Promoting Yourself, The Right Way

As it should be for any writing community, irony abounds. Even though the big NY houses are still the big NY houses, they're beginning to lose ground. The future of the large markets may rest in the hand of the small, community-based markets.

I've constantly said that the small and electronic published Romance community is doing everything right. Now, I figure I'd back that up with some specific examples of how small-time authors are making a big splash!

• Community - Aside from taking full advantage of where the everyday reader spends their time online - MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc. - Romance writers are creating and culturing online groups and communities. Many of these they've started years ago - as Yahoo groups, or maybe even before (remember eGroups, anyone? Or Themestream?). What's this mean? It means that authors helped build these communities with the readers, which lends ravenous loyalty throughout an entire career.
• Staying In Touch - Even after these Romance authors become successful (and your definition may vary on that, but let's stick with published) - they continue to be easily accessible to their fans, fellow writers, and general population. Sure, there's a few elitists, some eclectics, and drama llama's. But for the most part, the Romance community has developed a passion for hanging out together, and that makes them successful in many more ways.
• Trying New Things - There is no other online community that not only adapts to change, but promotes it than Romance authors. It all began with webrings, moved to e-publishing, rallied with erotic romance, culminated in contests, and now pushes towards promotion with book videos, and the future of high speed Internet. What other group would have thought to make videos to promote reading a book? Awesome.

So, if you are not a Romance author, and not involved in their community (which isn't as cliquish as you would think), then it's a good time to watch what they're doing and mimic it! Personally, I'm a bit more of a Sci-Fi fan, but the Sci-Fi author community has been less quick to adapt to the Internet community (aha, more irony), and has seen a significant decline in reader interest, even while science fiction and fantasy movies are blockbuster hits.

The moral of this story? Get involved in a community, stay in touch with your readers, and take risks. The rewards will be more than just monetary success. Over time, I think that the smallest self-published author that develops a community will be the person that ends up buying the big publishers if they don't start paying attention.