Ideas to market non-fiction kindle books

If you just create a whole new book, and it skips the core message, is it really going to favorably impress the reader?

I don't like to be teased. An author who teases me is wasting my time and I probably wouldn't waste any on a book that purposefully avoided explaining things in order to get me to buy more books.

Let alone read through one whole book that was basically the author being coy to read a second book about the same thing, but with more information.

Don;t try and trick your readers. Just write an awesome book. Instead of writing one awesome book and then a half-hearted tease of a book to act as bait, write two awesome books.

I'm creating an ebook to market my commercially published book. It's an experiment to see if I can increase sales. I'm not dancing around the same topic, tho. I'm writing about a different topic that has a clear connection to the commercially published book.

escritora said:

I'm creating an ebook to market my commercially published book. It's an experiment to see if I can increase sales. I'm not dancing around the same topic, tho. I'm writing about a different topic that has a clear connection to the commercially published book.

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This sounds fine! It's the "dancing around," part that gets me.

Supplementary material: good.

"Real" book that contains teaser chapters from another book: good.

Book which is not a book (?) that goads people into buying other book: bad.

Also, possibly a violation of the Terms of Service of the retailer, which could get you kicked off the system entirely. I think Smashwords expressly forbids you from uploading a title which is effectively an advertisement for another book, and I'm sure Amazon has similar language in their TOS. Perhaps I've misunderstood what it is you're talking about promoting, but it sounds like you're trying to game the system by both taking advantage of the promotion period while keeping the "real" book in reserve at full price. Even if there's nothing about that in the TOS, I don't think that would be very ethical.

Justin_AC said:

This sounds fine! It's the "dancing around," part that gets me.

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That's understandable.

My post was meant to show the OP an alternative.

mpclemens said:

Supplementary material: good.

"Real" book that contains teaser chapters from another book: good.

Book which is not a book (?) that goads people into buying other book: bad.

Also, possibly a violation of the Terms of Service of the retailer, which could get you kicked off the system entirely. I think Smashwords expressly forbids you from uploading a title which is effectively an advertisement for another book, and I'm sure Amazon has similar language in their TOS. Perhaps I've misunderstood what it is you're talking about promoting, but it sounds like you're trying to game the system by both taking advantage of the promotion period while keeping the "real" book in reserve at full price. Even if there's nothing about that in the TOS, I don't think that would be very ethical.

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Agreed on all counts.

Why limit yourself in promotional activities? There are so many things that you can do to draw attention to a publication that this question, no matter how many times it has been asked here (in whatever wording, amounting to the same thing) that I sometimes wonder just how much imagination is needed to work out that everything you do in the time before release can be used to build anticipation.

Do you have a website set up for the book yet? If not, please consider it.
Are you going to upload a trailer to YouTube or Blip? People like book trailers.
Are you going to post blog pieces which will encourage people to buy the book?

It isn't difficult to look at your internet activities and identify where you can stick links to a central web page or blog with regularly updated information. Be sure to keep updating and correcting that information, and make sure there is a way for potential readers to stay alerted (via RSS or whatever).