Innovate & Elevate: Book Marketing Leaders

Uncover the latest trends in book marketing innovation straight from three industry disruptors who are reshaping the author’s journey. Juliet Clark sits down with Kathleen Kaiser of the ProBookLaunch; Desireé Duffy, founder of the PR agency Black Château and The BookFest; and Jared Kuritz, CEO of Strategies Public Relations and CMO of the cutting-edge audio platform Zoundy. They tackle the shift in publishing, beginning with the explosive growth of the audiobook market, which has now surpassed e-books in sales. They also explore new platforms like Zoundy that offer authors unprecedented marketing and list-building control. Learn why Kathleen asserts that marketing is a science and how her agency uses AI to automate media kit creation. Desireé highlights the resurgence of listicle articles and the enduring importance of human connection, even as technology speeds up. Finally, Jared breaks down the essential business model every author needs. He covers the critical mindset shift: building your community, not just selling your book, starting 12 to 24 months in advance.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Innovate & Elevate: Book Marketing Leaders

We have three great guests whom I’m going to introduce in a moment. All of these guests have been innovators in the book marketing world. If you’ve been around as an author, you undoubtedly know that book marketing has needed some innovation for a very long time. I’m so super excited to introduce Kathleen Kaiser who is President of the Writers and Publishers Network, a national literary non-profit and a frequent conference speaker. She’s going to be talking about her new platform, which is a game changer for if you’re trying to self-publish your book. Also, Desiree Duffy. She is the Founder of Black Château, a marketing and public relations agency, Books That Make You, a Webby award-winning multimedia brand and The BookFest®.

Probably a lot of you have won BookFest Awards if you’re here. That’s coming up again too in the spring. I’m pretty excited about that. Also, Jared Kuritz is a Publishing and Marketing Innovator with more than two decades of experience working in traditional, hybrid, and Indie publishers. He’s also the CEO of STRATEGIES Public Relations and the CSO and CMO of Zoundy, which he’s going to talk about which is a cutting-edge audio platform.

Welcome all three of you. I’m going to start out with Kathleen. Kathleen, you have moved from music journalism into decades of literary publicity and running organizations. What innovation and book marketing promotion look like to you compared to many years ago? I’m sure it’s changed tremendously.

It’s changed a lot. There is so much happening. When I speak sometimes, I have a graph of the website and then the different parts. When I started in the late days, everything has changed and what you emphasize and what you don’t. With all of the algorithm changes, AI search and everything that’s happening, it’s all changing again. It’s all been thrown up in the air. Amazon is changing their algorithms and their rankings. It did a real kick to a lot of people. It changed how your book is brought to the public. It also changed what you have to have for their algorithms to find you and rank you.

In doing all of that for clients, in ’23, Adan who works with me started playing around with AI to start working on the Media Kit and One-Sheet and make the writing faster. I like what she was producing so she kept playing with it. Basically, we have automated most of the writing and work that we do. I’d say 70% of the work that we spent time finding keywords, testing this and doing that.

We’ve put it into a separate module on top of ChatGPT that protects the manuscript. Instead of you putting in somewhere, “This is what the story is about. These are what I think the keywords are.” It reads your entire manuscript and pulls from it. It tells you which ones are drawing now and ranks them and everything. You can still decide which you want to use but it gives you a ranking.

The most important thing is it tells you why. My big question is always, “Why do I do this? Why do I need to do this?” We’ve put that into it. It’s all behind the scenes. All you say is yes or no. It asks you the questions instead of you prompting it. It’s a great tool. We’ve had incredible success. We had a book come out in July 2025, which was the first one with the new rankings and the new algorithms. We were so happy with what happened. We were sitting there for three days waiting to be ranked, which was unusual.

Usually, you can get it within the first 8-10 hours of the book release but it’s just adjusting the way everything is done. The other thing that I’ve relied a lot on that I enjoy doing is eBook promotions, especially three months or six months after the book is out to keep bringing it up. That’s all changed too. That is not having the success that we’ve had before. Now, we’re investigating that and trying to figure out what’s going on behind the scenes to make that work. The thing I think most people don’t realize, writing is a creative art but marketing is a Science. There are rules and things that you’ve got to do. There’s always exceptions but there are procedures. There are ways to do things.

“Building Your Book Launch Plan”

With this such a dynamic market that we’re in now, you have to be constantly on top of all of it. Adan is far more into it than I am. She’s 30 years younger than me, so it helps. It’s more of her world but we’re both reading everything and testing things out. She’s playing with stuff. We do the seven-day free trial of more products than you can believe and see what they do. She tries to get in behind to see what they are doing. It’s just all changing, but it makes it more dynamic because it levels the playing field. Unless you have a big publisher that’s putting a ton of money or somebody who’s a million selling author and has twenty books out that have sold a million or more copies. They’ve already got to build an audience.

