As some of you may know, Angela (my wife and business partner) just released a book on our battle with the local hospital and our Ob/Gyn over their mandatory C-section policy when we were preparing for the arrival of Mason, our fifth child, in 2006.

The book not only covers our experiences, but those of several other women seeking what is know in medical parlance as a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean).

Among my many duties, I’m charged with developing and executing the promotional plan for this book.

I’ve written extensively about how to promote online, and often offer free advice privately to BookLocker authors. But I thought it would be useful if I walked through all the steps I go through when promoting, using a real world example. So over the next several weeks, I’m going to explain how I’m tackling the project of promoting Angela’s new book.

Lesson 1 - What We’re Selling

The first thing you need to do is understand what you are selling and why it is unique. Otherwise, you have no foundation from which to explain it to other people.

So in the case of our book, the issue is repeat cesarean sections (or c-sections). It is common practice in many hospitals to automatically give a woman a c-section if she’s had one before. While there are sound medical reasons why a woman might need a c-section, cutting a woman open just because that was the way her previous delivery was done is not a legitimate one. In fact, it can be significantly more dangerous for mother and baby - due to the risks of surgery - to have a c-section versus a vaginal birth, assuming the pregnancy has no complications (the situation with most pregnancies).

Angela’s book discusses all this from the perspective of 22 different mothers, almost all of whom met resistance from their respective doctors when raising the question as to the need for a repeat c-section. It is these real life stories that make the book unique.

Now that we have a good handle on what we are selling, it is time to pull together the material we’ll need to sell the book to the public.

Lesson 2 - Marketing Material

Here is the list of stuff I have in my notes to create and/or gather for Angela’s book:

+ Descriptive copy for the book page on BookLocker.com
+ Chapter excerpt (in PDF)
+ Cover graphic
+ Bio of Angela
+ Picture of Angela
+ Angela’s chapter in the book (in text format)
+ 25 copies of the book for reviewers
+ Extra editorial info to add to the Amazon and Barnes and Noble book pages
+ Blog

A side note here on the blog. I’ve already laid out my rational for a blog versus a web site here, in case you are curious as to why I went that route. We were fortunate that we created a blog a year ago to chronicle our own experiences with this issue - making it easy to convert over as a site for the book. (The blog is here: http://vbac.angelahoy.com/). Where we made a mistake is in not keeping the blog going after Mason was born last June. It would be a much more powerful promotional tool had we kept posting as Angela wrote the book.

In the next installment I’ll discuss how to use this material.