What Celebrities Teach Us About Book Promotion

Hilary Duff at her book signing.

When a celebrity becomes an author, it seems as if the whole world knows about it because their book promotion team works hard to make that happen, right.

So why doesn't the whole world know about our books as self-published authors?

One big thing I have noticed about celebrities is that everything they do, their fans (and even those of us who could care less) know about it. And they show up by the masses in support.

Authors are celebrities, but the vast majority of us have not embraced that fact just yet.

If we did, we would understand the importance of having a book promotion team, a glamor team, a publicist, and so on and so forth,

Noticed I said team. You have to learn how to delegate in the areas where you are not the strongest, or those areas that are going to take too much of your time away from writing. (That's what authors do, right?)

A book promotion team can help us to get the word out about our books much faster than we can doing everything alone.

We need book bloggers because their job is to blog about books, and the more blogs our books appear on, the better our chances are of having our books purchased.

Our glamor team can make sure that we look good for any photo opportunities that may arise. You know what they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Our publicist can make sure that the newspapers and magazines know who we are and when we will be in town signing books, or when we will be having our next big event, and so on and so forth. They work hard to publicize us so that people know why they should take notice of us.

If we really understood the celebrity status we possess as being authors, we would really start to treat our book promotion as an integral part of our career.

Celebrities go all out. They happen to show up where they know cameras and other influential people will be so that they stay in the forefront of the lives of their loyal fans and followers. They constantly tweet about their contests and update their statuses (well, it's probably someone they have paid to do it, but, you catch my drift). We like and share their statuses, we follow them, we retweet them. Why? Because they are someone that we admire, right?

As authors, our book promotion should make us someone that our readers admire. Someone that our readers want to retweet and follow and be wherever we are.

So, I want you to take a look at what you are doing to promote your book. Are you seriously taking your career as an author as seriously as you should? Be honest. Most of you, the vast majority of you, are not. Don't feel bad. I said the vast majority (myself included).

Start to take your own writing career seriously. Build your team of people that are going to work to make you stand out so that you too can become a household name.

Start embracing your celebrity.

Until next time,