Back To Making A Bestseller...

All right, many of you initially came from my listserve, The Making of a Bestseller. And now that the editorial is done for FWB, I will then concentrate on tell you the FWB strategy.

For me, I'm going to try to build momentum for the book, and I have less than six weeks to do it. FWB ships from the publisher to their distribution center in August, and then heads out to bookstores. I start UCLA on September 26, so whatever I do for the book has to have bang for the buck.

Plan #1: My frat brother, Ray Dennis, operates a marketing firm and he's working his magic to find a sponsor for some Friends With Benefits soirees in about ten cities. The idea is to take the book out of the bookstore and into a social environment. Personally, I find bookstore signings the most boring events on earth. I get asked the same questions, and I robotically give answers, sometimes thinking about whether to have chicken or beef for dinner, rather than the actual question. But a social event, say at a restaurant, where people purchase the book from a bookseller, and then we mingle, is much more attractive to me. So I've got to choose ten cities. Here they are:

1. Los Angeles
2. New York
3. Atlanta
4. Chicago
5. SF/Oakland
6. Dallas
7. Washington DC
8. New Orleans
9. Philadelphia
10. Detroit

Plan #2: Plan #2 is a much larger, more complicated plan that is geared toward selling thousands of books in one day, and also provide the largest amount of exposure and publicity possible. I'm still waiting on Books-A-Million to see if they like my proposal. Once I finish talking with them, then I talk more about it.