Promoting Your Book Nontraditionally

Writing is an art.  Writing is a business.  Sometimes the business takes too much time from writing, but sometimes careful promotion pays off.

The best book marketing results I had out of all my 27 books came with the 19th, the memoir/travelogue My Germany.  It explores the role Germany played in my life as a Jewish writer with Holocaust survivor parents.

The book was published by my first choice, Terrace Books at the University of Wisconsin Press, which does gorgeous trade books and superb marketing.

But I planned my own campaign, too, and I didn’t target bookstores or any traditional venues. I looked for all the German Studies and Jewish Studies programs in the country, studied each one, and wrote individual, personalized emails to various professors in both fields.  If there was something I shared with each professor I was writing to, I made sure to mention it in my email.

Example: if a professor was from Germany or had studied there in a city I knew, I would mention that connection somewhere in my email. I also made sure to reference previous Jewish-themed books of mine if that was a good choice. All this took time and consideration, but it wasn’t back-breaking work by any means. It was actually enjoyable.

The academic venues were my main target, but not the only ones and the response was terrific: I ended up touring on and off for about five years, with readings and talks at colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. The venues also included German cultural institutions, museums, synagogues and churches, and even The Library of Congress.

Thanks to my publisher, the Jewish Book Council picked up the book and I appeared at a string of Jewish Book Fairs, too, but my own efforts ended up garnering me two all-expenses-paid tours across Germany. The hotels were terrific in every city and my hosts were amazing, showering me with gifts like museum catalogues, wine, chocolate, city history books, calendars, CDs and more.

The German tours happened because I spoke at the Goethe-Institut in D.C. where someone was about to take a post in the American embassy in Berlin. The auditorium was packed and she was impressed: “We’re bringing you to Germany,” she promised. The book had been translated into German but not yet published in that language.

Once I knew that I’d be touring in Germany, the hardest part of the whole enterprise was working with a German teacher I knew to compose an introduction in German that would help break the ice there, and re-translating the book’s prologue. Given German grammar and my not being totally bilingual, I found sentence construction and pronunciation of the text iffy at times, so we simplified it just enough to be true to the original English. And I practiced, practiced, practiced until I felt relaxed and confident. She was a good tutor because more than one person in Germany complimented me on my accent—or lack of one.

When I started, I already had a platform as one of the earliest Jewish-American authors of what’s called The Second Generation, children of Holocaust survivors, so that helped enormously.  I wasn’t an unknown.  But a platform isn’t a guarantee, just a starting place.  I did my research and it paid off beyond what I expected.  And so I ask budding authors, “Is there a non-traditional way you can promote your work, aside from trying to do signings or reading in bookstores?  Who is your audience?  Try to find them, and then maybe they’ll find you.”

Lev Raphael is the author of The German Money, Winter Eyes, Journeys & Arrivals and twenty-four other books in genres from memoir to mystery. He is living his childhood dream of being an author. You can read about his books at www.levraphael.com.