You’ve written your book. It’s published – print, ebook, audio, maybe all three. You wrote a first draft, then a second, third and forth. Then there was the editing. Sometimes you changed a line, or a paragraph. Sometimes it was a word, or just a punctuation mark. But you’re tired of the damned thing, and it doesn’t matter anymore because it’s published. You can forget about it.
Well. . . no. You can’t. Novel or non-fiction, in order for people to stumble on it by chance, loving every word and telling all their friends to buy a copy, the book must be promoted.
Here’s a sad (perhaps) fact for you: all that effort to write your book is just the tip of the iceberg. In order for you to become the next shining literary beacon, the bottom 90% of your iceberg needs to be completed. You need to be interviewed, to be quoted, to do readings for rooms small and even smaller. You need to remain completely upbeat when getting up early and staying up late for phone interviews, saying the same things over and over again. Blogs and magazines won’t go out and find your book on a store shelf, rushing home to read it and gush over it to their myriad readers. It needs to be put into their hands.