Fun With Publicity

I’ve got a book coming out in March, which means I’m in the middle of a publicity blitz. This means doing facebook advertising and talking to a lot of people who do Blog Tours.

There’s this big open question which everyone in the creative industries asks at some point - how do you find a place for yourself when you’re competing against massive corperate advertising budgets. To solve this problem would be to solve capitalism, so it’s not happening any time soon (although if you’re interested in solving it, there’s a video on christian anarchism I’ve been watching recently which might interest you).

A solution to break through the noise is to do targeted advertising on Facebook - which can apparantly win elections and sway referenda, so there must be something to it, but it’s not quite that simple. Another solution is Blog Tours - a Blog Tour operator shops your book around various book blogs, trying to get you picked up for reviews, interviews and so on.

I’ve been having fun with these Blog Tour operators over the last few weeks because they keep asking me interesting questions. I won’t go into them here, because the whole point is people are supposed to find out the answers to the questions on these blogs, but I really enjoy being asked difficult questions about my work because it makes me think about the text in different ways, and really try and nail down what’s good about it.