How to promote your book during publication week

From events to bookshop signings and why cake is essential

As a writer, some weeks you do very little actual writing.

Sometimes you’re researching or editing.

Sometimes you’re doing events and promoting a new book instead.

I honestly love the variety of these different aspects of being a writer.

On Thursday this week my newest book The Hug Button publishes. I’ve already shared what I was doing a month, and six months before publication as I began it plan how to promote it.

Now all the planning is done - in this post I’m going to share exactly what I’m going to be doing this week as The Hug Button hits the shelves.

Events

On Friday last week I did my first event for The Hug Button at my local library.

(My local library is tiny so they held my event in the church next door.)

Normally I charge for school and festival events, however I do offer some free events around publication to help promote the book.

These are often school events arranged through my publisher like the one Rebecca Ashdown (illustrator of The Hug Button) and I are doing in London on Thursday.

As well as offering free events to my local library I also offer them to my children’s school, local indie bookshops and National Literary Trust branch.

I’ll be doing an event with the NLT in Camborne next week, will be at

Clemo Books

in Newquay on 2nd August and Waterstones in Truro on 12th August.

The benefit of doing all of these free events is that it helps with promotion, provides social media content and it also provides an opportunity to practice and refine my event.

When I first started doing events for children, I used to get really nervous, but now I absolutely love them. Like lots of other things in life, the more events you do, the better you get at them. Standing up in front of children helps you discover what your style of event is and you’ll quickly learn what works - as well as what doesn’t.

As someone who is dyslexic, I learn better when I’m doing something which is why the only way for me to know my events off by heart and back to front, is to do them multiple times.

If you want to find out more about events, how I plan them and what works, then this post here is for you.