Fiction Marketing — The 12-Step Program for Marketing Your Fiction (Frugally)

The 12-Step Program for Marketing Your Fiction (Frugally)

We’re Carolyn Howard-Johnson (multi-award-winning How to Do It Frugally book series) and Phyllis Zimbler Miller (Mrs. Lieutenant, a novel about four new army officers’ wives in 1970). We’ve created this website for our nonfiction book proposal for The 12-Step Program for Marketing Your Fiction (Frugally).

This book is based on the online expertise we’ve both developed — online expertise we want to share with other authors as well as with publishers and publicists.

What we’ve learned from working in the book marketing field is that there’s a whole lot more marketing help for nonfiction authors than there is for authors of fiction (novels, graphic novels, short stories) as well as poetry and memoirs. (Yes, memoirs are theoretically nonfiction, but they’re not the how-to books that grab people’s attention.)

Here’s what one fiction author has to say about this predicament:

“I love PR and marketing people who parade their wares for nonfiction and add as an afterthought, ‘And this works for fiction too!’ Yeah, right! Then why don’t they have any fiction writers on their list of success stories?” — Nadine Laman

With Marketing Your Fiction, we aim to help fiction authors have as many tools in their marketing arsenal as their nonfiction book author colleagues have.

Following Carolyn’s advice in her ebook available on Amazon — The Great First Impression Book Proposal — we have prepared our book proposal. Only, as we both actively market on the Internet, we’re using tools of the Internet for this proposal.

These tools include this site, which offers a taste of our blogging chapter, BLOGGING YOUR WAY TO … IF NOT FAME AND FORTUNE THEN AT LEAST BOOK FANS, as well as the entire blogging chapter if you sign-up in the email opt-in box found at the top right-hand side of each page of this site.

And from a well-known nonfiction book marketer, here’s a quote about the need for a fiction marketing book:

“Although there are a number of good book marketing guides, I haven’t seen any that deal in any depth specifically with marketing fiction,” says Dana Lynn Smith, book marketing coach and author of the Savvy Book Marketer Guides.

“Authors and publishers of novels, children’s, and young adult books are selling entertainment, rather than information, and their target audiences are less easily defined. They can use many of the same marketing tactics as nonfiction authors and publishers, but they must be creative in adapting those methods to their product and their audience.”