Outta’ this world blog

February 11, 2025 — I recently watched an online workshop on launching a new book, presented by Bryan Cohen of Best Page Forward. For those of you new(er) authors, like me, who may have a book launch approaching sooner or later, or maybe you’re just interested, I’ll outline some main takeaways in this post.

Being my second book launch, I’m looking forward to using the knowledge I gained last time, which will be a nice time-saver and guide. Build on your previous launch, Bryan said. Along these lines, some of the resources I have in my quiver are:

• List of bookstores who are carrying (or have carried my book)
• Local and regional publications and associations (for press releases)
• Author

August 20, 2024

Reels
One of the sessions I watched at the recent virtual conference I attended was about creating reels on Instagram to help market our books. How to Strategically Craft Reels to Promote Your Book was presented by Erin Lee, an elementary school teacher whose fun reels have gone viral. There was too much information to take in within the span of the presentation but we can watch sessions again through Sept. 10, 2024. If you’re interested, you have until Aug. 31 to sign up on the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators website to watch any/all of the presentations in that same timeframe (for a fee). There’s a plethora of really helpful, interesting, great information and insigh

January 9, 2024 — First, I want to wish my readers a happy, healthy and beautiful new year 2024! How futuristic this year sounds … 

I’ve worked in public relations and communications since I graduated from Michigan State with my bachelor’s in journalism and my master’s degree in advertising and public relations. I’ve been writing about and promoting others’ works for my entire career of over 30 years. So, marketing myself and my own book feels odd and takes some getting used to. It certainly helps to have the background and experience. And since my goal is to get my book noticed so that more people, especially children, can experience, and hopefully have fun and learn from my picture book, I have to forge ahead through a

November 28, 2023 — There’s a good amount to cover about marketing your self-published picture book so I’ll break this topic into more than one post. I’ll begin with some of the more obvious ideas and move on to some of the tactics that you might not think of right away. There are things I wish I’d known sooner. But, we’ll get to that. 

Fortunately, I have a dear friend, Nancy Rosen, a former client who I used to do freelance public relations writing for, who’s a marketing whiz. She tipped me off about the importance of presales for upcoming books and so I created a number of social media posts starting several months before publication, encouraging people to preorder my book. I didn’t get enough presales to ma