Days remaining to publication date – 15.
The Happiness Project is an account of the year I spent testing the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happier. This is my fourth book (or my fifth book, if you include a book I did in collaboration with an artist).
It’s wonderful when people pre-order a book, and this week I accomplished two things meant to encourage people to pre-order The Happiness Project. First of all, I launched my book trailer. For a long time, I’d planned to make it myself, and several weeks ago, I actually sat down one afternoon with the PC equivalent of iMovie and put something together. But it wasn’t any good, and I didn’t have the expertise to fix it, and I was paralyzed. When I found out that two writers I knew had book trailers made by a third person, whom I also knew, I had my solution: I needed to hire that person myself. Maria Giacchino of My Little Jacket did such great book trailers for Abigail Pogrebin’s One and the Same and Deborah Copaken Kogan’s Hell Is Other Parents that I knew she’d come up with something terrific. (Yet another example of the uncanny truth in the Zen saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher appears.") And she did! Watch it here!. It was very exciting to launch that into the world. Second, my publisher had encouraged me to create bonus materials to send to people to thank them for pre-ordering. I pulled together some materials, and Harper turned it into a nicely designed, unified PDF. Now I send that to people who e-mail at gretchenrubin1[at]gmail.com me telling me they’ve pre-ordered. Honor system – I don’t actually check. Now, do things like book trailers or bonus materials actually help spread the word about a book, or better still, prompt people to buy it? It’s hard to know exactly what inspires people to want to read a book – especially in the new, shifting media landscape. Such things seem worth a try, except that of course they do cost a lot of money, time, and energy. It can be hard to know where to focus. How about you? What strategies have you tried to help make people aware of your work -- whether online or through other avenues?
* On my book tour, I’ll be visiting New York City, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Please come, or let your friends in those cities know! It would be great to meet other SheWrites members along the way. Details here.
