotion, founder with WIRED editor Chris Anderson of booktour.com
• Ami Greko, digital marketing, MacMillian
• Brad Grochowski, Director of Baltimore-based AuthorsBookshop.com, a nationally acclaimed online bookstore, or alternative to Amazon.com, dedicated to selling self-published, independently published and small-press published books.

No time for a F2F book club?

At minimum, you as the author have received the advice from your publisher, publicists and friends: contact book clubs. Not only do clubs buy in bulk, the word-of-mouth generated by book clubs is unmatched in content and effectiveness.

The truth is, book clubs -- at least the ones of some stablilty and open membership -- are swamped by review requests like elephants to a pumpkin feast. Tapping the cane, Mr. Obie Joe asks you to open your eyes to other ways to promote your book in ways similar to a book club.

Susan Larson the inestimable book editor for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, compiled a list of sites where you and your friends can go into depth why your book is everything.
(Excerpt from 8/12/09 Times-Picayune)

GoodReads.com
This site is a great place to recommend books you've read and see what books others are reading.

It's easy to sign up, and one way to build your virtual bookshelf quickly is to rate the books you've read, from such classics as "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee to contemporary favorites such as "The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Nighttime" by Mark Haddon. In no time at all, I had a virtual shelf of 90 books. There are also categories for books you're reading now, and a place to list books you want to read.

This is also a good place to post quotes, your own writing, or publicize literary events. GoodReads also sends out a monthly newsletter, and there's a group for almost every taste.

The top five "must read" books on Good Reads this week are "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," by Junot Diaz; "The Host, by Stephenie Meyer; "Living Dead in Dallas (Sookie Stackhouse No. 2)," by Charlaine Harris; "Olive Kitteridge," by Elizabeth Strout; and "Outliers," by Malcolm Gladwell." GoodReads also runs an ongoing, fun-to-follow poll of the best and worst books of all time; Stephenie Meyer's bestselling vampire novel, "Twilight," appears on both lists.

Librarything.com
I became aware of this personal book collection cataloging site during a visit from my old college roommate, who, like me, has too many books. Just type in the title, author or the ISBN number on the back of the book and the description will appear. Users can enter 200 books for free or as many as you like for $10 a year or $25 for life.

Currently, the site has more than 700,000 users with more than 40 million book listings. One user has more than 30,000 books listed. The top five authors on Librarything are J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Neil Gaiman.

Shelfari.com
This Seattle site, founded in 2006, became so successful that it was purchased by Amazon.com in 2008 (so naturally, every entry features a "buy from Amazon" link).

Another virtual shelf-building site, it offers readers a variety of groups. Top postings on the current Shelfari blog are entries about children's summer reading, hilarious parodies of children's literature in "The Runaway Mummy" and "Where the Mild Things Are," by Maurice Sendup, and fond reminiscences of Frank McCourt and Walter Cronkite.

Bookcrossing.com
This site is for the booklover with a generous streak who wonders what to do with books that they have no room for in a permanent collection. "Help make the whole world a library" with more than 700,000 members in more than 130 countries.

Here's how it works: Take a book from your collection, put a note inside the cover about Bookcrossing.com, register the book on the Web site, and release it "into the wild" -- leaving it behind in a hotel room, airport waiting area, restaurant booth, park bench, wherever. Whenever I travel, I take books I can leave behind, and so far I've released books in Louisiana, Maine, Georgia, Florida and Texas. Happy reading, you lucky people who found those books.

You can also find out where books have been released in your geographical area if you want to go book-hunting. Currently there are 18 books "in the wild in Louisiana," 2 in New Orleans, and 8 in Pineville..

My Space and Facebook and Twitter
Those social networking megasites are also must-stops for booklovers. Many authors have their own pages now, and local bookstores such as Garden District, Maple Street Book Shop, and Octavia Books have online presences. It's fun to check out the stats of such best-selling writers as Anne Rice, who has more than 30,000 fans, and Rebecca Wells and Michael Lewis, who each have more than 400.

"Facebook is a networking tool, but it is not a substitute for the face-to-face communication with our customers which we value above all else," said Tom Lowenburg of Octavia Books, which also posts YouTube clips of author visits.

Twitter recently came in handy when Maple Street Book Shop only had a day's notice for a visit by best-seeling author Dave Eggers. "About 150 people follow us on Twitter," said owner Donna Allen. "We had a great turn-out."

TIP: Be a cultural filter

Several decades ago -- well, it seems so -- Ms. Obie Joe was a new parent, and unwise to procuring the good influences for children. As in, what were the actual good books for kids. Ones that entertained without pandering, intrigued without scaring, and soothed without boring.

This being the 90's, without the web, recommendations were gotten piecemeal from librarians, other parents, or something heard. Then Ms. Obie Joe got her hands on the Chinaberry catalog. It was, and remains, one of the best filters for the surfeit of children's books in the library.

Beyond reading with some satisfaction of the predictable drama of someone's life, most of us read blogs for the type of information that's a quick tip, a secret, a new crush. Like Chinaberry, your blog can be an essential filter for readers, inspiring them to return repeatedly. Tell readers about the new book, the best hat, the spiciest sauce.

