Get Your Book
NOTICED
You put your life on hold so you could finish
writing your book. Now, you can sit back and
relax while the sales roll in, right? Wrong!
Developing a publicity strategy is critical
to your book’s success.
By lori aMes E ver since I was a little girl, I was surrounded by books. My mother was an English teacher and both she and my dad, who are
now in their mid-eighties, support their
local library as voracious readers. And
dad just asked for a Kindle.
School itself was not a favorite activity of mine—I absolutely hated tests.
To this day if you ask me the value of
“x,” I will tell you I really don’t care.
But college was a different story. All of
my professors let me prepare essays instead of taking tests. I was in heaven. I
majored in English with a specialization
in publishing, and minored in speech,
communications and psychology. When
I graduated, I found a job in the publishing industry within two weeks. My
career surrounded by books had begun.
I have been involved in book publishing since 1979, and in book publicity since 1980. Oh, how the industry
has changed, both the publishing side
and the publicity side. It’s been fascinating and exhilarating keeping ahead
of the curve.
Turning a New Page
In the late 1980s, I worked at William
Morrow, and then spent 20 years at a
boutique book publicity agency in New
York City. Then, on October 21, 2010,
my world came to a screeching halt.
Three weeks after my son’s 22nd birthday, he was diagnosed with an inoperable malignant brain tumor . . . and I
never returned to my job in the city.
As we sat in the hospital, my son
questioned why I wasn’t going to work.
At that time, he had no idea of the seri-
ousness of his illness. I explained that
he was going to need a lot of help and
treatment and that I needed to be with
him. Then, he uttered those fateful
words, “Well, you need to work. Why
don’t you start your own business?”
And so I did, from a chair in the
corner of his Neuro-ICU room, using
LinkedIn and my iPad®. The need to
create a sense of normalcy was so
strong that it helped us both stay on
firm footing for the battle of his life.
Fast forward to today. He’s doing
very well—and so is my business.
Lori Ames will speak on
book publicity at the
in New York, May 1-3, 2014.
Register at
NSAspeaker.org/
attend/spring-lab
