How to Market a Book: The Hilariously Comprehensive Guide to Book Marketing and Promotion
Lori Culwell

The real work begins after you’ve finished writing your book

Lori Culwell clearly had a lot of fun writing How to Market a Book, the latest in her Funny You Should Ask! series.

As an author and publishing (but not marketing) consultant, I’ve lost count of the book marketing books I’ve read and seminars I’ve attended, with costs ranging from free to hundreds of dollars. That puts me in a position to authoritatively say that Culwell’s book is indeed comprehensive. It’s also well-structured and easy to read.

She begins by explaining how to organize your marketing efforts so you have a system in place to manage things before you begin doing the work. Follow this advice and you’ll save countless hours of trying to remember where you put something you worked on a few months ago.

How to Market a Book by Lori Culwell

Next is a section on why and how to build an email list, which is an essential element of book marketing. If you don’t anything else to market your book, do that.

Then Culwell systematically goes through a wide range of marketing and promotion strategies, most of which you can do from the comfort of your computer and some things you can do in person. She addresses some of the strategies from the proverbial 30,000 feet level—for example, she recommends asking local bookstores to stock your book, but doesn’t go into significant detail on exactly how to do that. Other strategies included thorough, step-by-step explanations and illustrations for the why and how.

You might want to read this book at your computer because Culwell includes an abundance of links to additional resources (or you can tab the pages and come back to them). The print version of the book includes plenty of white space; use it to write notes and capture ideas that come to you as you read.

This is not a read-once-and-you’ve-got-it book. If you try to absorb it all at once, you’ll get overwhelmed. Skim through it the first time, put together your plan, then go back to the applicable sections as you implement. And try to have as much fun marketing your book as Culwell had writing hers.

Jacquelyn Lynn
Follow me
Latest posts by Jacquelyn Lynn (see all)