Guest Post: Gabriel Gadfly on Offline Promotion for Weblit

Gabriel Gadfly is a 24 year old Weblit poet and blogger from Alabama who thinks he’s a decent writer and thinks you should too. He writes a little bit of everything, but mostly fantasy fiction and weird love poems about zombies.

He’s provided this excellent post about offline promotion for weblit authors.

Visit Gabriel at his Website or find him on Twitter.

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How Public Readings Can Help Weblit Writers Gain Readers
by Gabriel Gadfly

When most weblit writers think of ways to promote their sites, offline efforts often get overlooked. After all – we write for the Web, we publish our work on the Web, our readers read us on the Web, so it makes sense to focus on promotional efforts that directly involve the Web: ad campaigns, social media, backlinks generated through forum posts, blog comments, and reviews, etc.. That said, I’d like to focus for a bit on one method of offline promotion that can not only help you attract readers, but maybe even generate some sales.

I’m talking about The Reading. It’s an event that’s long been a staple of the literary world: an author publishes a book and travels around a bit, reading an excerpt of their work to a public audience at venues like coffee shops, book stores, universities, and libraries. Depending on the venue’s budget, sometimes refreshments are made available, and there’s usually a bit of time afterward to personally talk with the author, purchase signed copies of their book, or ask questions.

If you think about it, the reading has a lot in common with weblit: the author is delivering their content straight to the audience, the audience has the ability to ask questions or make comments directly to the author, and, on the business side, the audience is able to purchase books direct from the author without the impersonal intermediary of a bookstore or Amazon.com checkout screen.

In an article in this month’s Poets & Writers magazine, author Steve Almond writers “What I’d noticed over the years was that I sold most of my books at readings. For those of us authors in the vast midlist ghetto, this is generally true. It’s not reviews or blurbs or fancy Web sites that generate sales, but the opportunity to read our work for an audience of strangers as often as possible.” (“Self-Publishing Steve,” Poets & Writers, July/August 2010).

Almond brings up a lot of good points in the article, but one in particular mentions the effect an author’s presence has on a reader’s decision to buy a book: because buying a book directly from the author’s hand is so much more of a personal and novel experience than purchasing books the traditional way, it tends to lead to higher sales. In other words, people who wouldn’t normally buy your work are more likely to do so when you’re pitching it directly to them.

Of course, the conundrum is this: how does a (traditionally) unpublished writer get invited to give a reading? Some venues only host readings by invitation – this is especially common in universities – and without some particular notoriety or personal connection with the event coordinator, it can be tough to land that sort of invitation. Other venues, however, are more open to pitches from authors: coffee shops, small libraries, and independent bookstores are often looking for events to draw people in the door. Contact the owner or the person in charge of coordinating events for the venue and tell them you’d like to host a reading at their place. If they’re not familiar with weblit publishing, tell them a bit about it and invite them to check out your work. With a professional, confident demeanor, a thick skin for rejections, and a bit of luck, you might be able to land a few gigs.

Even if you can’t land a traditional reading, look for alternative events where you can put your work in front of an audience: open mic nights are great for poetry or flash fiction, and if your work is notable to a niche group, look for local organizations related to that niche – for example, if you write a steampunk serial, look for local steampunk groups and see if any of them are interested in letting you give a reading at their next meeting. If you write a story about superheroes, a local comic book shop might be worth checking out.

About once a month, the local coffee shop hosts a poetry slam competition, and I’ve participated several times. Every time, I’ve had members of the audience come up to talk to me and ask where they can find more of my work. About half of the new readers I gained this way have become regular readers of my work that return every time I post something new – you won’t find that kind of conversion rate in most forms of online promotion.

You don’t necessarily have to have a dead-tree book to sell at your readings, but it does help if you have something tangible: give out bookmarks with your URL, or have a sign-up list for a newsletter where people can get updates about your new content. If you have any ebooks available, consider giving out discount codes to people who attend the reading. Since I usually have my laptop with me at poetry slams, I’ve been known to pull up the site and let people fill out the Subscribe By Email form right there.

If you’re going to give a reading, be sure to advertise it! Post about it on your site, your Twitter account, on Facebook page. Depending on your budget, it might even be a good idea to print up some flyers advertising the event. Afterwards, post a recap and maybe even some pictures or video. Video of the event lets your reading work double duty: not only do you get the offline promotion, but you’ve got a strong piece of content that you can post on YouTube to maybe generate some online traffic as well, and it’s a good way to people who couldn’t make it to the event to still catch your reading.

What about you? What are your experiences with readings?