It’s all about self-promotion for book authors and illustrators!

Hello and welcome to LITTLE RED HEN, a website for authors and illustrators to share creative ideas on marketing your work and getting media attention in today’s competitive publishing world.

My name is Dianne Ochiltree, and I’m an author of books for the very young. (See my author website at www.ochiltreebooks.com for more details, if you’d like.) When I was a kid, one of my favorite bedtime stories was the one about the little red hen. She’s that plucky chicken, a fine-feathered friend of the cat, the rat and the dog, who lives on a farm ‘once upon a time’. At every turn, on her way to baking up a beautiful loaf of bread, her companions are asked to help and their response is “no, thanks”. The Little Red Hen’s response is always to simply do it herself, and proceed with determination toward her goal. I knew this was a good life lesson. What I didn’t know back then was that it was an even better lesson for a life in publishing today.

In recent years, the number of books being published each year has grown in number at an alarming rate…at the same time publishing houses continue to pare down staff in their editorial, publicity and marketing departments. Celebrity books have popped up almost exponentially on publishers’ lists, taking a big chunk of these reduced in-house promotional resources. The volume of new books released each season means review sources are overwhelmed, and no one is guaranteed coverage. Independent bookstores (guardian angels of the mid-list author) are disappearing from the map as big-box retailers and bookstore chains are moving into neighborhoods. The marketplace is filled with books and more books, while there is a serious decline in readership. Library and school funding is fading, too, as their needs for other media and computer support often take priority over the latest mystery novel or picture book.

So in the face of all these challenges, what’s a struggling author to do?
Like The Little Red Hen, we’ve got to do it by ourselves, and for ourselves. But we don’t all have to re-invent the wheel. We can share information to help us help our publishers sell those wonderful books we’ve created. I’ll start the ball rolling by posting resources I’ve found along the way. But my hope is that others will join in, too, and this site will evolve into a clearinghouse of DIY ideas to market and publicize our books.

From your fine-feathered friend---
Dianne Ochiltree, the Little Red Hen