Word of Mouth – a powerful medium to sell books.
By Horane Smith – award-winning author
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for authors, especially the new ones, to get review in newspapers and magazines. Newspapers have cut back on review spaces, and the reduced pages available, seem to be reserved for well-established authors or the big guns of the publishing houses, be they a Random House, Harper Collins or Simon and Schuster.
What can the new and upcoming authors do to get their titles more visible, the ultimate goal being to get them in the hands of readers? Surely, the introduction of the internet has been a blessing in disguise for many new writers. Were it not for the internet, and all the wide and varied opportunities available to promote books, the works of many new authors wouldn’t have seen the light of day and go on to become best-sellers or create an impact in literary circles. The “Google” effect and the Yahoo searches have been catalysts in the careers of many an author; the blogs, the websites, the Amazon.coms, the Barnes and Noble.coms, online discussions forums, the online book clubs, the notice boards, the online/POD publishers, and online self-publishing ventures have played, and continue to play, pivotal roles in the career and of many emerging writers.
Nevertheless, newspapers and magazines continue to have their roles, be they reduced, in promoting books. Certainly, The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail or The New York Times Review of Books, do initiate and discover new writers through their reviews, but the frequency of such is another matter.
Similarly, the internet, too, is responsible for ongoing exposure for books and writers, and so does an often overlooked method long used and practiced by many famous writers from as far back as we want to go. Word of mouth, as many writers like me will attest to, can be a powerful tool to sell your books. In fact, for a lot of writers, who don’t enjoy the privilege of getting automatic or publisher arranged reviews in the major daily newspapers, they may sell more books by word of mouth than through any other method.
Lover’s Leap: Based on the Jamaican Legend, my first of six novels was published in 1999. My other novels are Port Royal, Underground to Freedom, Reggae Silver, Dawn at Lover’s Leap and The Lynching Stream. In the case of Lover’s Leap, now a Jamaican best-seller, I can safely say its success is largely attributed to word of mouth. Only three book reviews were done in the U.K., Jamaica and North America, although over fifty newspaper stories were published in those three markets. But being my first novel, I went all out to ensure that people heard about it.
When the novel came out, I heard of cases where one person bought a copy and up to twenty people ended up reading the same copy. At first, I was concerned, given the reality that sales would be affected. However, as time went by, I began to realize that one of the reasons people were reading the same copy was that the word was getting around about this novel that people were describing as a “page turner.” The success of the novel didn’t come in the first year, however, in the second year, sales started to move up steadily and has been like that ever since. Although it was published nine years ago, the novel enjoyed its biggest sale in 2007, primarily because of a marketing strategy that ensures that it’s always available at the location of the legend it is based on, and of course, word of mouth is still getting around.
My other novels have received much more media publicity than Lover’s Leap. I’ve had roughly 150 newspaper stories and radio and television interviews for all my books. Somehow, Lover’s Leap is way ahead in sales and continues to sell today. It’s sequel Dawn at Lover’s Leap, which came out in 2006, was a finalist in the USA Booknews Bestbook Awards for Historical Fiction, yet it’s sales is nowhere near that of Lover’s Leap.
As my seventh novel Seven Days in Jamaica (Rain Publishing) comes out in the fall of 2008, I’m being forced by my own conscience to take another look at the word of mouth method of promoting this new publication. Most certainly, all other methods of promoting this novel will be utilized, but closer attention will be paid to word of mouth, which could give me another best-seller.
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