Author: Melissa Bowersock

Melissa Bowersock is an eclectic, award-winning author who writes in a variety of fiction and non-fiction genres. She has been both traditionally and independently published and lives in a small community in northern Arizona. Learn more about Melissa from her Amazon author page and her blog.

Keeping Track of Online Appearances

We all know one of the hardest aspects of being an indie writer is keeping our name out there in front of readers. Luckily, we have a zillion ways to do that: Facebook, Twitter, our own blog, guest blogs, review sites, author interviews. There really is no lack of exposure if we go looking for it and ask for it. But for some of us, the problem is not getting the exposure, it’s keeping track of it all.

I’m guessing I’m not the only one who’s made an arrangement to provide a guest post or author interview, and once I got the piece off to the site owner, I completely forgot about it. If I’m lucky, the site owner sends out an e-mail the day before to suggest tweets or FB posts; if I’m not, I hear three days later from someone, “Hey, nice post last week.” Ug. Continue reading “Keeping Track of Online Appearances”

Promotions with Tomoson

Some time back, I heard about Tomoson, a site for promoting products, including books. Curious, I checked it out. It’s an interesting idea. It’s essentially a meeting point for people who have a product to promote and bloggers looking for products to review. They describe themselves like this:

Tomoson was created because there needed to be a better way of managing product promotions with bloggers. The process was always so long, manual, and time consuming. Tomoson is the fast and efficient way to communicate with all your promotional bloggers or find new ones to review products.

I decided to run a promotion of my book, Queen’s Gold. I set it up on June 6 of this year and ran it through August 31. I realized after the fact that I really didn’t need to run it for that length of time, but found out once you set up a promotion, you cannot change the timing on it, so that was fine. Continue reading “Promotions with Tomoson”

World Book Night

Today I am sitting down with Carl Lennertz, Executive Director of World Book Night U.S. World Book Night is a wonderfully ambitious program designed to encourage reading, particularly in traditionally non-reading environments.

Please tell us what World Book Night is all about.
World Book Night is an annual celebration dedicated to spreading the love of reading, person to person. Each year on April 23, tens of thousands of people in the U.S. go out into their communities and give a total of half a million free World Book Night paperbacks to light and non-readers.

World Book Night was the product of a round table discussion at London’s Book Industry Conference in May 2010, the purpose of which was to imagine a way to encourage more adults to read. What better way to spread a love for reading than to inspire passionate readers to go out into their communities and share copies of their favorite books with those who don’t regularly read? Giving is an incredibly powerful part of our culture—and culture, art, and a writers’ talent are all themselves ‘gifts.’ Continue reading “World Book Night”

The Story Cartel Experience

Story Cartel has been around for less than a year, so it’s not surprising that many people may not have heard of it. It’s developed a unique symbiotic system of exchanging free books for book reviews prompted by several stages of giveaways. According to their website:

“Story Cartel is full of books that are read and discovered by people like you. Since October 2012, over 10,000 readers have downloaded and read over 100 books, generating more than 1,700 reviews on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, and blogs. Thousands of readers are connecting with new authors right now.”

It works like this. An author uploads an e-book with all the usual accoutrements: title, book cover, blurb, sales link. Story Cartel offers the e-book for free downloads for a limited time, usually 20 days. Anyone willing to review the book posts their reviews and registers with Story Cartel and becomes eligible for one of three gifts from the author (author’s pick): three $10 Amazon gift certificates (1 per winner), five physical books mailed out to winners, or an e-reader. Continue reading “The Story Cartel Experience”