With what you can do nowadays and what we’ve tried to put into ProBookLaunch is how you can slowly build your own market. I’m starting a blog series in January one year out, the timeline for launch, of all the things that you can slowly start doing. Instead of, “It’s a month out and I have to jump in and do everything.” Here’s how you do it and you start doing it while you’re still writing or maybe you’re going through your third or fourth draft or it’s off with the editor. You can slowly get it all done. With a blog series, I’m explaining what it is, what I’ve learned and done with it and then giving you some bullet points of why it’s important and how to use it.

That’s what we do over here, is platform building, which so often gets left behind. Desiree, you founded Black Château, books that make you and the book fast. When you think about your ecosystem as a whole, what was the core innovation you were trying to bring to book marketing that you thought everyone else out there was missing?

“Author Network and Listicles”

It’s interesting that you asked that because in many ways, that innovation has now come full circle and is going through a Renaissance in a good way. When I started Black Château, when I started everything, one of the core things was getting authors to network together because I would see these lists of the best books to read, list at both type articles. I was like, “I want to do that.” If we can get authors to work together rather than putting out one article about one author and one book. You could put them all together, advertise that and get a little bit more bang for your buck.

That was the beginning of the author network, which is the services that Black Château offers. Listicle articles have always been a core feature of that and to explain this a little bit more and what I mean by listicle. It’s what it sounds like, the best books to give during the holidays, the top ten books to bring with you to the beach this summer, and what does mom want for Mother’s Day? Give her a book she’s going to love. If they are an article and they feature a list of books, it falls under that category. They are tied into seasonal shopping, habits, and in some ways to genre. Coming up in February, books that you’re going to love like focusing a little bit more on relationships and romance books.

That was the core of the author network. We’re still doing them and we’re doing them more than ever now. One of the things that artificial intelligence and AI is doing more of than ever before is utilizing those types of lists. That list appears online, on a website. When we do them, we do them in the Books That Make You. You mentioned my ecosystem. Black Château is the agency. Books That Make You is the consumer face on the platform. Those listicle articles are getting out there.

The groovy thing about it is, with AI, it’s giving more precedence to those types of articles than ever before. We probably know why. AI, whether it’s Grok or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. They are looking at the internet and they are looking for the information. If somebody is searching or looking for a book or talking to their ChatGPT about a book. it’s going to rank the listicle type articles as higher. That’s an innovation that we started with. I’m not saying it wasn’t working. I was working with traditional search and advertising, but now it’s working even better. It’s giving more opportunities for authors than ever before.

It does. We utilize those a lot and some of the outlets that pick them up is pretty incredible, the number of imprints they get. Jared, you’ve worked with traditional, hybrid and Indie publishers where you’re seeing the most experimentation. Where are you now in seeing the most experimentation and innovation? What can we learn from those models that you’re seeing?

The area in which publishing is changing the most is in the audible world. In 2019, audiobooks started outperforming eBooks in terms of sales, production, and consumption and they’ve never looked back. It’s the second most popular platform and it’s also by far the fastest growing platform in terms of production and consumption across the world, let alone in the US. In 2024, it was around $6.5 billion in revenue. In 2025, it will be around $10 billion. It’s projected to be around $30 billion or $40 billion by 2030, which is an enormous jump. Audiobooks sales in the US were about 1% in 2015 and they are about 15% in 2024. It is a huge shift in the way people are accessing and consuming content.

There are a lot of different reasons for that, but most of it comes down to the fact that production of audiobooks has become a lot less expensive. The accessibility is increased. There’s almost zero footprint. There’s no storage and no shipping. Accessibility can be had anywhere and from a consumer standpoint, you can listen to an audiobook 4 to 6 times faster than you can read while doing other things. Everything lines up beautifully for it. I truly believe that that’s where a huge percentage of the industry is going, but it’s how you leverage and how you take advantage of it. That’s where I stick my efforts.

Audiobook Studio Encounter

What I came up with in 2024 and I shouldn’t say I. I’ll tell a short story because it explains where this came from. A few years ago, I was bringing one of my authors to the studio to have her audiobook created. I wasn’t familiar with the studio but it had come highly recommended to me. It turns out that they produce like 85,000 to 95,000 audiobooks. They are one of the biggest studios in the country and they’ve been around for twenty plus years. I handed her off and she was in good hands. I was talking with the other and he said, “What do you do? What are your pain points?” I said, “I’m in book marketing. I’ve been doing it for many years. I see this huge trend shift in audiobooks but the ability to market them is very limited just like it is with print and eBook.”

He said, “Give me some examples,” and I talked about sponsorship sales, bulk order sales, giveaways, blog engagement, customizing your content, being able to set different price points, and all these different things I would love to be able to do that’s just not available. He said, “Let’s build it,” and that’s where Zoundy came from. Zoundy is a cutting-edge audiobook marketing platform that allows individual authors, publishers and hybrid publishers to engage with core audiences on many different levels independent of the retailers.

Maximizing Audiobook Marketing Strategies

It’s just like your print book and your eBook. Your audiobook should be available on all traditional retail platforms as dynamically distributed as possible. From a marketing standpoint, how frustrated are we when we run a Katie P. eBook giveaway and 17,000 people download our eBook but we have no idea who those people are. Now, what if I turned around to you and said, “You can do the same thing but you can get the names and emails of all those 17,000 people?” What if you could go to a conference and say, “I’m going to take my book and use it as a marketing tool for this conference and give my audiobook away for free?”

