Marketing our books

My sister, Ricky Hunter, and I have both published books in the last few months. That's the easy bit. Then you need to sell the little blighters. Aha, you think, no problem! But it's not that easy.

When you write a book it is your 'baby', and of course you are in love with it, although there is a love/hate relationship too, because by the time you have edited the thing a zillion times you are at the 'nine months and one week' stage, when all you want is to get this birth over and done with. A book is no different. Nevertheless, being brilliant authors is not enough. You have to tell people that the books are there, and that they would love to read them and of course to read them they need to spend a bit of money.

My sister and I have decided to market to the libraries. I took my book into my local branch of the public library. She handed it on to someone in another library who does the buying for this area. Fabulous, an order for 22 books came through a week ago. So now, we are slowly building spread sheets of every library in Australia and emailing every last one of them with details and cover pictures of our books.

What a job! Do you know how many libraries there are in this big brown country? Lots and lots and lots. So  the spreadsheet is getting bigger and bigger. We have already contacted New Zealand library suppliers.

Then comes USA, England, Ireland, Scotland and Canada, and any other English speaking country we can think of. On top of that I have to make up a spreadsheet of all the TESOL colleges, because my book will be good for them. Oh well, no rest for the wicked.

Completely different topics, but a bit of shameless promotion on my own blog can't be too bad.