Effective Strategies on Giving Book Talks

One effective way I've found for spreading the word of my books around and selling them is to give talks at various  events and clubs.  When I first started doing this I tried having events just for my books, such as a signing at a bookstore, or at a library.  I got spoiled because it went well the first time I did it.  This was, however, a fluke.  I happened to have written about a subject that occurred in the town where I was speaking, so I had a huge turnout.  But after that, you could hear crickets chirping as I sat and waited in a bookstore for someone to give a crap.

What turned out to work much better was to find groups that were already meeting on a regular basis and who were looking for guests to speak.  Rotaries are a perfect example of this, because they meet every week, and most of them need a new guest speaker every single time.  That's a lot of slots to fill, so authors are helping them out by offering to speak, as long as it's on a topic their members are interested in hearing.

The first few times I did this, I was very nervous.  However, it became easy for me once I understood what I really needed to do; just tell the story.

You typically have only 20 minutes.  That's enough time to just tell everyone the basics of your book.  This may seem like you're giving it away and they won't want to buy it afterwards, but the trick is to not tell them any major spoilers, and to give them broad strokes.  In the case of Two Gun Hart, I'm telling the story of a man's entire life.  By giving the broad strokes of what happened, I'm basically providing a trailer for each part of his life.  By the time I'm done, the listeners feel that they've been told an entertaining story, and they get the book to fill in all the details.

This style works particularly well with nonfiction.  With fiction, it's a bit more difficult.  First of all, Rotaries are less interested in fiction.  Most of the members are interested in hearing true stories.  However, they're also interested in hearing about true facts.  If you find some that are related to your book, you can give a talk on that.  For instance, when I give talks regarding my novel The American Game, I talk about the true history of baseball, and how it coincided with the Civil War.  I then end by explaining how I integrated this history into my book.

All these methods have gone over well with attendees, and have often gotten a good number of my books sold, and the word spread about them.