It costs you nothing to do it to every single person in the audience and everyone who downloads, I get their name and email. What if you were doing a speaking engagement? It could turn around to that speaking engagement and say, “I will record my keynote. Put it at the front end of my audiobook track and give your audience a customized version of my audiobook as part of my speaking fee, or turn around to bloggers.” If you’re a fiction author, turn around bloggers that love mystery books and say, “I will give you 1,000 free copies of the audiobook to get away if you share this with your audience of 1.7 million people by putting up the trailer of my book?” They love that.

You’re on a show and you say, “Thanks for having me on the show. Here’s a link to my audiobook.” The first hundred people that download it get it for free. It’s ongoing marketing and engagement that allows you to sell, put on sale, and leverage your audiobook in so many different ways regardless of genres. I basically was a kid in a candy shop. From a marketing standpoint, I turned around to the guy who’s building this out and said, “Can you make it do this? Can you make it do that? Can you make it do this?” I started using it a year and a half before it even hit the market and it has become a bread and butter for literally every marketing activity I do.

For the individual author, it allows them to take their business model. Take one or two focused marketing activities and say, “I can now fully maximize these.” I’m not just looking to engage with bloggers or with podcasters for single time exposure. I can now build a list. I can now do continuous engagement and leverage those contacts for other aspects of my business model if I’m a non-fiction author. The book is a marketing tool. You can create and build engagement rather than do a one-off one-time activity. That’s where it came from.

Gary McDermott, my AI partner can relate to that, “Can it do this? Can it do that?” He probably rolls his eyes and says, “Be quiet, Juliet.” That’s the other end of it. How many of you folks listen to audiobooks on a regular basis? I do have to say, I listen to the on 1.5, so when you all speak, you speak slowly.

The beauty of audiobooks and no offence to the majority of this audience including myself. The overwhelming majority of audiobook listeners are under the age of 40, which is fantastic from a marketing standpoint. What that means is the key demographic is constantly expanding at this point.

Each of you builds community either through conferences, festivals and networks. What does an innovative author community look like in 2026? How should authors plug into it early and strategically? Desiree, can you take that first?

I love what Jared is doing because he’s building community, getting those email addresses and list building. That’s awesome. What Kathleen is doing especially with the creative and all of those marketing materials and being able to build that out is great. I do feel that at the core that hasn’t changed. Years ago, everybody was talking about email marketing still being King and it is. It’s basically so that you can create your own email list and newsletter. You can use Substack. It’s all the same type of mentality, but being able to reach out to that community and build your ecosystem. You do that through social media and everything else. That’s very key.

Something that I feel a lot of authors and you touched on it too, Juliet, in the beginning. They think that the marketing comes later. To Kathleen’s point, when you’re building that author platform, you’re doing it early on. Even if you don’t have something to give away yet, find something. Maybe there’s a mug that has the theme of what your book is and you can do giveaways to help build up your email list. Do things on social media so that you’re capturing that audience so that you’re creating that ecosystem. When your book is ready to come out, you have that built-in audience there.

A lot of the core elements of email marketing, a community still hold true. On the more modern front if I may, I do feel and here we are. We’re doing this and it’s so great that we can do this on Zoom from all over the world, Juliete and Kathleen. We’re all in different areas of the planet and that’s so cool. I do feel that especially with AI and technology the way it is now. There’s almost like this feeling that we all have, human connection matters. A lot of what we’re focusing on when it comes to community is still finding those key moments or times during the year when we can bring authors into contact with real people.

“Building Community As An Author”

We do that with the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books every April. That happens. We believe in those in real-life events. We’ll help authors get opportunities in front of celebrities and people that are celebrating certain awards like the Golden Globes Awards and then we do the BookFest. Even though you might be in a digital ecosystem like this, I think that building community, getting yourself out there as an author, finding your tribe and your tribe might not just be your readers. It might be your fellow authors too, and I can’t stress enough.

Making sure that you’re doing that early on so that you can utilize that network when it comes time to promote your book. You can say to your fellow authors who you’ve been helping to promote their book and now it comes time to promote your book. Doing that ask isn’t so much like you’re asking a favor. You’ve all been working together up until that point and I’ll add one more thing on that note because I still see authors making this mistake when it comes to doing a bookstore signing. They want to do that bookstore signing because they have this in their head. They are sitting at the desk. They got the stack of books. They are reading the audiences and hanging on every word.

“Planning Successful Bookstore Events”

When they do the bookstore signing, the bookstore is like, “You want to do what? You want to come into our store?” Make sure that if that is your goal and it’s fine to have realistic expectations. The average is seven sales out of books store events. Go into your local books store a year in advance on Kathleen’s calendar. Kathleen, if you don’t have that added, maybe put in there. Go to your local Barnes and Noble or Indie bookstore, or if you have a couple, shake their hands and find out who their manager is. Make them want to eventually have you there.

