Earlier this year I wrote a how-to on the online promotional campaign I put together for Whisper to the Blood, the 16th Kate Shugak novel (February 2009). It’s for sale on Kindle and iTunes, but so many people have written who want one who don’t have a Kindle or an iTouch/iPhone that I’m going to post it here in seven parts. Share (see icon at bottom of post) or download away, just please properly attribute the authorship. That would be to, ahem. me. Thanks!

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Introduction

Hi, I’m Dana Stabenow, the author of 25 novels, including the Edgar-award winning, New York Times best-selling Kate Shugak series.

I was invited to guest blog on Jungle Red Writers in February 2009. I cast about for a subject that hadn’t already been done to death (“Where I get my ideas” or “Sex in the Kate Shugak series”). I was at the tail end of putting together an extensive Internet promotional campaign for my next book, Whisper to the Blood, and I thought, Why not that?

Little did I know when I received the invitation in 2008 how very topical the subject was going to be in early 2009. The econony tanked and the publishing industry tanked right along with it. Publishers are being fired, publishing houses are laying off staff, newspapers are no longer doing book reviews, the books-and-mortar bookstores who have traditionally been very powerful in spreading word of mouth are going down like ninepins, and chain stores are cutting stock and moving what’s left from up front to the bargain tables faster every month.

It’s a scary world out there for an author who is trying to make a living.

Back to the publishing houses. One of the first things always to be cut from a house’s budget is promotion. I’d been watching the news out of New York and I didn’t think things were going to get better any time soon. I submitted the final draft of Whisper to the Blood in the spring of 2008, at which time my publisher told me that for an author tour they were sending me to do Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust show in Seattle, to launch the book on publication day at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, to sign the book at Title Wave in Anchorage, and they were taking out an ad in Alaska magazine, and that was it.

I was grateful. They could have done nothing at all. That’s happening to a lot of my friends. I could have left it at that, but I decided I was going to pick up the promotional slack, and that I was going to do it online.

What follows is a quick-and-dirty description of that effort. I have added to, amended and elaborated on the blog I wrote for Jungle Red, as well as incorporated some of my comments into the text. There are hot links under every relevant subject so you can click on them to learn more.

This is the nuts-and-bolts approach to online promotion. I had some advice from my webmaster, the incomparable Scott Gere of GereDonovan, but most of it I learned on my own. It took a lot of hours and a lot of sweat equity, because HTML doesn’t come easily to me.

But I made it work. And if I can do this, believe me, you can, too.

(next Friday: a calendar of events)