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You Finished Your Book, The Next Steps May Surprise You
Here are 6 things to do ASAP
If you’re in the publishing pipeline, you may suspect already that writing the book is not the end of your work. Now it’s time to find your audience. At the very least you’ll want to be a good partner to your publisher, showing up for readings and book tours, writing topical essays, and participating in interviews. Most of us, however, not only have to do all that, we have to arrange it. For ourselves.
As someone with a book coming out with a small press in May 2022 (Blissful Thinking: A Memoir of Surviving the Wellness Revolution), I’ll be putting together my tips for birthing your book. It’s the second time I’ve published with a small press (my first book, Hello American Lady Creature: What I Learned as a Woman in Qatar did well enough), so I’ll share what I’m doing again, what didn’t work, and my experiments. While these strategies may apply across genres and to self-publishing, my specific examples will be based on work with narrative nonfiction at a small publishing house. But if there’s some facet of launching your book that particularly interests you, and I can address it, let me know and I will.