If you just walk off the street and you say, “I am an author and now I am here to grace you with my presence. Don’t you want to order my book and have me do a bookstore signing?” It costs them money and staffing. They have to order the books. They are going to want to return those books too if they don’t sell. You’re asking them something big. If you want to do that in-person community event with your local community, make sure you are sewing those seeds and networking far in advance so that you can make that dream come a reality.

There’s no better way to hit your pocketbook than with the returns from a book signing because you’ve heard that, seven books is the average. The last time I checked with Barnes and Noble, the minimum they bring in is 100. My author signed two books and 33 of each return. That’s a pretty hefty return bill for an author.

Depending upon how you set it up through ingrown if they are destroying the books. A little tip there. If you’re sitting there after your event, you see that they still have that stock there. You might want to just buy your books. It seems silly but then you have those books and they are not being destroyed because one way or another, you got to pay for them.

Kathleen, how about you, on the building community? You do a lot of conferences through the Writers Network.

Through the Writers and Publishers Network. In fact, like Desiree mentioned, the LA Times Festival Book is an amazing thing. I’m sure that where you are, there are small community festivals where you can get a table. There’s nothing like getting out and meeting your public or meeting your readers. The reason the LA Times is now the largest book festival in the country is that it’s 150,000 people for two days walking through that love books. They are not there for any of the reasons and it’s such a valuable way. I’ve had more people. I’ve been doing it now for many years except for COVID with the Writers and Publishers.

We’ve grown our booth because we’re now an Island. We’ve been given a new space of 600 square feet and people come up. They go around and see what all the authors have. What the authors learn is, who are my readers? What do they appeal to? I’ve had several of them by noon. It starts at like 10 AM. They are there and I see them riding. I’m going, “What?” They go, “I got to change my pitch.” They are asking me different things about my book. They are trying to find a tune to what they are doing. Being able to explain and catch people’s attention is important.

Another thing besides book signing is libraries. I find libraries are still a wonderful place. They will let you talk about your book and you’ll be able to sell them there. The other thing even with a book sign is you have to promote it. The store puts it on their website events page period. That’s it usually. Maybe a small poster. What you have to do is get out a press release about it. It’s one thing that’s a part of what we do with Launch Master is it writes press releases for you. I’ve taken everything I know about press releases and we programmed it. You fill out a sheet and it gives it all the information then you send it out. We have the list for you to send it out to.

Build Community for Author Success

You can get your local community there. I’ve never had a book signing where we’ve had less than twenty books sold because I promote it. I get it in all the calendars. There’s so many online calendars for your area you can go in and put it. Next door the program draws. I was surprised how well that draws. There’s ways to find it because you’re constantly building your community. That is the thing. It’s the community like Desiree said. It’s so important.

The further out you start doing it, go on to Facebook or Instagram and join some of the author groups. Comment on them and get to know who they are. It’s reaching out all over the place besides to everybody you’ve ever met in your life and you have an email for. You can start sending information, too. The other thing is, if you’re using Facebook and Instagram as your personal communication.

You have to set up a separate one for your business because you don’t want everybody seeing the pictures of your kids and grandkids or whatever. You need to have your own. I have Kathleen Kaiser then I have Kathleen Kaiser Author. That’s where I put all of that stuff and what’s going on with my books because I also write. It’s building the community. There’s just a hundred different ways to do it.

Jared, I bet I already know what you’re going to say.

I will bet you might not. I agree with both what Desiree and Kathleen said. Both of those techniques are fantastic. My old business partner was the area marketing manager for Barnes and Noble for a very long time. I’m very familiar with lots of the event techniques and so forth and I agree with all of them. I take a slightly different approach in terms of this. I would say don’t market the book. Don’t make it anything about the book when you’re trying to build community or make it as little about the book as possible.

I believe in continuous targeted authentic engagement with what I described as target readers and target buyers. The first thing I would suggest that any author does and I taught this class called Scalable Bookmarking for authors and publishers. I’ve taught it sixteen times for IBPA, which is the Independent Book Publishers Association. I’m teaching for the 17th time this upcoming January 2026. It’s a six-week course. One of the things I taught is to walk the authors through and this is good for everyone. Sit down and write down the avatar. Describe in detail your target reader and your target buyer. Sometimes they are the same and sometimes they are different. I won’t get into the weeds on that but you’ll realize what I mean when I have you do that.

A very simple example is that the target reader and target buyer for children’s middle-grade fiction is different. The target readers are the middle graders. The target buyer is the parents, grandparents, librarians and so forth. It’s very important to identify your target readers and target buyers to build community. The reason I say that is because you then want to go where they already exist. You want to go where they are when they are not necessarily thinking about buying a book. When we go to Amazon to buy a book, the majority of consumers that go to Amazon to buy a book don’t go there blindly randomly hoping to be inspired by a particular book.

