There are many zany tactics adopted by publishers and authors to get their books noticed, but how about giving them away for free? John Warner, chief creative tsar of struggling independent publisher TOW Books, is so sick of sending his books out to newspapers and magazines and television shows for review, and hearing nothing back, that he's decided to give up on the media and send books directly to his readers.
Article by the writer: TOW Books: How to fail at publishing a whole new way
Now, after two years of, let’s call it, non-success, I understand that the problem is at least as much about publicity and distribution as it is about quality. (At least I hope that’s the problem.) So I’m here to announce that if TOW Books is going to fail at publishing, we are going to fail in our own spectacularly new way.
How badly are we struggling? Well, we’ve released four books. Their Amazon rankings at the time of this typing are:
170,374
388,165
706,198
1,033,377
Another publisher who tried that with blogs: Blogger Reviews of Our Obama Book
A couple of weeks ago, I made an offer to bloggers. I told them that we would send them a free copy of The Faith of Barack Obama by Stephen Mansfield in exchange for their agreement to write a 200-word review of the book.
This isn't exactly new. Writer Cliff Burns (see here and here) -- among other writers -- will attest to that.
And let me remind everyone about Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, an entire site that is set up to be a liaison between publishers and bloggers who are interested in specific books.
TOW Books website
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