When I came across the title of this article today I must admit I was encouraged–”How Self Publishers Can Market and Sell More Books.” Hey, we’re all interested in that subject, aren’t we? I hoped I’d learn some tips that I could extend to my author clients, especially in the way of better utilizing the social networking tools that I often champion on this site–you know, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

That hope didn’t last long.

Although the opening paragraph encouraged me–”be careful about your promotion and marketing dollars and don’t plunge into unknown waters”–I can agree with that, the second paragraph lead-in caught me off-guard:

“Mail a press release to at least 1000 print and broadcast contacts just prior to publishing your title and again and again after you publish; you can never send too many.”

You can never send too many?

Wow, could that be the secret to success for self-published authors? Sending thousands of press releases?

Let’s do a little math. Lulu has at least 800K self-published titles and they’re the largest, so let’s double that number to around 2 million to conservatively guesstimate the overall number of self-published titles in the US over the last 5 years or so. That’s gotta be a very low estimate, but we’ll go with it. So we’ve got a thousand press release emails sent, say, 10-20 times over the life of a book, for 2 million titles…

With that, I have a hard time fathoming what 40 billion press release emails would accomplish–other than clogging millions of email boxes and generating millions of $$ for press release outlets–but I don’t think that significantly better book sales would result. Do you?

Other suggestions in the article, about investing in press release software and “not overlooking the Internet” had me double-checking the publication date of the article. Yep, it was yesterday.

But what really bothered me is that authors will read this and take stock in this “shotgun” approach to offline book marketing, when their best chance of success lies with online niche marketing. That’s where the world is now, and that’s where it will continue to go. I, along with many authors I worked with at Lulu, learned that truth–and sometimes the hard way.

Today’s authors should all be embracing online technologies–from Google to Facebook–and I have a hard time thinking of any situation where targeted online marketing won’t prove to be the more successful path, vs. offline marketing. Can you?

Don’t overlook the Internet???

Shoot me now…Or prove me wrong. If a press release has made all the difference for you as a self-published author, please tell me your story. Better yet, tell me that you have a proven press release strategy that consistently provides an impressive return, or even pays for itself (and does so legally). We’d all love to hear about it.

Until next time–and without cluttering my inbox with press releases– keep publishing!

Henry Hutton
Publish and Sell Enterprises
PublishandSell.com