Laguna Beach Books Archives - Sonia Marsh

Please click to listen to my PODCAST, or you can read the transcript below, or do both. I would love to hear what you’ve done for your own book launch party, and hope you leave comments in the section below. Please share with others who need help with their book launch.

Thanks, Sonia.

Hi, I’m Sonia Marsh, the founder of the weekly “My Gutsy Story” series and the author of Freeways to Flip-Flops: A Family’s Year of Gutsy Living on a Tropical Island,” which will be available on Amazon and bookstores nationwide on August 21^st.

Today I’d like to give you some ideas on how to do a book launch that’s not your usual type.

How many of us enjoy sitting behind a desk and waiting for people to come up to us?

Here are some ideas

Do not call it a book launch, but a book launch party. Yes, doesn’t a party sound like more fun than a boring old-fashioned launch?

Schedule your date and time with the bookstore manager, and start telling people about it two months before the date. My book launch party is on August 30^th, and I’m bubbling with Gutsy enthusiasm.

Talk about it with the same enthusiasm you have for planning your wedding.

As Carolyn Howard Johnson says in her book, The Frugal Book Promoter, How to do What Your Publisher Won’t”

“A book launch is akin to planning a wedding. You may not need an elaborate canopy of wedding bells but all the other elements that makes a wedding a success must be considered for a launch.”

Make some special postcard invitations which you give away to people everywhere. Your friends, neighbors, people at the gym, store owners you know and like, I mean everyone.

Insert 5 invitations into each ARC, you send out, or just drop them off or mail them and tell your friend to tell everyone she knows about your launch party. If she lives in another state, tell her when your book will be released and that you’d be more than happy to do a Skype interview with any book club she of her friends belong to.

Get sponsors for your event so that you are “inviting” other local businesses to participate and this will make it easier to get press coverage.

Walk to each restaurant or store, close to your bookstore, and introduce yourself. Bring a copy of your book with you, and tell them how many people you expect to attend, I said 75, because that’s how many Laguna Beach Books can hold “as far as standing room.”

If it’s a restaurant, ask them if they can offer an appetizer and that you picked them because they… (have a great Caribbean dish that fits perfectly with your theme.)

If it’s a store, for example I went inside a chocolate store, a hair salon and a home linens store, and asked if they would like to provide a gift basket for the raffle at my book launch party. I told them to send me their logos to add to our publicity campaign. So far they all said yes, including a Caribbean restaurant that’s donating rum punch.

So be Gutsy, and just go out there and ask. What’s the worst thing that can happen? The word “No.” That’s not the end of the world.

Now I have a question for you if you live outside the U.S.

I have a feeling that here in the U.S., businesses are more willing to help.

I would love to hear what would happen if I tried this in Paris, or Amsterdam.

Please share some of your own ideas for book launch parties that have worked for you.

Am I right? Is this more of an American concept: asking for donations from companies, as an author, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Thanks, good luck to you, and keep the conversation going.

Photo credit of Laguna beach Book Store above.

Today, I know what a birthday feels like to a five-year-old. I woke up earlier than usual to check the online edition of the Laguna Beach Independent newspaper.

I was crushed. Nothing. I looked for the article everywhere. For those of you who didn’t see it, I blogged about Dimestories on Easter Sunday. After reviewing my e-mail exchange with Jennifer Erickson, the journalist who interviewed me, I remembered what she said. “Things can always change in the newspaper world, but if all goes according to plan the article will appear in the May 1 edition of the Laguna Beach Independent.”

A couple of hours later, I re-checked, and found the article. If you click on the photo, you’ll see me reading. As Erickson wrote, this was my first DimeStories event, and my name happened to be pulled out of the red tin, first. Unfortunately, they wrote my last name as March instead of Marsh, but I’m excited about the paragraph on my memoir, half way down.

Names are chosen randomly out of a container to determine the order of readers. First-timer Sonia March of Lake Forest started things off at the April event, reading a short selection from a memoir she is writing about moving her family to Belize as a means of dealing with a defiant teenager. A little nervous at first, March gained poise as she read and finished before the timer. She hadn’t planned to be a writer, but kept a journal of her experiences and sent descriptive e-mails to friends who encouraged her to write a book. She’s been taking writing classes, and then learned about the open mic nights through McCormick. “I think this group is amazing, and I’m going to keep coming back because you can learn so much from listening to the other writers,” she said.

This Saturday, May 3rd, at 5 p.m., Laguna Beach Books is hosting the first DimeStories Orange County Showcase, where preselected stories will be read by their authors. I can’t wait to hear them.

What a great present I received today, and good luck to all other aspiring writers.

I know many of you have already published several articles, books, etc. Please share if you’ve been interviewed about your writing in a local, or national newspaper. What about television? I’d love to hear.