They go there because they’ve heard about something. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. What we want to do before they get to Amazon or any other retail platform is we want to engage with that community in places where they are when they are not looking for books. If you’ve got a children’s book, you should be hanging out on mommy blogs and communicating with the mommy blockers because those are the people that buy the children’s books. You should be hanging out and communicating in an authentic way that has nothing to do with the book itself. You’re not directly always trying to sell them.

I do believe that you need to give to get. I’ll give you an example of a community building campaign I did for an author. She’s a number one New York Times Bestselling Novelist. She has over 200 titles. She’s been writing for 40 years and writes mostly Western fiction, women’s fiction. She didn’t ever do a good job building her community in the sense of capturing those people and being able to engage with them on a regular basis. She sold a lot of books but she didn’t have her own built-in community. I sat down with her and I said, “Let’s talk about who your target buyers and target readers are.”

“Engaging Through Recipes and Activities”

We identified those avatars and we said, “What information are you interested in?” We did a very simple regularly posted social media campaign. Mondays were Monday Musics where she gave me a bunch in advance. No more than 300 words of just different stories from her life. It didn’t matter what they were and as an author, she has tons of them. Wednesdays were Recipe Roundup Wednesdays where we would grab a cool Western recipe or Southern recipe from another site. Tag that site so they loved getting credit for it.

Showed the recipe and said, “If you try this recipe let us know or if you make any changes to it, let us know your favorite version of it.” Fridays were family Friendly Fridays. There were different suggested family activities. If you notice, in none of those did we ever mention her books or sell her books. What we did is we said, “Let us know if you tried this family activity or what your favorite family activity is. Let us know if you try this recipe or what your favorite version of this recipe is.” Whatever the fun was, we asked a question to engage the audience.

Building Community Boosts Book Sales

Community building is about authentic engagement. You’re giving to get so she gave fun, engaging, simple content that didn’t take a lot of prep that we were able to preschedule to post way in advance. She went from about 2,000 to about 50,000 devoted followers in the first year and it’s blown up ever since. What we were able to do was when one of her books came out or we wanted to try to drive reviews or promote a sale on an eBook. When we sprinkled that stuff in, we created a sense of community so they didn’t feel like they were constantly being sold or constantly being marketed to.

My strongest recommendation I can make when it comes to building community is to understand who your target readers and target buyers are, understand where they are and what they are doing when they are not looking to buy books. Engage with them at that level and then you will have devoted followers and authentic loyal people that they can then market the book too. This goes back to what Kathleen said. This is something you start well in advance. You can do it at any point, but the further back you started, the simpler it is to then engage them when you’re about to make the ask.

The problem is, from a marketing standpoint, we don’t do anything out in advance or we don’t take the time to build up these relationships. All we’re doing is making an ask rather than an offer. I believe the most effective way to market and to build community is to constantly give and occasionally make the ask. That’s just my two cents.

Jared, I couldn’t agree more. We tell our clients 12 to 24 months in advance to start building because you’re building trust and trust doesn’t happen overnight.

I do want to say on that point, a lot of people are probably like, “I already have my book. I don’t have the 12 to 24 months lead time.” That’s okay. Start now. Start building and you’ll still be able to take advantage of that. One of the biggest misconceptions is that books become stale. Think of all the great classic books that we read. There’s very few stories that become stale. There’s very few books that become stale. Even if your book was published 2 years or 10 years ago, if the content is still worthy then you can start the marketing, the engagement and the community building for that at any time.

If you could give authors one mindset shift about book marketing and innovation, something that would change how they show up for the next five years, what would that be? Let’s start with Kathleen.

I would say in the heart of it and we’ve mentioned this. Desiree covered it, I believe. Even though it’s old fashioned, it’s still getting emails and putting an email list. Emails are still a trusted resource. If you don’t have on your website a way for them to sign up, learn about what you’re doing or whatever and then try other activities where you’re giving something away like Jared just did. They email you and you’re building your list. I still think they are still basic and to me, emails are a basic marketing tool.

Jared, how about you?

I would say the most powerful tool any author, any publisher can put in their arsenal is a business model. One of the biggest mistakes I see authors make is not treating himself like a business. I try to break it down very simply for all authors. I say, “Your business model should answer three simple questions. What do you plan to create? How do you plan to deliver it? What value do you want to capture from it?” Three very simple questions that most authors don’t take the time to answer because the three marathons and we talked about this earlier is, I write, I publish, I market. They are exhausted by the time they get to marketing and that’s the part that falls off.

Three Questions To Guide Success

Those three questions are magical, what do I plan to create, how do I plan to deliver it, and what value do I want to capture. You can apply that to the book initially or the services around the book, speaking engagements, whatever services or products you plan to create. More importantly, you can then apply it to the marketing side of it. A lot of us stay busy in marketing because busy feels productive when it’s not. Apply those three questions to any proposed marketing activity like bookstore signings, blogging engagement activities or press releases. It doesn’t matter.

Whatever the marketing activity is, apply those three questions and it will not only tell you whether or not that activity makes sense for you to do but will also keep you in check if the activity isn’t working on what shift you need to make. I would say from an innovation standpoint, apply those three simple questions to each aspect, the creation of the book, the marketing and the publishing of the book and the marketing of the book. It will be a game-changer and you will be figuring out how to effectively reach your audiences.

