Pride Promotions

Anna_Hedley · Feb 25, 2016

Does anyone have any experience with Pride Promotions?

Website.
Twitter.
Facebook.

They're a promotion company specialising in book tours for LGBT books.

From their FAQ:

How do you promote my book?

We post ads Monday - Friday (unless a special tour is set up on the weekends) on Facebook and Twitter. They show your book cover, the blurb, the stops for your tour, and the links for the stops. Once we reach the end of the tour dates, it's not over. We run ads for several days past (usually one week from the final date of the tour) so that people are reminded about your book, as well as the contest taking place and encouraging them to check it out.

From a read-through of what they're offering I'm sure they have good intentions, but I'm not convinced they're able to generate enough sales to recoup even a fraction of the cost of their services for the following reasons:

1) Their Facebook and Twitter are filled with only poorly-designed (often unreadable because of sizing issues) adverts and seem to be only liked or followed by authors who are also hoping to promote their own books. Do any readers actually follow accounts that do nothing but promote obscure books?
2) The blog hosts they have include some heavy-hitters in the genre but also some obscure ones with a minimal following and there's no guarantee you'll be hosted by the larger sites.
3) Their own site is an unprofessional-looking Wordpress affair.

But if other members have used them and found it has boosted their sales, I'll eat my words.

Oldbrasscat · Feb 26, 2016

They work best if you make your book available for review. Will works hard, and I've always gotten more tour stops than I actually paid for. (For the tour going on right now, I booked for 5 or 6 blogs and got 25). Results vary. Flesh Market struggled, but I'm not certain it wouldn't have struggled anyway--it's a tough book. But the Nutty Romance books have absolutely startled me with how well they've done. If you have a newsletter, or twitter, he'll set it up so that people can get extra entries by following you on twitter or signing up for your newsletter. Not all the graphics have the entire blurb either--some of them will have a logline you provide, so they're not as crowded as the ones on his blog do.

Honestly, without a time machine, I don't know if I can say for certain how much of a difference it made. I, personally, believe it got my books in front of a number of new eyes that wouldn't have known about them if I'd done my own blog tour. (And not having to set it up is wonderful. So much less stress.)

brainstorm77 · Feb 27, 2016

With any promotion company I always ask what they can do for me that I cannot do myself.

anne.arthur · Feb 27, 2016

I've used Pride Promotions for three tours so far, and I'm using them again for two this year. Each time I've gotten more stops than I paid for, and he works hard to make sure every stop has original content. As Oldbrasscat mentioned, it's impossible to know if my books would have done as well without using the tour, but I can make an educated guess that they wouldn't have. I had two new series debut last year. The one I toured has definitely outsold the one I did not.

Personally, I don't like the headache of organizing a blog tour on my own, which is why I'm happy to pay someone else to put it together for me. All I have to do is fill out some forms, hand over review copies, and then write the posts as topics are sent to me. Other authors are happy as clams to do all this on their own, but my investment is worth the outcome.

Anna_Hedley · Feb 27, 2016

For those of you who've used them: are you self-published and if you aren't, what do they do for you that your publisher doesn't do as standard? Even some of the micro presses I've sold short stories to were willing to organise blog tours, reviews, and author interviews for me. So I guess I'm struggling to see the value in their services from that perspective.

Oldbrasscat · Feb 27, 2016

I'm hybrid. My pub didn't do anything, really, in the way of promotion. A tweet on release day, but that's all. Any promo was down to me. If you've got a press that will do that for you, the you probably don't need them. And the convenience of not having to organize it, plus the reviews, is really worth it to me.

anne.arthur · Feb 28, 2016

I'm published with Carina Press, Dreamspinner Press, and Samhain (*sigh*). They do some promotion via social media, sale pricing promos, and I've gotten some great blogging opportunities through Carina, but they don't organize thirty-stop blog tours for their authors. And given the number of authors they have, I wouldn't expect them to. Most publishers I've worked with, under this name and other pseudonyms, expect the author to do the bulk of their own promotion. It's pretty standard practice unless you're one of their bestsellers.

Anna_Hedley · Feb 28, 2016

anne.arthur said:
I'm published with Carina Press, Dreamspinner Press, and Samhain (*sigh*). They do some promotion via social media, sale pricing promos, and I've gotten some great blogging opportunities through Carina, but they don't organize thirty-stop blog tours for their authors. And given the number of authors they have, I wouldn't expect them to. Most publishers I've worked with, under this name and other pseudonyms, expect the author to do the bulk of their own promotion. It's pretty standard practice unless you're one of their bestsellers.

The expecting you to do the bulk of your own promo is disappointing, but nothing to do with Pride Promotions so I'll keep my thoughts on that to myself.

Thank you for the responses. It's something to consider if I ever do self-publish.

Filigree · Feb 28, 2016

Same here. But I'm still wondering how well those huge multi-stop tours translate to actual sales.

And then there is the issue of quality and relevance: if I go with Pride (or Sensuous, or other marketing sites), can I research the associated blog writers, reviewers, and othe authors ahead of time? I've pulled back from blindly enthusiastic participation in multi-author blog tours. I keep finding my work in company with (some) badly self-published, vanity published, and small-press authors that I wouldn't normally want to promote.

Pride Promotions

Anna_Hedley

Fuelled by tea and crumpets.

Oldbrasscat

Making stuff up...or maybe sleeping

brainstorm77

practical experience, FTW

anne.arthur

Anna_Hedley

Fuelled by tea and crumpets.

Oldbrasscat

Making stuff up...or maybe sleeping

anne.arthur

Anna_Hedley

Fuelled by tea and crumpets.

Filigree

Mildly Disturbing