BUZZ YOUR BOOK: The Interactive Workbook

The Buzz series contains 13 self-promotion workbooks, and this neat, easy-to-navigate entry is aimed at already published authors who wish to increase their book sales. Other titles in the series are for unpublished and self-published authors, genre writers and people who want to promote products other than books. Little of the material e-publishing pros Rose and Clegg offer here is specific to book promotion. Most of it deals with getting articles published, giving speeches and getting Web traffic. The authors advise against spam, so it's hard to justify their suggestions to send chain e-mails urging the recipient to pass them along, to plug the book on unrelated listservs and to target friends of friends who work in the media. This contradiction results from a book written for two types of people: those who "love the process of writing," "would write even if [it] never got published" and would pay their publisher instead of the other way around; and those who write to make a "good living." The first type has little need for self-promotion, but could do it sincerely; the second is hawking a product to make money, which, if done under false pretenses, has obvious repercussions. The book contains several hundred ideas of varying quality in a relentlessly upbeat style that can inspire and energize. But serious self-promoters will do better with Irving Rein's classic High Visibility, and creative people with a product to sell will find better advice in Maurice Kanbar's Secrets from an Inventor's Notebook.

FYI:The reviewed copy was in Adobe Acrobat format, readable on almost all personal computers and some handheld readers. However, the extensive hyperlinks make this book most appropriate for a personal computer with a fast, continuous Internet connection.