Adia Colar, a publicist at New Harbinger Publications, recently sent me an email to explain how she and her colleagues were able to build up a marketing campaign for one of their recent titles without the author's participation. "Michael A. Singer, author of The Untethered Soul, made it known quite early what he wouldn't do to promote his book—no interviews, no author-penned pieces, no podcasts—the list goes on and on," Colar wrote. "So instead of searching for author-penned pieces, his publicist and marketing director distributed excerpts from his book. Rather than have Michael record a podcast, James O'Dea, the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, recorded one [on Allan Hunkin's The Written Voices]." Colar also relied on that old standby, the email blitz urging folks to buy the book on Amazon.com. "Tons of contacts," she said of the mailing list. "All of the author's contacts, the author's contacts' contacts, IONS contacts."

The upshot of all this effort? New Harbinger was able to drive The Untethered Soul, "a frank and friendly discussion of consciousness and how we can develop it" that could otherwise have gotten buried under the hundreds off other Mind-Body-Spirit books pumped out each month, into Amazon's top 25 bestsellers, even #1 in some categories, and sold enough copies to justify a second printing. They're still waiting for that shipment to arrive, but the book remains somewhere around #1,500 in the Amazon rankings, which is not bad at all considering that most people would simply move on when a title's availability is defined as 5-6 weeks. Obviously, no publicity team wants to work under these circumstances, but New Harbinger has at least managed to prove that, if worst comes to worst and the author simply isn't available to promote the book, something can always be done.