That is such a great answer. I will tell you, Gary and I are developing along the sciences, a book marketing, the steps that have to be done. Quite frankly, when we look at authors, a lot of them skip steps. They just go right out with, “You’re aware of my product.” They don’t realize that we have no idea who you are. We’re addressing part of that science of it as well. Desiree, what about you?

The human factor is more important than ever. We did some research along with Hugo, if you’re familiar with the survey. They do polls and we did that back in July 2024. Within the industry, within conversations like this, authors are often wondering things like, “Should I use AI? Publishers are trying to put AI images into books and all of this. We can fight back and forth all day long whether it’s appropriate to use AI to help you write a book.

AI’s Role In Reader Fulfillment

What we wanted to know is what the consumer thought of it and not even the average reader. The survey surveyed 1,000 average people and from there, we parcel whether or not they read, what books read, etc. The real interesting thing is that the average person is going to feel less fulfilled. If they read a book and they feel it was too much influenced or written by AI. I see and I hear authors out there discovering this wonderful thing. It is wonderful and it can help you do a lot but I would caution you to be in tune with what the consumer wants.

Jared was talking about profile and creating avatars for who your reader is. Think about it, does that reader of yours going to feel more or less fulfilled? We even went as far, Juliet. We parsed out the types of Health that AI might help with a book and explained briefly the difference between happy editing, ideation, outlining, and spell check. One can argue all the long that spell check has been around forever and it’s AI. It was interesting not only what the different segments of the audience thought. In other words, Gen Z, Millennials, X and Boomers, but then also how they felt about AI like never being used at all.

Being in tune with what consumers want and how technology is moving at the right next speed, how you can utilize it responsibly. I know we hear that a lot, the responsible use of AI and using it as a tool but keep in mind what it is that your reader wants. It’s interesting. There are some readers that are more open to it than others and that’s based on the types of book, the genres, and their demographic. I would say think like a marketer in that sense. That’s marketing. That’s the beginning of marketing.

It’s when you are surveying and you’re trying to figure out what consumer buying habits are and what the actual audience or the consumer is looking for. Keep that in mind and take a cue from Jared over there when you’re putting together their avatar and see if they are the kind of reader that’s going to respond to the type of book that you’re producing based on how you, as an author and maybe even your publisher. Maybe you’re illustrating or your book cover designer. All of that, how they might be using modern day technology to produce that book.

That’s a great point. Early on, I read a book that this guy bragged about. It was, “I used AI to write this whole thing.” You could tell he used AI to write that whole thing. It wasn’t a big revelation. When you use AI, you have to go back and make sure that it’s your voice and the information is correct because AI isn’t always right. It’s a garbage in and garbage out system. I want to open it up for a few questions. Do any of you guys have questions? If not, I’ll just go right into another question.

I was wondering. I’ve been considering using a website that works with a lot of book clubs and for a fairly hefty fee, they will feature your book in their newsletter and you can do a book club giveaway. It’s always so difficult to figure out whether these things are worth the investment or whether they are a little bit on the scammy side. Do any of you have ideas about best ways to reach book clubs?

Let me start off by saying this is a great example of applying those three questions, create, deliver and capture value to find out whether it’s scammy or worth it. You say to yourself, “What am I creating? I’m creating this opportunity to reach book clubs. How am I delivering it? I’m delivering it through this third-party service. What value am I capturing?”

“Effective Book Promotion Strategies”

In theory, the one piece of value that they are claiming your capturing is exposure to their audience but is that enough to be a value to you? Do you get the names and emails they reach out to? Probably not. Are you getting repetitive outreach to them? Maybe or maybe not because what we can save from a marketing standpoint and we know this when we watch advertisements or anything else. It usually says 6 to 8 outreaches for someone to take a definitive action.

If you’re not getting that repetitive outreach, if you’re not getting their emails and you’re getting one time mentioned in the newsletter along with a bunch of other mentions. You’re probably going to get lost in the shuffle to the majority of those people anyway. By simply applying those three questions and knowing what value you’re capturing from the activity. I don’t know how much they are charging, but it’s going to tell you probably whether or not it’s worthwhile.

To answer the second part of your question. There’s a great way and it always takes time. I need good activity. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably will, but any good activity usually takes time. A great way to reach book clubs is through a library. Almost every public library hosts multiple book clubs like different book reading groups or anything else. Whether they host them digitally or they have them in the library. I have a list of over a thousand libraries that hosts both adult book clubs and children book clubs.

I reach out to the library and say, “I have this latest book. I would love to reach out.” In a lot of cases, they will put me in touch with the person who runs the book club at their library. The library host but there’s a book club president or what have you. One of the best ways to aggressively reach book clubs is through libraries. I would say this to you. If you took the time to find a hundred of them yourself, versus going through a company like this. You’re probably going to have more success. You’re going to have created your own contacts and you’re going to be able to reuse those contacts again and again.