Entertainment on the brain

After Hurricane Katrina, Obie Joe decided to load up the minivan for a trip to the hometown. What better bulk than dozens of books slated for one of NOLA's recently reopened schools?

A woman in the neighborhood responded to our call for donated books. In her living room, boxed and labeled, were hundreds of books.

"What can I say? I'm a romance novel junkie. I love a good story," she shrugged. Turns out she bought and read about 30 books a month, which is about the average for romance novels.

Pulp fiction, romance, sci-fi, historical fiction....all easily derided as detriments to "true" literature, yet for the readers of these forms, the story is key, and they could care less about the aspirations of the form.

Ms. Obie Joe loved today's Lev Grossman's editorial in The Wall Street Journal reminding us that literature shouldn't exult in distancing itself from the reader. Perhaps one of the reasons why Young Adult as well as graphic novels are gathering huge contingents of new fans might be a response to the lack of good stories found in grown-up lit.

(credit: Jon Krause, Wall Street Journal for graphic)

TIP: Start your own book club - online

Some books are tougher than others as candidates for book clubs. 

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace would qualify. Fans of the books, unwilling to be the pariahs at their own book clubs, have formed an online book club to scale the 1,000-plus page book. Readers gather at 75-page benchmarks every week for three months. Community, complex discussion, and the thrill of suffusing one in a worthwhile book. 

So, why not start an online book club of your own? If you think of it, your Reader Guide is one step forward to your own online book club. But make the content matter, and follow-through. Peruse the structure of the Infinite Jest site in its straightforward blog format:

• The last 10 Posts

• Archives

• The last 10 Comments (many in the wonderfully DFW loquacious way)

But the site's searchability is what Ms. Obie Joe likes best. The search box rocks, but the categories section is particularly astute. 

TIP: Cultivate your live line cranks

The news was startling: President Kennedy was reported shot during a motorcade in Dallas. Walter Cronkite of CBS Evening News was having trouble finding a clear phone line for an outgoing call. In the newsroom, he picked up one of the lines, but a caller was already live. From his autobiography, A Reporter's Life:

I reported (ed: can you imagine how many times that word appeared in his book?) that she had reached our newsroom. 

"I want to complain," she complained, "of your having that Walter Cronkite on the air at a time like this, crying his crocodile tears when we all knew he hated Jack Kennedy."

With all of the outraged dignity I could muster, I told her: "Mrs. Llewellyn-Arbuthnot, you are speaking to Walter Cronkite, and you, madam, are a damned idiot."

One of the first jobs a J-school grad gets is triaging the calls from the newsroom's live line, be it newspapers, radio or TV. What happens on the journey from live line to the news editor is an expression of what was wrong with traditional media, and why Ms. Obie Joe has trouble shedding tears for newspapers who refuse to update themselves to the new media. As in, allowing, and welcoming input from their audiences. The type of derogatory comments and dismissive responses from editors who received the message slips from the live line exampled the 1,001 reasons why traditional media lost their audiences. 

Many authors and publishers snapped on to blogs and other social networks as a way to reach out. But regardless of your format, watch your live lines. Treat those who e-mail you, leave comments, and generally reach out with a welcome mat. Many times their feedback and accolades will fuel your own literal lifeline. Granted, sometimes the life lines -- comments, generally -- do get out of hand. The battles among commenters have been brutal for Stephenie Meyer, Haven Kimmel and Jacquelyn Mitchard, and each has either frozen or shut down the participatory parts of their sites in the past year.

But if you are willing to start your line, push that Cronkite button. Gently.

Why Friends & Family need to show the love

In the attic of the former home of the Obie Joe, sat a box of PartyLite candles. At double the normal retail cost, Ms. Obie Joe bought these hallowed candles because she was at a party of friends all engaged in loving the PartyLite.

There's been a long-running debate whether books and/or authors would benefit from traditional advertising. Arguments against include: too difficult to do justice to a book's complexity; book audiences are too niche to risk wide advertising; ads depend on namebrands, only known quantities like Jodi Pincoult go. Plus, advertising is not the same as marketing, which are the tasks most suited for books. Think. When was the last time you saw an ad -- in any of the standard media -- for Avon, Amway, Personal Chef? These brands depend solely on the exploitation, uh, invitation, skills of friends and families. This method is not to be underestimated; Obama's presidential campaign was cited as Internet savvy. Perhaps. Internet was the tool, but Friends & Family was the campaign.

You know your Friends & Family love you, and your book. As your book premieres, give them a nudge to show it. After you send out a postcard via online and mail about the book, shout to your people to do these tasks:
• Request the book at your local book store and/or library. The request will prompt an order, and in some cases with libraries several copies.
• Boost your book to book groups via local bookstores, or readerscircle.com, and libraries.
• Post a review on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, shelfari.com, goodreads.com, or anywhere that takes reader reviews. Speaking from Obie Joe experience, e-opinions are powerful motivators for a new reader.
• Leave an anecdote, cheer, or good wishes on the author's blog, facebook, or elsewhere.

On the postcard, or flier, help your Friends & Family out by including:
• Publisher's name
• ISBN number
• Order information (if self or small published)
• Contact information, w/ reminder that author is available for any event, in-person or electronically.

And...of course, you can always ask ya Friend/Family to host their own book party in your honor. Promise them a pink Cadillac if they sell 1,000 copies.