The basic starting point should be that your book is good. You believe this to be true and that is why it has been published. Now ‘the only thing’ you have to do is to find your readers who will spread the news of the wonderful book you have written by word of mouth. How can you achieve this?
1. Use social media and be yourself. Write down your opinion on things, post excerpts from your work, show people what you’re like. The power of one’s personality is becoming increasingly important, so make sure your showing your true self and not some ‘invented character,’ because sooner or later, deception will be exposed.
2. Meet your future readers. Meet them at book clubs, schools, libraries, and take part in the organization of these meetings. Don’t try to sell books, don’t read from your book, but instead, talk to the people who came, show yourself, talk about your novel, but don’t try and pitch it, because that is ‘literally’ not your job. Your task is to show yourself, to ‘sell yourself.’ Get people interested in you and your work. Appear at all meetings possible.
3. Be on good terms with bloggers and journalists. Don’t get offended if they are critical of your work. Don’t be concerned with this at all. Don’t react to negative criticism, don’t defend yourself, don’t retaliate, because it will only make things worse. Accept the fact that not everyone has the same taste, and so your book can’t please everyone either. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you must know that if you argue with bloggers, critics, or commenters, your will NEVER come out on top. It’s much most elegant if you just go on with your work, and if someone asks for an interview or a guest post, be accommodating.
4. Create your own web page if you haven’t already. Post excerpts from your works and host lots of games where people have the chance to win a copy of your book. Free books can spread knowledge about you, so be generous.
5. Only very few people are able to achieve a breakthrough from one moment to the next. Usually outsiders forget that even these authors have many, many years of work behind their seemingly fast, or ‘instant’ success. So don’t be impatient. Write, write, write, and build slowly, but surely. If your works are good, sooner or later you will be discovered, but make sure you do all you can to get yourself noticed, and follow the advice I mentioned above.
Bangkok: a sizzling, all-embracing, exotic city where the past and the present intertwine. It’s a place where anything can happen… and anything really does happen. The paths of seven people cross in this metropolis. Seven seekers, for whom this city might be a final destination. Or perhaps it is only the start of a new journey? A successful businessman; a celebrated supermodel; a man who is forever the outsider; a young mother who suddenly loses everything; a talented surgeon, who could not give the woman he loved all that she desired; a brothel’s madam; and a charming young woman adopted at birth. Why these seven? Why did they come to Bangkok now, at the same time? Do chance encounters truly exist?
Bangkok Transit is a Central European best-seller. The author, Eva Fejos, a Hungarian writer and journalist, is a regular contributor to women’s magazines and is often herself a featured personality. Bangkok Transit was her first best-seller, which sold more than 100,000 copies and is still selling. Following the initial publication of this novel in 2008, she went on to write twelve other best-sellers, thus becoming a publishing phenomena in Hungary According to accounts given by her readers, the author’s books are “therapeutic journeys,” full of flesh and blood characters who never give up on their dreams. Many readers have been inspired to change the course of their own lives after reading her books. “Take your life into your own hands,” is one of the important messages the author wishes to convey.
Try it for yourself, and let Eva Fejos whisk you off on one of her whirlwind journeys… that might lead deep into your own heart.
About Eva Fejos, the author of Bangkok Transit
- Eva Fejos is a Hungarian writer and journalist.
She:
- has had 13 best-selling novels published in Hungary so far.
- Bangkok Transit is her first best-seller, published in 2008.
- has won several awards as a journalist, and thanks to one of her articles, the legislation pertaining to human egg donation was modified, allowing couples in need to acquire donor eggs more easily.
- spends her winters in Bangkok.
- likes novels that have several storylines running parallel.
- visited all the places she’s written about.
- spent a few days at an elephant orphanage in Thailand; and has investigated the process of how Thai children are put up for adoption while visiting several orphanages.
- founded her own publishing company in Hungary last year, where she not only publishes her own books, but foreign books too, hand-picked by her.
- Her books published in Hungary thus far are:
Till Death Do Us Part (Holtodiglan) | Bangkok Transit | Hotel Bali | Chicks (Csajok) | Strawberries for Breakfast (Eper reggelire) | The Mexican (A mexikói) | Cuba Libre | Dalma | Hello, London | Christmas in New York (Karácsony New Yorkban) | Caribbean Summer (Karibi nyár) | Bangkok, I Love You (Szeretlek, Bangkok) | Starting Now – the new edition ofTill Death Do Us Part (Most kezdődik) | Vacation in Naples – the English version will be published in summer, 2014 (Nápolyi vakáció)
To be published in spring of 2014: I Waited One Hundred Nights (Száz éjjel vártam)
Genre – Women’s Fiction, Contemporary
Rating – PG-13
