Want the world's best book promotion opportunity?

The world's best opportunity is pretty easy to come by. All you have to do is become president of the United States. Do that, and your new children's book will be published by Random House; enjoy a first print run of half a million copies; garner as much media attention as it can handle; and rake in the cash (in this case, I'm glad to report, the cash will be donated to a scholarship fund for children of disabled war veterans).

So if you're struggling for book publicity opportunities, you know now what you have to do to garner those media interviews and book reviews. Become president of the United States, and book promotion opportunities will follow.

Wouldn't it be great if this could happen with book promotion opportunities?

Sometimes, for whatever reason, an interview doesn't go perfectly well during a book promotion campaign. The interviewer might be having a bad day or might become confrontational or ditzy; the author might be nervous, over-confident, or distracted. In any event, wouldn't it be great if book promotion interviews could be done a second time if they went south initially? Well, of course, if it's a taped radio or TV interview -- and if it really went south -- there's a chance (however slim) that the interview could be taped a second time (or, at least, that the most embarrassing part(s) could be edited out. And, if newspaper and magazine reporters have a heart, they simply won't use the portion(s) of the interview that were awful or would show the author in a bad light.

But, typically, book promotion interviews happen, and you do your best, and then you're done...and you move onto the next opportunity. Hopefully, you learn from the experience and you improve your performance each time. And, hopefully, your book promotion campaign gets stronger, and more effective, over time as you become better and better.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to be the President of the United States or the Chief Justice, though, and have an opportunity to take a wrecked TV opportunity and do it all over again the next day? It happened. The botched Oath of Office was able to proceed without a hitch the second time around. Here's the story.

There weren't many media people around when President Obama and Chief Justice Roberts went through the whole Oath again, "very slowly" this time. But it must have been a source of satisfaction to both the President and the Chief Justice that, when the pressure was off, both could perform at the top of their game...and that they weren't doomed to remember the silly mix-ups (because it sounds to me as though there were a couple of problems with the Oath of Office the first time around) that occurred on Inauguration Day.

Would that all authors had an opportunity to redo their less-than-perfect media moments!

Book promotion tip

Here's a book promotion tip: If you want to sell a book, then just become president of the United States.

You don't want the job? Well, I don't, either. But the book promotion strategy is working out very well for President-Elect Barack Obama. According to the Los Angeles Times, we'll be seeing at least nine Obama-related books in the next few months. The LA Times quotes Dermot McEvoy, a senior editor at Publishers Weekly, as saying that the election was "the biggest thing for publishing since Harry Potter."

However, the fairy dust isn't sprinkled on all presidents in equal measures. Witness George W. Bush's failure to announce a book publishing deal. His wife, Laura, may beat him to the punch. See an Associated Press article that MSNBC.com is running that says Laura's people have been in touch with at least three publishers about selling them her memoir.

There's a lesson in here somewhere. Maybe becoming president of the United States is worth it for the book promotion value alone ... or maybe just being a likeable soul is what does the trick. Hmmmm....

Yet another Associated Press story caught my eye.

Yet another Associated Press story caught my eye. It seems that a goodly number of noteworthy writers (Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ayelet Waldman, and others) consider President-Elect Obama to be "a peer, a thinker, a man of words."

Finally ... a president who is a book person.

I'm good with that.

It's been a long, long time.