Back in the Day

I had comitted myself to doing a lot of promotion this weekend including updating my website. I only work on my website from my desktop. I also had some big plans of designing some business card size promotion for pre-ordering The Keepers of Sulbreth, now that it is on Amazon. I vowed to visit all my usual blog haunts everyday and perhaps discover a few more.
Well, Thursday my daughter and I were watching a Lifetime movie on demand, one of Nora's, while I visited some blogs, and Kapow! The ondemand movie went off and so did my internet. I thought it was minor clitch but after checking my desktop and my son's laptop I discovered we had no internet. Two hours later, three times getting cutoff, Verizon told me my router took a fatal dive. I was not happy. They promised to sent one right away but with the holiday that means I won't get it until Tuesday.
So here I am at Borders, checking my mail, doing a quick blog and thinking I'm wasting an entire weekend of promotional time. So, quite dangerously, I started thinking. Is the internet all there is to promotion? Is that all I can do? Isn't there more to promotion than blogging, yahoo groups and facebook/twitter? While at Borders, I picked up the newest copy of Realms of Fantasy. It's filled with glossy book ads. I know it can be expensive, but many authors use it to promote their fantasy and science fiction books. Other magazines such as Romantic Times offer another expensive venue for advertising. So I wonder, back in the day, before the internet, how did beginning authors get the word out about their books? I know some newspapers will run a small blurb, but what else it out there?