RC: As you were not backed by a publishing house, how did you promote the book?
LN: I promoted it by having a Web site professionally designed by Glacierdesign.com where I posted the book and created links to the predominant booksellers that sold it directly to the Idiot Girls product page. I also created a press kit with a sell sheet, excerpts, a bio and so on, but I only sent a few of those out locally to get radio and television spots. I posted my Web site and a small blurb about the book on Web sites that would draw the audience of young, progressive girls and women, and I used Sponsored Results through Amazon.com. Sadly, the program was discontinued last month despite my repeated letters to shamelessly beg Amazon to keep it. There, you could essentially buy an "advertisement" spot by selecting search terms (such as Sex and the City or J.K. Rowling) and every time someone ran a search on that term, your product would pop up in a sidebar with a cover image and a short blurb that also linked to your product page. It was a wonderful program. Through their tracking system, I was able to tell which search terms worked well for me and which ones didn't by the number of hits my product page got. It was a great way to reach readers who would already have an interest in the genre by choosing book titles and authors that were similar to myself and Idiot Girls. It was like a chess game, there was a lot of strategy and "trial by fire" involved. Monetarily, it was an investment, sometimes at $100 a week, but it really paid off for me. Through Sponsored Results, I was able to spread the word about my book, which eventually hit numbers 7 and 12 on the humor and short story bestseller lists, and an overall high sales ranking of 680 from my initial 1,500,000. As I was hoping, it wasn't only people in Phoenix who bought the book. I've recieved letters from almost every state in the country, including Puerto Rico.