So a while back, I happened to mention Lawrence G. McDonald’s new book about the Lehman Brothers meltdown, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers
About an hour or so later, I got a nice “thank you” from McDonald, via Twitter (@Convertbond). (And you know me and Twitter…) So I added him to my followers, and boy, this is an author other folks with new books should imitate.
As every new author learns (usually too late), publishers don’t “do” book publicity anymore. They haven’t for years, but for some reason, amateur authors don’t do much research about the business end of things.
Being a, well, business guy, McDonald knows this and is good at promoting himself — but NOT in an obnoxious way. He doesn’t tweet about his book 100 times a day. Every few days I might get something, like an entertaining excerpt from the book, up at his very clean, simple website.
Authors: you have to do your own promotion. You could do worse than check out the understated way McDonald is running his campaign.
