How to Get Your Book Onto Pinellas Library Shelves
Library talks are the easiest events a local author can get, and the audiences engage harder than bookstore crowds. Getting into the collection is a separate process with different rules.
Category: Book Marketing (Page 5)
Book MarketingThe Truth About Bookstore Signings
The store will usually say yes if your book is orderable through the standard channel. Then nobody comes unless you bring them. The signing is not the marketing; it is where the marketing gets photographed.
Book MarketingGetting Local Media to Cover Your Book
Tampa Bay has more working media than most metro areas its size. None of them want to hear that your book is out. All of them want a story, and your book is the credential instead of the subject.
Book MarketingFive Hundred Years of Selling the Same Water
Five mineral springs in Safety Harbor have been sold as a cure for five hundred years, starting when Hernando de Soto decided he had found the Fountain of Youth. There is a lesson in it for anyone writing a book.
Book MarketingFinding a Writing Group Worth Sitting In
Pinellas County has more writing groups than most people realize, mostly meeting in library rooms. The useful skill is telling a group that will make you better from one that will correct your commas for two years.
Book MarketingThe Men Paid to Read Novels Aloud in Tampa
For fifty years in Ybor City, cigar workers paid a man out of their own wages to sit on a platform and read novels aloud while they worked. They elected him, voted on the books, and struck when the owners…
Book MarketingThe School That Owns a Newspaper
The Poynter Institute owns the Tampa Bay Times, because Nelson Poynter willed it to them so no chain could buy the paper. It is also where much of the modern craft of nonfiction writing was taught and written down.
Book MarketingWhere to Write in Safety Harbor
Safety Harbor has more workable places to write than towns four times its size. The library for long stretches, the waterfront for the stuck paragraph, Philippe Park for the structural think.
Book MarketingThe Hotel a Man Built Out of One Sentence
A man built an eight-story pink hotel on St. Pete Beach because a woman in Spain was forbidden to marry him. It opened in 1928, three hundred percent over budget, and the Fitzgeralds spent a week there in 1930.
Book MarketingGetting Your Book Into a Tampa Bay Bookstore
Tampa Bay still has a real independent bookstore scene, and each shop takes local books differently. The thing that decides whether any of them can stock you is how your book is printed.
Book MarketingKerouac’s Last Address, Twenty Minutes From My Desk
Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg in 1969 at forty-seven, in a concrete block ranch house in Disston Heights, leaving an estate valued at ninety-one dollars. On the Road has never stopped selling.
Book MarketingThe Safety Harbor Library, and Why I Keep Going Back
The Safety Harbor Public Library began in 1938 with a hundred books and $2.35 raised at a tea party. It is now open seven days a week and is the best free workspace in town for anyone writing a book.