Fun with Book Promotion by Erin Farwell

Writing is hard work. You have to create believable but inventive plots and characters people care about or hate depending on their role in your story. The setting must support the world you’ve created and the ending must satisfy the readers so that the want more. After all this hard, challenging, and satisfying work, you finally have a book: a real one that you can hold in your hand, turn the pages, and hold up to say “I wrote this.”

After the joy of birthing your new “baby” comes the hard part – marketing the dang thing. While we love our work and hopefully so do our friends and family, we still need, want, crave others to like it, too. So we do launch parties, book signings, Goodreads Giveaways, Facebook posts, bookstore queries, and anything else we can think of to tell people about this precious piece of ourselves that we have launched into the world.

Recently, a fellow author, Lois Winston, invited me to contribute to an author cookbook featuring dessert recipes along with our thoughts on love and writing as well as a blurb about our books/stories. The idea is that people will get some great recipes and maybe find a few new favorite authors in the process and the writers will have another forum to connect with potential readers.

I jumped at the chance, offering my family’s recipe for Hidden Treasure Cookies, aka chocolate cups and caramel cups. This is the recipe that one child, upon tasting the cookies for the first time, turned to her mom and asked, “Can we adopt Miss Erin?” Yes, they are that good and one of the gems of our Christmas cookie trays. My thoughts on love and writing were pretty basic, yet true from my perspective but the recipe… so good.

The result of Lois’ effort is an amazing book entitled Bake, Love, Write and includes recipes and inspirations from 105 authors. In addition to the book itself, a group of the contributors are holding an electronic scavenger hunt during the month of October. I had never heard of this before but thought – why not, and I’m so glad I did. The participating authors have hidden a Halloween icon on one of the pages of their author websites and have donated a book, e-book, or swag item as prizes. Contestants must go to the author pages, find the icons and report their findings to be eligible for prizes which will be chosen through Raffle Copter. You can learn more and participate if you’d like here.

What a brilliant way to get people to read our author pages, learn more about our books, win prizes, and have some fun. Now if only I knew another group of connected authors with books to promote who might want to participate in a scavenger hunt…?

The recipes in Bake, Love, Write are awesome as are the authors themselves and it’s a wonderful way to take the drudgery out of book promotion. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Also, today is my husband’s birthday so a quick shout-out to him. Happy Birthday, Mike!

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Erin Farwell
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