2. If you're an author, make February 1 the date to begin a forever book. What's a forever book you might ask? It's a book—any genre—that celebrates the holiday of your choice. Why so early? Because you want to have it published and ready for marketing anywhere from "Christmas in July" celebrations to an online e-book promotion the week before the big date. Everything you do with new book becomes a template for 2025, 2026 and forever more. You make it a classic with promotions that become more effective, more creative, easier, and more frugal of time as the years go by. Speaking of Christmas in July, that's the month to start planning your holiday media blitz, too. July is the time to pitch holiday stories and promotions for your business, your book, your profession to magazines and some other print media. I know because I worked for Good Housekeeping magazine after honing by journalism at a daily newspaper and had a hard time accepting that it takes that long to get the job done! But every medium will be looking for new, fresh holiday ideas or current angles until the last gift is unwrapped...or after. Think both pre- and post-holiday needs. Think worldwide. Think national. Think local. As ideas come to you, add alerts to your calendar. Don't be chintzy with the details. Busy minds get forgetful. Note: Do you use HARO (Help A Reporter Out)? It’s a subscription service that lets you know when a reporter can benefit from whatever it is you are promoting. Use it year-round to build your exposure, nurture contacts and get ideas. Save your submissions to tailor them for different calls-for-help HARO puts out every season of the year. 3. Mending the world is (must be!) an ongoing project, of course. But you can begin weaving the charitable considerations and your awareness of the power of the word into everything from guestlists to donating profits from your books to suitable organizations. (Keep reading for more information and link on how my poetry coauthor and I work charities into the branding of each of our books.) 4. Here are a couple of other guidelines. For authors I'm thinking last-minute gifts by touting e-book gifts that are inexpensive and arrive very nearly instantly. For readers I'm suggesting you use more books as gifts— everything from classics to books you loved, maybe with a printout of the review you wrote for it tucked inside the cover. I bet Taylor would like the idea. I'm thinking donations to your local library and a special thank you to whoever tosses the daily news onto your front porch. The list can get really long. “Think worldwide. Think national. Think local. As ideas come to you, add alerts to your calendar. Don't be chintzy with the details. Busy minds get forgetful.” - Carolyn Howard-Johnson, multi-award winning writer of fiction, poetry, and the HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers
85 Carolyn Howard-Johnson brings her experience as a publicist, journalist, marketer, editor, and retailer to the advice she gives in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers and the many classes she taught for nearly a decade as instructor for UCLA Extension’s world-renown Writers’ Program. The books in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books published by Modern History Press include the third editions of The Frugal Book Promoter and The Frugal Editor which won awards from USA Book News, Readers’ Views Literary Award, the marketing award from Next Generation Indie Books and the coveted Irwin award. That series includes books on other topics for writing as varied as writing book proposals and editing tricky homonyms.
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