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The quickest way to launch your book is to stage an around the world online launch party (when most media people are available) inviting the specialty and general press, publishers, agents, entertainment attorneys, producers, directors, book talent managers, book packagers, famous writers, newspaper reporters and columnists from TV as well as print media, small press publishers, book sellers, event planners for booksellers events overseas and nationally, and those who come to book sales parties in people's homes as well as software, book and video distributors to meet you for a conference online where you'll have a chat and put up a presentation with sound, text, and video clips or visuals all about your unpublished book or script.
Did you see the pre release publicity the Harry Potter books received, even coverage on the cover of Newsweek? What can you do for your unpublished book to create spin that will add to your credibility as well as visibility in the media all over the world? It all starts with a story board and a press kit that reveals your main character's measured change, transformation, or growth, or if your book's nonfiction, how much everyone needs to know the information you're about to tell. It's not whom you know, but whom you tell--and how you tell it that brings people together.
HOW DO YOU MAKE A STORYBOARD? Storyboards can help launch your unpublished book if you use them as a kind of mind map that uses the right hemisphere of the brain to express visually with thumbnail sketches and dialogue bubbles what goes into a novel or script. If you write your story as a play first and flesh out the dialogue into a novel, it will flow easier when based on a storyboard. You can move to a springboard, where you can bounce the story off of the springboard's role as a summary or synopses of significant events and turning points in your book or script. A springboard runs up to 15 pages long. A story board can go the length of the book summarizing the highlights in half that number of pages. A synopsis runs about one or two pages, and a high concept pitch is one sentence that tells your whole story such as Star Trek is Wagon Train in space.
What's a storyboard? Storyboards are pages of panel cartoon-like visual images of how each scene looks visually before the dialogue is spoken. Draw in thumbnail sketches your storyboard for each scene of your novel, autobiography, or script as you write it or adapt it from a novel, news clipping, or story.
To pre sell your unpublished book to the media or publishers, write the significant events, turning points, or highlights of your confrontation where the hero and the opponent come into conflict for the last time. The battle scene is the major test that results in a major change both inside the hero morally and externally so he/she can reach the goal and end the story. This is what you hand to the press and to publishers, agents, or producers. You're highlighting and summarizing the significant events of your book.
1. Hold a mid-night launch party for your life story or other book.
2. Hold a noon launch party for readers who can't drive or go out at night, and have the location on a bus line.
3. Hold a weekend launch party at a department or discount store such as Wal-Mart or any similar store. Or combine with any store's grand opening party.
4. Hold a launch party in a school cafeteria, library, gym, yard, or auditorium for the appropriate age group. Combine launch party with a lecture to elementary or high school classes. Or if more appropriate, to special interest groups and clubs, professional associations, or women's clubs and organizations or related societies.
5. Hold a launch party at a college campus or rent a room or auditorium or space on the lawn.
6. Hold a launch party in a senior citizens apartment complex, recreational center, adult education center, hospital gift shop, or nursing home.
7. Hold a launch party in a place where you can set up an international or national day so that everyone, especially children, if your book is appropriate, can read your book on the same day, in case they do order it. Have all the children across the nation experience Your Life Story or Your Book on the same day.
8. Hold a launch party in a church recreation hall, park, museum, library, art gallery, zoo, space theater, or social center.
9. Hold a launch party in a mall or on the lawn of a public park or skating rink on a Sunday or at a sports center or field.
10. Hold a launch party on a cruise ship before it sails or in a bus or train station or airport. Put up a temporary kiosk for your launch party. Or get permission and a permit to launch your book near or in front of a supermarket or convention center or a hotel lobby.
Use cruises and travel situations to launch your party. Or charter a flight and launch it in transit to help passengers pass the time. Cruise ships are you best bet.
Ask newspaper reporters from national press associations and public relations associations to cover your book or life story in their articles on lifestyle or business subjects or whatever the subject of your book covers. Societies of professional journalists have monthly meetings. Ask to have your launch party at one of their meetings or invite the whole organization to your meeting.
Gather other writers of similar books and life stories into a pool of vendors and sell booths or tables in a large hall, Masonic center, or other meeting place, like an association of Realtor's Hall, or building you can rent. Have all the writers self-publish their books or photocopy with cardstock cover and illustration or photo and comb binding. Print on demand. Have numerous copies of books on tables. A group of 10 or 20 writers can have a group launch party and invite the press or sponsor a press club meeting, perhaps on board a docked yacht that's rented for the day or in a hotel or university rented room or meeting hall. Books can be printed on demand and given as press copies to reporters.
Invite entertainment and copyright attorneys, agents, publishers, editors, the media, and writers, also the potential readers of your book such as children and parents or business people. Have your launch party at a convention or conference on a related theme, such as a conference of small press publishers or a book buyer's convention or annual meeting in the US or abroad. Or take a group of writers on a cruise and present books to the press. You can go free if you gather enough paying people to take the tour with you. Have stationery printed with a logo or slogan. Print the letterhead with enlarged slogan or logo onto a supply of two-pocket folders. Print a scriptwriting logo onto adhesive labels. Stick the labels onto the cover of the folders. The multi-colored two-pocket folders are available in any office supply outlet.
Create a brochure, preferably in color. Include the brochure in the press kit. The brochure could list a writer's services and credentials or credits. If there are no past credits, print all the services provided. You could offer the following events for writers to publicize your work: quality circles for writers, individual instruction, seminars, event planning for communications professionals, freelance technical writing, manual writing, corporate scriptwriting, desktop publishing, word processing, editing, tutoring, instructional courseware design, children's writing instruction, corporate scriptwriting, English as a second language writing instruction, or fiction written for adults with 2nd grade reading ability, science journalism, writer's speakers bureau, art publicity writing, or any other type of writing services offered.
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