The Frugal Book Promoter assures your book gets the best possible start in life, whether your publisher assigns zero dollars or thousands to your book's marketing campaign. A former publicist, the author provides no-nonsense basics to build the essentials you need to build a time-saving social media campaign and knock'em dead lists of influencers that will be more effective than anything you could buy. Pick and choose from dozens of ideas for promotions that she developed or refined through extensive (and award-winning) book campaigns of her own. Several will match your pocketbook and personality. "The most expensive part of book promotion are the mistakes. This book will save you time and money." --Dan Poynter, legendary author of The Self-Publishing Manual "Carolyn Howard-Johnson's Frugal Book Promoter is... a classic!" --Bookbaby.com "[Carolyn Howard-Johnson is] an incessant promoter who develops and shares new approaches for book promotion." --Marilyn Ross, founder, Small Publishers of North America and coauthor of The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing> " The Frugal Book Promoter has given me ideas that would never have occurred to me and has changed the way I think about book promotion." -- Mark Logie, award-winning poet and short-story writer Carolyn Howard-Johnson (@FrugalBookPromo) is a multi award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is a former publicist for a New York PR firm and a marketing instructor for the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. She has appeared on hundreds of TV and radio stations both nationally and locally, and her poetry, essays, columns and stories are published frequently in journals and on the web. She admits to loving marketing almost as much as she loves writing. Learn more at www.HowToDoItFrugally.com From Modern History Press I first read, and reviewed Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s The Frugal Book Promoter in 2011, when the first edition came out. Since then it has been my go-to for ideas on ways to promote my books cheaply – which is, of course, what every author needs these days. It’s a noisy world, and no matter how well-written, or what kind of publisher support you may have, if you don’t promote well, it’s unlikely that your books will attract notice. Few of us have big budgets for promotion, and most of us have a budget close to zero. Creative and effective ideas for book promotion are more than just nice-to-haves, they’re critical, and Howard-Johnson is about as knowledgeable as it gets on the subject. Of course books like this go out of date quickly, so the re-releases are also vital, as they allow for technological and cultural change. The 3rd edition came out in September 2019, and is right up-to-the-minute, exploring new ways of branding, developing a platform, and getting your work out into the world. Howard-Johnson’s prose remains utterly clear, accessible, and warm–like having a very helpful, clued-up conversation with your best friend–and the book is as inspirational as it is practical. The latest version of the book contains nearly 300 pages (quite a lot more than the first edition!) of high quality information on every thing from how to promote your work ethically, public relations, creating media releases and a media kit, querying for reviews (and believe me, this is a much needed skill!), making use of radio and other media, using the internet and social media (and how not to use it), including ensuring that you use online bookstores correctly, making the most of reading groups, revitalizing old titles, recycling your work, and so much more. As with the original version, the book comes with a number of handy template, scripts, codes and examples, but these have been updated so that they continue to remain relevant to a modern author. The book is beautifully structured and well indexed, so you can find what you need when you need it fast. Howard-Johnson has created a number of mnemonics to help simplify the overall promotion process: “The Six-P maxim is the one that makes me a nag. The more organized you are, the more you know early on, the earlier you start to practice promotion and publicity magic, the more good it will do for your book. The more you learn the easier it is. And that leads me to the three most important Ps for marketing books. Platform, Publicity, Public Relations.” Throughout the book, there is careful attention paid to ethics, which I love. The Frugal Book Promoter is most certainly not about buying likes, reviews, unsolicited mailings, or manipulating people into purchasing something they don’t want. These practices happen all too frequently, and sometimes they work in the short term, but they are unsustainable and no way to manage a lifelong career. Ethical marketing all about relationships, giving people work they will get value from, and working within carefully obtained permissions. It’s about creating a brand that people will continue to trust, so you’re not just selling one book, b