How useful is a website for promoting your book?
The jury is still out for my co-author Rudi Raab and me [Julie Freestone] and our book Stumbling Stone, but we’re having a good time posting details about book events, blogs, photos and reviews to the website (we launched it about a month before the novel was published).
Stumbling Stone is a novel, but it’s based on our true life stories—a Jewish reporter meets a German-born Berkeley cop who was born eight days after World War II ended in Europe. She wants to know what his family did during the war—he doesn’t know much—and they embark upon a quest to find answers.
To write the book, we used diaries, letters, interviews and our imagination. Not all of the material we had made it into the book and the book has no photos, so the website is a great spot for sharing the real documents that provided the foundation for the novel. We have a blog where we describe our memories about the post-war period (I lived in Germany after the war so I have some too) and even some from readers.
We use Facebook to “drive” visitors to the website and as a way for people to share information and help create a buzz.
We’ve done a number of book events and have two coming up: August 22, 1 p.m. at Once Upon a Canvas in Benicia and August 30, 7 p.m. at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Some of the photos on our website—along with others, form the foundation for our book events.
And of course, there are more details about the book and upcoming events on the website stumbling-stone.com. Send us comments about what you think.