I just want to add. There are some book club emails going around. I’ve gotten three of my own books. The best thing you can do is go find their digital footprint. I knew right away they were a scam because I couldn’t find the sender’s name anywhere. I couldn’t find a footprint for their company. I asked them if they wanted to be a vendor for our company to fill out paperwork and they disappeared. All three of them. I said, “As a publisher, I’d love to talk to you about that.” Do your due diligence on them as well.Anybody else on that?

I have two questions. One is, has anyone had experience with TikTok, Booktalk or Substack as media outreaches? The other is, Jared, what point do you recommend to put in the pre-sales because pre-sales is very important on knowing how a book is going to do?

TikTok Or Strategic Book Marketing?

This comes up a lot with just social media in general, too. I generally will say and even way back when TikTok was first coming up. If you want to be on TikTok, sure. That’s fine as long as you want to be a dancing and singing author. Is that something that you want to do? Be aware of not only TikTok but whatever the platform is. If you want to be on it and make that a place to find your community, that’s great. Make sure that is you and you want to put in the time, the energy and all of that. When you talk about Substack or building email lists, going back to that whole conversation.

There’s two ways to look at this and indeed, you should start twelve months in advance building your list, building your community, your Substack, your email list or whatever it is that you’re doing. Also keep in mind that what you’re doing by working with marketing for or with whether it’s a book club group or with getting reviews on NetGalley, is your tapping into networks that are already there. Strategically, the thing to do is ask yourself, “Do I want to be on TikTok, Booktalk, or do I want to reach somebody who has a network and is already affiliated with people who are on TikTok because I feel my book is a TikTok or a Booktalk book.”

That could be finding reviewers that are already on there. Influencers who are on TikTok and they are singing and dancing about lots of different books because they’ve got 20,000 followers. Whereas, if you’re suddenly on TikTok, you’re going to be building and building for a while. Think of how much time and energy it is going to take you to build up and then you’re going to get 20,000 followers so that you can sell one book. Whereas that influencer who’s been on TikTok all this time and is talking about books and they can move volumes of books quickly and easily might be more bang for your buck.

If you love it, if you enjoy it, if it’s your thing to be on that platform then go for it. If nothing else strategically, you might want to do a little bit of both or see where you land. If you’re tying into somebody else’s community, that seems to be a theme here and their network. Being able to do that is probably going to get you a lot farther than doing it yourself. If you’re doing it yourself and it’s what you love, you’re sharing recipes, it ties into your book’s theme, and things like that then you have the best of both worlds.

Try saying Booktalk, TikTok fast. Kathleen, do you want to add something before we move to Jared for the second question?

Let’s move to Jared.

I do want to mention I completely agree with what Desiree is saying. It’s very important because she just said something that is incredibly valuable. There’s internal marketing and external marketing. To me, internal marketing is what you’re doing from your own platforms outward. External marketing is slipstreaming off of the following and efforts that someone else has already built up. There’s a balance between the two. If you’re starting from scratch as an author, you want to put more emphasis on the external marketing and that will slowly build your internal stuff.

If you put the majority of emphasis on your internal from the get-go and as much smaller percentage on the external. You’re going to spend the majority of time building an audience rather than marketing to an existing audience. Desiree is spot on. From the pre-sale standpoint, I know it’s going to sound repetitive but it comes down to your business model of when you want to do pre-sales or if you want to do pre-sales. Part of that business model is what you’re publishing part of your business model and distribution is.

18 “Pre-Sales Strategy For Authors”

If you’re doing traditional distribution with an offset print run, then understanding what your presale numbers are is incredibly important because it will help you determine what your initial print run is going to be. That plays into the overall business model aspect of it. If you’re doing print on demand then generating pre-sales is not important at all. It has no relevance to determining offset print runs of books. That being said, I always get a question of, when should I start doing podcasts? When should I start doing blog engagement? When should I start doing this activity? I always hear people say 12 months in advance or 6 months or 3 months in advance.

To a very simple answer and this comes down to the pre-sale question when create, deliver and capture value. When that activity connects it captures value based on whatever your call to action is going to be for that activity. That’s where it should start. Pre-sale should start as a tool for your marketing activities. If you have the opportunity to get on blogs ahead of your publication date where you have the opportunity to have an incredible blogging engagement or connect with a social media influencer or so forth but there’s no action that the listener or the viewer can take. At that point in time, it’s a waste of activity.

Having your book up for pre-sales is a great thing to have to drive people towards. Pre-sales should happen based on, one, your business model, printing, offset print run pod and two, the marketing activities are doing. Do they support the marketing activities and the overall goal of those activities? It’s one of those like Cornerstone things people can add in place.

I keep telling authors of companies, “I’ve done 50 shows and I didn’t sell any books.” I’m like, “What was your call to action? Was your book available for sale yet?” “No.” I’m like, “People are not going to come back six months later and you’re your books.” I would say pre-sale should happen in time with whatever your business model timeline is.

We had just about enough time to go to all three of you. How can we get a hold of you if somebody wants more or wants to talk to you about your services or your platform? Kathleen, do you want to go first?

