I don’t really have a plan for promoting Restless Spirits beyond simply telling everybody in my social circle about it. After all, it’s the vanguard, sent out to raise awareness of my name and writing and hopefully generate some good feeling toward both in time for Dominion of the Damned to take Amazon by storm, and if it made a little extra money in the process, that’s just butter on the toast (and so far it’s earned enough to buy us a large pizza. Ka-ching!). Since DotD is the book I’m currently pinning the majority of my hopes and dreams on, I was going to save all of my marketing energy for its release.
But that’s still a few months away, and it will be kind of hard for RS to win me any new readers if, y’know, nobody actually reads it.
So I’ve been trying to do at least one thing a day to get the word out about it. So far, this has mostly involved telling people I kinda-sorta know: here on LJ, on Twitter, on Facebook, on my other blog, etc. So far, this effort has managed to convince about one person a day to buy the book. That might sound like a pitifully small amount to you, but I’m just thrilled that it’s selling, period. It’s making me want to put in the work to get the word out to more people. And wouldn’t it be helpful to experiment with promotion techniques to see what works best and develop a solid plan for Dominion?
The problem is, I’m out of ideas. As I tweeted the other day, even though I don’t generally consider other writers that I follow on Twitter to be d-bags for constantly promoting their books on there, that doesn’t stop me from feeling like one if I mention mine more than a couple of times. Not just a couple times a day — a couple of times, period. Clearly, I need to get over this. I don’t have the time to set up a blog tour — essentially, soliciting book & writing blogs to either interview me or let me write guest posts promoting my book. I also don’t have time to participate regularly in forums, and I’m back to feeling like a total d-bag if I just pop into a forum I rarely-to-never post in just to drop a link to my book.
Pretty much, this “one promotion thing a day” model is all I can fit in with my various freelance jobs, attending my health issues and assuring my husband that I haven’t forgotten he’s alive. Oh, and the actual writing.
Part of me thinks I need to suck it up and figure something out–maybe at the very least hunt down the rare book review blog that deigns to review self-pubbed e-books and send them a free copy. But part of me thinks that the best “marketing” I can do is just to get more of my writing out there, and that I’m better off keeping my head down and writing as much as I can, as fast as I can.
I think it’s obvious that I have a lot to learn yet about the promotional end of being an indie author. And I’m not going to learn it by sitting around here blogging.
One thing I see most writers on Facebook and Twitter do is change their user photo to the book cover when a new release comes around. Perhaps that’s something you could think about doing. Beyond that, I have no ideas. Congrats on doing this by the way.
I didn’t even think of that. Thanks! And thanks for the congrats, too. š
I have nothing useful to say, other than that I think ‘s idea is a great one. š
I’m so glad your book is doing okay sales wise. I think slow and steady progress is good.
I loved it, btw. I’m very much looking forward to DotD. š
Thank you, Cal. I’m so glad to hear that you liked it. I’m really nervous about this one.