Tom Levenson has another post up in his ongoing series about the writing and publishing process of his new book, this one about generating publicity. At this point, he’s gone past what I’ve experienced so far, but this is fortuitously timed, as I got a note from my editor yesterday saying that the bound galleys are in. Woo-hoo!
There will be pictures and so on when I get my copies (probably next week). This seems kind of early– the book itself won’t be out for another six months– but I assume that the folks at Scribner know what they’re doing. Anyway, I eagerly await Tom’s next installment, on the getting of cover blurbs, because I’ve been generating a list of names of people who ought to get advance copies in hopes of producing good cover quotes.
At any rate, Tom’s got some good thoughts on publicity things, some of which I’m already doing (blogging), and others that are in the works. There’s dogphysics.com, Emmy has her own Facebook profile, and a Facebook page for the book is on my list of things to do (right after “submit my NSF grant report”). I’ll probably investigate Twitter, as well, though I’m not sure how well I can make the time scale thing work. The “Schrödinger’s Dog” movie clip pretty well exhausts my multimedia skills, though I’m looking into finding somebody to help with more.
I’m open to other suggestions of things I ought to be doing. Tom suggests publishing articles and essays as a way to build an audience, which is an interesting idea, though I’m not sure how to go about that (and I don’t know if I have the free time…). If you know of, or better yet run, a publication that would like pieces about the sort of thing I write about here, leave a comment or send me email. And I’m sure there are other outlets I’m not even aware of that I could be using to promote the book, so if there’s something I should know of, leave me a comment.