Guest Post: Cindi Myers – Successful Buzz Building

By Cindi Myers

As promised, today I’m going to talk about some promotional efforts I’ve made over the years that I felt were worth the time and money involved. Again, your mileage may vary. And one caution: the promotional landscape is changing rapidly. What worked for one author quickly becomes overdone and blasé and doesn’t work for another, so keep that in mind as you read on:

1. Media training. In my last blog I mentioned the publicist I hired to promote one of my books, Learning Curves. Another service she offered was media training. She filmed me and recorded me doing a mock interview, then told me everything I did wrong, told me how to correct my errors, then filmed and recorded again two more times until I was more comfortable with the process. This was worth the money. I learned a lot and I still remember those lessons. Plus, publishers love it when you tell them you’ve had media training. It’s also a good thing to put in press releases when you contact the media.

2. My market newsletter. This started out as a yahoogroup newsletter and is now a blog. http://www.cindimyersmarketnews.wordpress.com I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years now. It’s given me lots of name recognition. People don’t care about my political or social opinions, or anything else I might blog about, but if they are writers who are trying to sell their work (and writers are big readers) I give them useful information. The cost is pretty much zero. (When I promo my self-pubbed titles on the blog, I always see a slight uptick in purchases for a couple of days.)

3. Facebook ‘pushes.’ If you have an author page, you can pay Facebook to promote a post. I’ve spent anywhere from $5 to $20 to promote a post when I have a new book release and I always see an uptick in the ebook sales, and more page likes. And it’s cheap, which I like.

4. Bookbub. Not so cheap, but every author I’ve spoken with says Bookbub is worth it. So far, I only have experience with Bookbub placement that my publisher has paid for, but it’s resulted in huge increases in sales (for instance, going from a 70,000 + ranking on Amazon to double digits in the space of a day.) This was for $2.99 books, not free ones. I’m still trying to get them to accept me for a free promo. Friends who have done this said they easily made back their money and more with every Bookbub promo they’ve done. (I’m giving a workshop All About Bookbub at Colorado Gold this year.)

5. Making the first book in an ebook series free. Even without Bookbub, doing this led to a big uptick in sales for the other two books in the series, and a much more modest increase in sales of my other self-pubbed historical titles.

6. Web ads on targeted sites. I had a book a few years ago called A Soldier Comes Home. I paid for inexpensive ads on blogs and message boards that catered to military wives. I think I spent about $75 total for four or five ads. I got good click-throughs on the ads, the book was the top-selling SuperRomance for the month of its release, and I got great fan mail from military wives who read the book. The key for me with this kind of thing is targeted and cheap.

7. Printed excerpts. For the last few years, instead of paying for giveaways for conferences, I’ve printed up excerpts of the first chapter of a book. I print them in booklet form on my computer then make copies at the local copy shop. I either staple them into cover flats my publisher sends me, or run off color copies of my cover on cardstock and use that as the cover for the excerpts. I include information about my website, where to buy the book, other related books, Facebook, Twitter – whatever I can think of. People love these. And I’ve had people tell me after they read the first chapter they buy the book to find out what happens next. Not everyone who gets an excerpt will buy a book, but enough do that I think the expense is worthwhile.

So, those are promotional efforts that have worked for me. I’d love to hear what you have done to promote your books that has worked for you.

 

Cindi Myers sold her first book in 1997 and since then has had “somewhere north of 60” books published. Currently, she writes romantic suspense for Harlequin Intrigue, women’s fiction for Kensington Books, and self-publishes historical romance under the pen name Cynthia Sterling.