Book Groups and Your Book

One of the fun things about having a book out is that random people will drift into your life and want to talk about Your Book. Through a series of e-mails, the coordinator of a mother-daughter book group invited me to speak at their meeting. This group had been meeting for over a year, had invited other local YA authors to speak, and in the way that working moms are, were highly organized about the whole thing. I brought my 13 year old daughter to the event.

It was a fantastic evening because a) they all read the book b) asked me a ton of questions about the writing and the story, and c) were mothers and daughters sharing the love of reading and books with each other.  Since CONFESSIONS OF A FIRST DAUGHTER is a YA novel about the daughter of the president of the United States, who happens to be her mother, the book mapped onto the book club’s demographic to a T.  The daughters loved the funny jokes and romantic elements of the book, while the moms were interested in my research about White House life and how real life mother/daughter tensions played out in the book.

I’d never considered it before, but reading groups are a great opportunity to promote your book.  Not only do the members of the group read (and purchase) your book, but they can recommend your novel to others in their reader network, leading to more opportunities to speak and thus sell more books.  And it’s never a bad time when you are among folks who want to talk about you and your writing.  It’s local, grassroots marketing, and will lead to other promotional gigs.  If booksignings and readings in big chain bookstores aren’t your thing, consider offering to speak at a book group. 

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I’m writing this Nov. 1, on lo our first day of NaNoWriMo, hallowed be the day, and after logging 1,250 words from my meticulously plotted outline, I already want to deviate from the outline. I guess it’s better to figure this out now.  Sheesh!

Buddy me and Therese at Kathleen_Bolton and Therese_Walsh as soon as the NaNo site stops crashing.

ETA: I’ve got an author interview up at Stop, Drop, and Read! Thanks for the fun questions, Diana!

Kathleen Bolton

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.

She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.

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