Tag: book promotion

Creative Book Promotion Ideas Courtesy of a Failed Kickstarter

crazy marketing ideas for authors hat-591973_960_720Happy Tuesday! The strange journey known as Kickstarter is now over, and I still have so much to share. You can read the previous articles in my Kickstarter adventure series here. This part will cover advertising, advice, and avoidances. Trust me, you’ll want to read this even if your plan is to never run a Kickstarter.

Advertising:

I hope to see this change over the years, but for now there is nowhere that truly supports a book Kickstarter. Video games, gadgets, films, even comic books have Facebook groups, special advertising websites, Twitter accounts, and all the things we tend to utilize outside of Kickstarter for promoting our books. Novelists have none of that. The websites you normally post your free/discounted books on? Most of them ask for an ASIN number, which you don’t have because your project hasn’t been published yet. Because of the strangeness of the terrain, I found myself performing guerilla advertising. Is that a real term? Don’t know, but it defines this madness fairly well. Continue reading “Creative Book Promotion Ideas Courtesy of a Failed Kickstarter”

Book Promoting:Is $1.99 The New 99 Cents?

the dead list by martin crosbieWe’re going to talk about selling eBooks. We can call it “connecting with readers” or “building our reader base” or “expanding our discoverability” in other articles. Right here, right now, we’re going to call it what it is: selling books.

I’ve been through the ups and downs of free promotions. I’ve had mega-successful returns where I’ve sold tens of thousands of books and I’ve had disappointing returns where I have not covered my promotion costs. I’ve sworn off free promotions and come back to them and realized that they can still be effective in terms of selling books. Again, we are not talking about climbing up the rankings in a genre-specific category or how many email subscribers we can gain or how many books we can give away. We’re dealing with book sales, and with free promotions we’re referring to peripheral sales of our other books or paid sales when our free book returns to its regular price. Continue reading “Book Promoting:Is $1.99 The New 99 Cents?”

Author Promos on the Cheap (or even better — FREE!)

dar's adventures in space comic
Photo courtesy of Comics and Games in London, KY (click to enlarge)

Face it, most Indie authors are strapped for cash. We can’t always afford to put out hundreds to thousands of dollars for promotions. We need quick, easy, and preferably FREE. So here’s one way I managed to sell a few books, had a fun time, made a few contacts, and became a more accessible part of the local community.

I don’t have any comic books, but I’m in the process of working with an illustrator to create one. (see: IU post) But that didn’t stop me from going to a local comic book store and inquiring if they had any upcoming events where I could set up a table and sell books. The owner was very cool — especially when I told him I was working on a comic, and said there was going to be National Free Comic Book Day in May (May 7th it was). The store was going to be hosting an event that ran from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. and I could set up and try to create interest in my books. Yes! Continue reading “Author Promos on the Cheap (or even better — FREE!)”

IndieListers: The Promotion Results Database You’ve Been Looking For

Author Jason B. Ladd of IndieListerGuest post
by Jason B. Ladd

“How am I supposed to know which book promotion services are effective?”

That was the question I asked while planning my second book promotion, and it was the genesis of IndieListers.com.

IndieListers has become the web’s largest free database of book promotion results to help authors find and pick effective promos. I’ll explain more below. But first, some backstory. Continue reading “IndieListers: The Promotion Results Database You’ve Been Looking For”