Sarah Wilson, one of our She Writes Preferred Providers and an expert marketer with a passion for authors and books (she left a very successful corporate marketing career to focus on working with authors), spent an hour talking shop with Kamy today, and taking questions from She Writers who joined us from Aspen, CO, Eugene, OR, Los Angeles, Boston, and lots of other places for an extremely illuminating and productive discussion.

A few choice bits:

• Sarah suggests that authors test the waters in multiple marketing channels and assess the response in those channels before identifying one of them to focus on with a big campaign.
• Make sure that whatever you do is scaleable -- in other words, a reading at a bookstore is hard to scale, but a reading at a bookstore that you video and use as part of a book trailer can reach a very wide audience on You Tube and through other channels.
• Giving away content for free DOES sell books -- Sarah cited this Mediabistro study (for a summary of the findings, rather than the study itself, check out this article in Wired) which underscored that point, but Sarah also reiterated that authors should be strategic about what they give away for free.
• Sarah also pointed She Writers to a super-cool site that I can't believe I hadn't heard of: Pixability, which had the absolutely ingenious idea of sending Flip Cams to authors (or others who wished to produce edited video for the web), asking them to film and film to their heart's content (readings, testimonials about their books, etc.), and then send the full Flipcam back to them so they can edit the raw footage and create an online book trailer.

Thanks, Sarah, for the tip!

Sarah Wilson is available for consulting to She Writers, including two really interesting services:

1) Sarah will help authors perfect the "marketing" part of their book proposals

2) Sarah will create marketing plans for authors that they can then execute themselves.

Sarah is also available for a She Writes Virtual Lunch, a comprehensive one-on-one phone consultation for just 100 bucks. For more Blog Talk Radio interviews, with literary agent Erin Hosier, former Random House Editor and She Writes Services Manager Lea Beresford, career coach Shari Cohen, and more, browse our Blog Talk Radio player!