Getting word out

Seeing as it's only six weeks until the publication of The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide, I've been on a mission to get word out about it. It's a bit of a challenge not to sound like blatantly advertising even though I am blatantly advertising, but the good thing is I have a lot of followers on Facebook and Twitter who will be genuinely interested in the book, so I don't feel too much like a door-to-door salesman.

With that in mind I've set up a Facebook page for the book here. So far it's attracted a couple of dozen likes, which is heartening.

I've also started to send out two or three tweets a day with choice quotes from the book, especially from those with Twitter accounts in the hope of attracting the odd retweet. Guardian theatre critic Lyn Gardner kindly did that very thing with the first tweet of my one-man campaign this morning.

In addition to that I've been sending emails to contributors and press officers asking them to spread the word. New York director John Clancy, who's quoted in the book, gave a nice mention on his Scrappy Jack's World blog.

Normally I'd say I wouldn't expect any of this to change anything over night, but the book's ranking on Amazon has shot up. It might not sound such a big deal to have made it into the top 50,000, but only a couple of days ago, the book was at 469,854 and an increase in 400,000 ain't bad by my reckoning. No idea how that translates as sales, but for a book that isn't out yet, I can't complain.