Making the Most Out of Your Research — to Promote Your Book
Making the Most Out of Your Research — to Promote Your Book
By Julie Tollefson
You’re finished writing your book, now what do you do with the tons of research you’ve amassed in the process? Follow Lori Rader-Day’s example: Switch hats from author to promoter-in-chief and transform all those details that brought your story to life into hooks to interest future readers.
1) Collect! Collect! Collect! — Lori’s new book, Death at Greenway (out October 12), based on the true events of a group of children evacuated during the Blitz of World War II to Agatha Christie’s holiday estate, required “layers of research,” she says, but “it’s important for people to know that I am not a researcher. I’m not a person who likes to prepare. I don’t like instruction manuals. Really anything that slows me down from getting started on what I want to do — writing — is not really how I like to spend my time.”
To accurately depict 1941 wartime England, though, she immersed herself in books, primary sources, genealogy databases, internet searches, census records, and Agatha Christie’s novels. She traveled to England. Twice. During her last trip, she spent three days living in Agatha Christie’s Greenway House. All of that effort resulted in a richly detailed story and a collection of anecdotes, photos, and experiences that are now the foundation of her promotional efforts.
“There’s so much fun stuff to share. I might bore people for years on this book,” she says. “My advice would be to think about the story from all different angles. I needed to see it from the house, the landscape, the people who lived there. Gather it all.”
And take good notes, she says. “You’re going to need them.”
2) Tap into your inspiration — Whether your story is set in 1940s England, the Gilded Age in New York City, or contemporary rural Missouri, look to the people or places or sources that ignited your interest as you plan promotional pieces related to your book.
“Find those notes to yourself or the file you saved on your laptop or pictures that you took when you were on the ground somewhere,” Lori says. Show readers pictures of the national park your protagonist visited or the corner where you were standing when inspiration struck or a historical photo you used for reference. Give a shout-out to a real place or to the librarians who helped you.
“Anyone who helped you or inspired the story or helped feed your ideas — now you can turn around and say thank you,” says Lori. “All of that makes nice social media.”
3) Share your process — Your audience never tires of hearing what it’s like to be a writer. They love to get a glimpse from the outside into how a novel is put together.
“Go back to your inspiration. Go back to all the work you did to get it written. The same tidbits and pictures and objects that inspired you can be used to engage with your audience,” Lori says. “You get to acknowledge that you didn’t do it all on your own, that there’s a world out there and it helped you write the book.”
Lori researched before she started writing and as she was writing. Because she wanted Death at Greenway steeped in as much fact as possible, she rewrote passages and characters when she learned something new.
“As I was researching, I would find information that I was looking for, but also information that I just had no way to know that I needed,” she says. The backstory of Greenway House’s butler, the regional legend of the Wisht man, how the river that flows below the house and the residents along the valley were affected by war — all were important parts of the story learned through research.
Now, she’s documenting the process for subscribers to her newsletter. “However many issues that takes, because I want it somewhere,” she says. “I thought, ‘I am so interested in this book, maybe other people are, too.’”
4) Don’t be afraid to share other people’s stuff — Research doesn’t necessarily end when the book is finished. Lori keeps an eye out for bits and pieces that she can transform into a Tweet or Instagram post. Google alerts for “Agatha Christie,” “Greenway House,” and “Death at Greenway” occasionally turn up such neat stories as a profile of Agatha Christie as one of the earliest people to bring surfing to England or a notice that a house she owned has hit the market in the present day. When Lori saw that the house Christie owned with her husband, Max Mallowan, in Oxford was up for sale, she linked to the story and asked followers to pitch in for a group purchase. “Not exactly on point,” she says, “but I didn’t have to create it.”
5) Reflect on who you are, or want to be, as an author — Death at Greenway, Lori’s sixth book, is a treasure trove for promotion. But her first three books (“while I loved them”) tackled difficult themes. Campus violence. Sexual trafficking. Domestic violence.
“I did talk about them a little, but they weren’t the friendly face I wanted to put on myself,” she says.
Her recent books — The Lucky One (true crime), Under a Dark Sky (dark sky protection and photography), and now Death at Greenway — have been a “soft marketing” dream.
“It’s not just ‘here’s my book,'” Lori says. “It’s ‘here’s something I’m interested in.’ It was so fun to talk about light pollution and where to find dark skies where you live. I didn’t have to be an expert in the topic to share resources from those who were or to share gorgeous photos from dark sky parks or posts about the successes of true amateur sleuths like those in The Lucky One. I’m still interested in all the things I wrote about, so I’m still following all those accounts — and, of course, I still want people to discover my backlist.”