Help us get our books out there
Liminal Ink, as many of you know, is a small, indie publisher – tiny, in fact. But that doesn’t stop us having big dreams when it comes to our authors and their books. We believe in the books we publish; we’re proud of them and we would really like as many people as possible to read them.
In a crowded market, we know the best promotion for any book is the word of a reader who loves it. That’s why we want you to help us punk the promotion (though not in a beery way, you understand).
The punk philosophy is to sidestep the mainstream way of doing things and adopt the DIY approach. It’s something Liminal Ink has embraced from the start. We crowdfunded our first book, My Heart’s Content, and used freelancers to help us with elements such as cover design and typesetting. For our second book, Life Is Elsewhere/Burn Your Flags, we decided to do as much of it ourselves as possible, in collaboration with the book’s author, Iain Maloney.
We formed a gang with a ‘one in, all in’ attitude. Between us we edited, typeset, designed, produced and published the book. All decisions were joint ones. We spoke to bookshops, both in the UK and Japan, compromised with distributors and sent out invitations to review the book. We tweeted (wow did we tweet) and leaned on our friends and family. Every time any of us left our home we made sure we had books in our bags, or hands, or cars, to share with anyone who showed an interest in reading them.
Now we’re asking each of you to help us spread the word even further; to get our books to even more readers. It probably won’t come as a surprise to learn we even have some ideas on how you might do this. We’ve been thinking a lot about how as writers and publishers, once a book is out there, we rarely get to know who reads them. And since we’re curious people, we came up with an idea to see / hear some of our readers and hopefully persuade a few others to buy our books.
Here’s how.
If you’re up for it, we’d like you to record yourself (or get someone else to record you) reading your favourite few lines from one of our books. Or any lines you like really. If you can also get the cover of the book in shot, and set it against an interesting backdrop, well that would be beyond brilliant. Like this ...
Then either:
share your video on Twitter, with a link to our website, liminalink.com, using the hashtags #punkthepromo, #Liminalink, #LIEBYFbook (for Life Is Elsewhere/Burn Your Flags) or #MyHeartsContent
or
send your video to us at info@liminalink.com and we’ll share it
It doesn’t have to be slick or professional, it just has to be you, as you are (although the clearer the audio, the better).
And if you’d rather not do that, just tell as many people about us, in whatever way you choose.
Thanks