Promoting Your Book / Art and Spirituality

Thought for the Week: Success means fulfilling your own dreams, singing your own words, dancing your own dances, creating from your heart, and trusting that whatever happens, it will be okay. ~ Elana Lindquist

 Promoting Your Book

 

Hope Clark’s newsletters are an inspiration to me, not just for her market listings but for the essays. Sometimes they make me smile. In her April 13 Funds for Writers newsletter she wrote about how she found herself selling books in a bar. She sold more books that evening than she did at one well-promoted bookstore event. She attributed that to the atmosphere. In a bar, people consider you more approachable. In a bookstore, you’re THE AUTHOR.

She definitely has a point. When I approach an author sitting at a table full of books at a bookstore to learn more about his or her writing, I’m often hit with a hard or seemingly desperate attempt to sell and I find it awkward to extricate myself if I decide not to buy the book. At a bar or social occasion, conversation is much more casual – we’re all just people. But I think there’s another factor that Hope did not mention.

A nonprofit women’s business owner group I used to belong to held a fundraising auction. People paid the regular price for a dinner and we offered free wine before and during the auction. People had fun and we raised more money than expected. The next year, the group decided to save money by not including the wine. We still had fun but made significantly less money than the year before. 

The third year we went back to including free wine and sales went back up. No, we didn’t get our audience drunk, but we learned that a modest amount of alcohol loosens people’s wallets as well as their tongues. It definitely creates a party atmosphere as opposed to a selling one. Something to consider if you hold an informal book event at someone’s home or other non-traditional location.

  

Art and spirituality

Print publication StoneVoices looks for articles, essays, and fiction up to 5,000 words, as well as the occasional poem, about the connection between art and the spiritual journey. "Our premise is that art – both its process and its product ‐‐ has profound connections to spirituality. The making of art ‐‐ the creative process undertaken by the artist ‐‐ can be a transformative experience..."