How to Promote Your Book, No Publicist Needed

I first met Dan Kleftstad at WNIJ, the NPR affiliate station in my town. I was visiting the station, and he was the current Morning Edition host, but he was also on his way out. He was retiring from the station. He had published his horror novel Fiona’s Guardians in 2020 and was in the process of promoting it. Interested to see how his book promotion went, I connected with him on social media. 

This year, Kleftstad published DIY Book Promo, a guide for authors who want to promote their self-published (or traditionally published) books without having to invest a lot of money. I remember leaving him a Facebook comment saying something along the lines of, “I write about books a lot, and I was about to type up a comment asking you to connect me to your publicist before I realized it went against the spirit of your book.” One laugh reaction and a couple months later, I scheduled an interview. 

I spoke to Kleftstad on Zoom about his idea for the book, the process of publishing it and the ins and outs of self-promotion. Before I could even ask my first question, he took a screenshot of us in conversation to promote on his social media. 

Q&A with Dan Kleftstad

(This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.) 

SUCCESS: Tell me how your public radio career helped you learn how to promote your book.

Dan Kleftstad: In commercial and public radio, you’re constantly promoting what’s coming up next. I’m already radio-host primed to say what’s coming up, keep you listening, keep you paying attention to me. 

But there are other things I picked up along the way. My station invested in training for our newsroom that was provided by the Knight Foundation: how to take a photo, how to promote [your stories] on social media. This was back in 2012 and was actually kind of new at the time for journalists. So I had professional development training, but it was also my radio career. 

S: So you retired from public radio and immediately threw yourself into promoting your book?

DK: This is a two-part answer. One, Fiona’s Guardians came out in 2020 while I was still at WNIJ. So that became a part-time job promoting [it]. For a total of three years, every single moment when I wasn’t asleep or eating or talking with my wife was spent promoting the book. When I retired on May 1, 2023, my wife and I moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and I had a little more time. So what did I do? I hit the ground running and  immediately started introducing myself to authors in Kentucky, meeting bookstore owners, talking to podcast hosts and people who run the festivals and conventions. 

Then, after writing several articles on DIY book promo, I got an invitation to promote it at the Imaginarium Convention, and that prompted me to write a book. My publisher and I worked really quickly over the Christmas holiday to get it out. And now I’ll have a book that goes along with the presentation I’ll be doing. 

S: What advice would you give to readers who want to promote their books? 

DK: Try to get a review. That’s actually the first thing you should do. Get a really good review from a respectable source, and then use that review as your calling card when you pitch bookstores, when you pitch media. I also placed an emphasis on obtaining media interviews—just like this one! 

And also co-branding. Once you’re working with a bookstore that you like, you’re co-branding with them. You’re constantly sharing social media pictures of them holding your book. Booksellers are a big part of it. 

S: How is it partnering with bookstores? 

DK: You might be surprised to know indie bookstores have been expanding within an hour’s drive of my house in Louisville. I know of three bookstores that opened since last August. Love it. When I was in Illinois, several stores opened during the pandemic. This is a surprising, and I would say counterintuitive, development. But indie bookstores have been doing really well. 

It’s important to remember that if you’re an author—and especially if you’re a local author—if you connect with your local indie bookstore, they are more likely to shelve your book and display it on the shelf, which is really important. 

S: Tell me what takeaway you would want your readers to have.

DK: If you’re going to be successful at promoting your book or authoring in general, you have to have a book that you really believe in that represents you at your best. That’s the book that’s most likely to get that all-important review.

Photo courtesy rospoint/Shutterstock.com