Responding to News Fast

Have you signed up for Google Alerts yet to help market your book? How fast do you typically find news stories about the topic of your book?

Go to www.google.com/alerts and put in your main key words of the topic of your book, so that you will get a message each day with any news stories on the topic of your book.

My example for the day… I just scanned through my alert for “chronic illness” (I have about 15 alerts) and one of the news stories from a newspaper in Wayland, MA was, “Course on ‘Being a Friend to Someone Affected by Cancer’” I clicked and it discusses an entire class a high school had on how teenagers learned how to encourage, relate, talk to, etc. someone with a chronic illness or cancer. Bingo!

As the founder of National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week and author of Beyond Casseroles: 505 Ways to Encourage a Chronically Ill Friend, I couldn’t find a more appropriate person to send off some information to. I couldn’t track down addresses for the 3 people who actually led the course, the but Dean of Students, who was quoted was a perfect source. The article quoted him as saying, ”The ‘Being a Friend’ class was a wonderful program for the students of Wayland High School because it addressed important issues that many Wayland students have to face during their school years and throughout their lifetime.”

I looked up the school address, wrote him a letter commending him for having such a course and what a difference it would make in these student’s lives for the rest of their life. I also told him about II Week and Beyond Casseroles and I included 3 copies of the Beyond Casseroles books for the course leaders.

I included II Week brochures, II Week stickers, Beyond Casseroles bookmarks (that have 13 ways to encourage a chronically ill friend). I also added 3 white silicone bracelets for Invisible Illness Week, offering to send more if they’d be interested in acknowledging the week in September or in case they had the class again.

All from one little Google Alert. Trust me, I would not have been reading a newspaper from Framingham, MA today!

What’s in your email today that is the perfect match for your book?

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Lisa and Joel Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!