First off, this has been fun. I always learn something when I’m on these things because this is such a complex world and we all focus in different areas. You can get a hold of me at Kathleen@KathleenKaiser.com. That’s my email. My website is KathleenKaiser.com. If you want to learn more about Launch Master, that is ProBookLaunch.com.

It’s Jared@StrategiesPR.com. Anyone can reach out. Feel free if you got any follow-up questions. If you’re interested in the audiobook marketing platform, you can just go to Zoundy.com and take a look at it. If you email me, I can send you a promo code to use it or you can use BMP25.

Desiree, how about you?

“Books, Events, And Resources”

Thank you, Juliet, for doing this and Jared and Kathleen. I always learned so much from others when I’m on like this. Thank you. This has been so much fun. You can find me at BlackChâteauEnterprises.com. If you hit the let’s talk button, the contact us, that goes to me. It goes to other people too but I do see all of those. That’s probably the best way. If you’re interested in the BookFest, that one’s easy too, TheBookFest.com. We have the next BookFest coming up the Spring of 2026 as well as the next BookFest Awards.

If you’re interested in Books That Make You, that’s our consumer-facing brand and may I just say if you’re a writer, you should be a reader. Get into the skin of what the reader experience is. Sign up for our newsletter. It’s won a Webby Award and that’s where we do a lot of promotions for our authors and listicles and things that I told you about. That’s simply BooksThatMakeYou.com and all of our platforms are on social media between Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

That’s what I love about the BookFest. They have a reader day and they have an author day. The Reader Day is pretty important as well. Thank you so much, everyone, for coming on, speaking and showing up. If you missed part of it, you can go to Promote Profit Publish. You can get a replay there or over on YouTube. Thank you very much.

Important Links

• Kathleen Kaiser
• Desireé Duffy on LinkedIn
• Jared Kuritz on LinkedIn
• Black Château
• Books That Make You
• The BookFest®
• Writers and Publishers Network
• STRATEGIES Public Relations
• Zoundy
• IBPA
• NetGalley
• ProBookLaunch
• Kathleen@KathleenKaiser.com
• ProBookLaunch.com
• Jared@StrategiesPR.com
• JKuritz@StrategiesPR.com

About Desiree Duffy

Duffy is an advocate for spreading stories. Her expansive marketing, event production, broadcast, and public relations background, mixed with her passion for storytelling, led her to found the multi-award-winning, full-service marketing and public relations firm Black Château in 2016, Books That Make You in 2018, and The BookFest® in 2020.

She is the executive producer for events including The BookFest®, the annual Beach-Bound Book Bash, Jingle Books, and was the license-holder and lead organizer for TEDxResedaBlvd in 2019. She hosts and is the executive producer for the Books That Make You Show. She has programed panels and placed speakers for a wide array of writers’ conferences and organizations including: the Alliance for Women in Media, Digital Hollywood, The Paley Center for Media, IWOSC, LosCon, the Twin Cities Book Festival, Women in Business, WriterCon, and others.

Duffy is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS); on the board of directors for the Writers and Publishers Network; past-president and advisory board member of the Alliance for Women in Media in Southern California; and member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Women’s National Book Association. Black Château holds corporate memberships with the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA).

Duffy is a graduate of Marian University and Santa Clarita’s College of the Canyons. She holds Bachelor of Science degrees in English and communication, and an associate degree in art and in marketing, and certificates in ecommerce business and entrepreneurship. Desireé Duffy spends her time between Southern California, Oklahoma, and everywhere bookish events and booklovers can be found around the world.

About Kathleen Kaiser

Kathleen Kaiser’s journey through the dynamic landscapes of marketing, technology, and the arts spans over five decades. Beginning as a music journalist and transitioning to publicity, Kathleen has left her mark on the most exhilarating industries of her generation.

Her career has been a remarkable evolution from the electrifying world of rock and roll in the late 60s and 70s to the transformative digital and internet revolution of the late 80s, 90s, and 00s. She is President of the Writers & Publishers Network, a national literary nonprofit, and a frequent conference speaker. Throughout her career, Kathleen’s words have graced publications in the United States, Japan, the UK, and Italy.

In addition, she is the author of five published books, four dedicated to the music industry, a novel, and a collection of plays. She launched the engaging podcast, “Talking Book Publishing with Kathleen Kaiser,” in March 2021, now co-hosted with poet and book marketer Adanna Moriarty, with whom she is co-founder of ProBookLaunch, a new book marketing assistant tool.

About Jared Kuritz

Jared Kuritz is a publishing and marketing innovator with more than two decades of experience working with traditional, hybrid, and indie publishers and authors all over the world. Jared is the president and CEO of STRATEGIES Public Relations and the CSO and CMO of Zoundy, a cutting-edge audiobook marketing platform. Learn more at strategiespr.com and zoundy.com.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

• superbrandpublishing.com
• Promote, Profit, Publish on YouTube
• Follow Juliet on LinkedIn
• Take the Quiz!