Reprinted from my Publishers Marketplace blog:

Even though I now write fulltime as an author, I'm still a journo with ink in my blood, so I continue to periodically freelance for magazines as well as blog. My most recent freelanced magazine piece is in the June issue of The Social Media Monthly, a magazine based in Washington, D.C.

Here's a sampling of the article, titled "The Millionaire's Wife: A Case Study in Book Promotion":

Promoting a book in this new age of social media is light years away from when my first book, The Killing of Tupac Shakur, was released in 1997 compared with the March 2012 release of my latest true crime book, The Millionaire’s Wife. I was barely online when Tupac was released. The newspaper I reported for, the Las Vegas Sun, had just launched its website the year before. It was practically the Dark Ages.

That first brick-and-mortar book tour took me from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, from San Diego to St. Louis, and from New York City to Hartford. It was deejay Kurt Loder’s daily reports on MTV News about a controversial photo inside my Tupac book that skyrocketed it onto the Los Angeles Times’ bestseller list. That also kept it on Amazon’s Top 100 list for a year.

The fatal shooting in Las Vegas of the biggest rapper at the time literally put the Sun’s website on the map – shutting down the site at one point because of overload. Write-ups about my book in the same newspaper, not to mention a plum review in Publishers Weekly, also helped catapult sales, with the first print run of 25,000 copies selling out the first week.

But that was then and this is now. Today, it is an all-together different story. In the new-media world, authors no longer depend on newspaper, magazine and trade reviews; the possibilities for book publicity go far beyond newsprint. Authors are taking on their own promotions and book tours in large part because budgeting for tours, unless your name is John Grisham, is all but nonexistent at cash-conscious publishing houses that are competing for shrinking hard-copy royalties, especially with the growing market of self-published eBooks.

The magazine isn't online; to read the full story, a complimentary issue is available by clicking here.