Let’s start with the shameless self promotion, shall we? It goes so well with my morning tea. Peak of the Devil, the second book in the Lydia Trinket series, is not only available for Kindle, but it’s on sale! All the ghosts, witches, demons, and supernaturally powerful dogs you can handle for just 99¢, but only through Thursday, so don’t wait! This book is moodier and less bloody than the first, more of an old-fashioned haunted suspense kind of tale.
Now, on to a couple of promotion things that we might actually want to discuss. Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts and experiences and favorite promotional strategies.
First of all, did you know that if you sign up for a Bit.ly account (as opposed to just quickly shortening your URL’s on their home page), you can edit the links to customize them? Some of you probably did, but I didn’t. So for example, now I can tweet with the link http://bit.ly/PeakOfTheDevil, and not only have a short link, but a memorable one that has my book title in it too. Very useful for character economy. Here’s a post from Juliet Rich that explains how to do it.
For me (because I’m new at this), deciding how to market book two in a series has been a bit tricky. It seems like a waste of time and sometimes money to use an advertising site to reach an audience made up almost entirely of people who haven’t read book one. So I decided on a two pronged approach: promote book two mostly to my existing readers, friends, and colleagues, and promote the crap out of book one at the same time.
The 99¢ sale I have going on until Thursday isn’t so much designed to attract new readers (although of course I’d love some new readers, too), but to try to reach anyone out there who may have been considering buying the book anyway. First to give them a deal, because my readers rule. But also to give them some incentive to buy it in this first week of release, to get those Amazon algorithm juices flowing. The only promotion I’m doing this week is through the usual channels: my newsletter, blog, and Twitter.
Next week, I’m doing a ton of promotion for book one, to give that a boost as well as funnel some readers into two. One of my categories is pretty small, so getting both books in the top 100 is a reasonable goal. That’s what I’m shooting for, just working on the theory that having two books there makes me twice as visible as having one. Peak of the Devil will be up to full price by then, but Ghost in the Canteen is always 99¢, making it ideal for promotional sites. Here’s the lineup:
- Monday: Awesomegang (free), Choosy Bookworm ($8)
- Tuesday: eBookHunter ($15), BKnights ($10)
- Wednesday: Pretty Hot (free)
- Thursday: Genre Pulse ($10)
- Saturday: eReader News Today (ENT) ($15)
Total spent, $58.50. That’s a pretty big whack to my indie budget, personally. And I don’t expect to make it back, or probably even close to it, especially not on 99¢ sales. I consider it more of an investment in visibility and building readership. Plus these were all sites I wanted to evaluate at some point, and it’s tax deductible.
I’ll keep you guys posted on which sites were effective and which were duds. It’s highly genre dependent, but that information still may be of some use to folks here.
On a tangential note, fretting over one’s sales rank on a day-to-day basis during a release week is pointless and will only serve to stress a girl out. I get sales during the daytime, but my sales rank ignores them and continues to drop throughout the day. Then all the sudden at 8PM my rank will shoot up, and I’ll be in the top 100 for my category… overnight, when nobody is browsing. By the time I wake up in the morning I’m back down to 100k again.
Luckily for me, I’m guaranteed a spot on the HNR lists for two of my categories, because they don’t even go to 100!
The Write Stuff 