How to Reach People Effectively

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nippycrisp

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Hi everyone! First post for me.

Here's the situation: First-time author, first book accepted by a decent publisher, scheduled for release in September. Obviously, I want to sell enough copies to quit my job and roam the house sans pants for the rest of my days, so marketing the book will be fairly important.

My strategy thus far has been to pre-promote the book by drawing people to my website. I hope this will serve to "brand" me to an audience, allow me to establish a mailing list, etc. I'm attracting traffic through a curiosity of my writing - much of my work includes true funny stories that most people find entertaining. I don't want to shill it here, but I'll post a URL if you'd like to see content. Thus far, I've relied on word-of-mouth advertising, and have gotten a good response from people who visit - 3-4 emails from "fans" per day, 500 unique visitors a day, etc.

My question: Since I think the approach works OK, I want to reach a large number of people. This means getting links to my site in highly visible places in a situation where someone would click for entertainment. How would I go about this?
 

benbradley

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Hi everyone! First post for me.
:welcome:, nippycrisp!
Be sure to make a signature (somewhere in User CP, on the left of that dark bar on this forum) with a link to your book site, and post in the Newbie thread saying hi, a little of what your book is about, any other writing you've done, what your goals are for future writing, name of first born male child, and ... well, whatever you want to say. :)
Here's the situation: First-time author, first book accepted by a decent publisher, scheduled for release in September. Obviously, I want to sell enough copies to quit my job and roam the house sans pants for the rest of my days, so marketing the book will be fairly important.

My strategy thus far has been to pre-promote the book by drawing people to my website. I hope this will serve to "brand" me to an audience, allow me to establish a mailing list, etc. I'm attracting traffic through a curiosity of my writing - much of my work includes true funny stories that most people find entertaining. I don't want to shill it here, but I'll post a URL if you'd like to see content. Thus far, I've relied on word-of-mouth advertising, and have gotten a good response from people who visit - 3-4 emails from "fans" per day, 500 unique visitors a day, etc.

My question: Since I think the approach works OK, I want to reach a large number of people. This means getting links to my site in highly visible places in a situation where someone would click for entertainment. How would I go about this?
Again, putting a sig with your site link in it is good, here and on most any other discussion group you're on (some forums MAY have rules against this, but in general, discussion forums and email lists allow up to four lines of "signature" for quotes, personal/business websites, etc.

Be sure you're actually participating in any forum you post to, like here, and not just joining up different places to post something just so people see your website in your sig - that's a bit too spammish.

Do you have a blog on your site? You should. I've seen several new authors here (Toothpaste is an example) blogging about getting published, getting the first copies of their book, announcing signings and other promotions, etc. And yes, I suppose this should be "in cooperation" with your publisher - maybe they have some guidelines of what you should and shouldn't do, but regardless, they're surely happy you want to do your part in promoting your book.

There's more info in the AW forums on doing all these things than you can shake a stick at, so be sure to look around and read other threads on book promotion.
 

nippycrisp

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Thanks!

Thanks for the ideas on how to draw people to my stuff online. I'll do my best to incorporate a signature line and so forth.

To answer the question by indiriverflow, my publisher is Sentient Publications. They have their own marketing people, but I am attempting to (a) work in a complementary fashion to their efforts and (b) establish myself with a core audience for future work. Wow, that last one sounds a little arrogant when written down. yikes...

I imagine its a long process that takes a while, no matter how eager you may be to have everyone on the planet have a good look at your thoughts and ideas, right?
 

indiriverflow

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If I were you, I'd be scheduling radio, even TV appearances. You are a credentialed author, which looks great to booking managers.

Are you intending to promote the fitness book, the fiction, or both? If you are telegenic and comfortable with speaking, there are lifestyle shows and general interest broadcasts that would be happy to have you explain your system. If it is sufficiently cutting-edge, you might get a spot on a show like Coast-to-Coast AM. That's pure gold.

Weekly local papers run several book reviews each week. Get on the horn, explain the idea of the book, and have your publisher send review copies if requested.

I imagine you'd promote your fiction along side, or through book store tour.

There are much more experienced folk here than I to help guide you. Use the community, and congratulations on your upcoming release!
 
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flashgordon

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There are tons of things you can do, some pre-pub and some post-pub. Here is a little article that talks about a few things to do to market your book before and after publication. However, if you are asking about building up an online presence to market your books and writing, there are a lot of tricks and tips. Since you already have a website, I would work on tweaking that first. I noticed that not all your links are working (on the Writing page I could not use the upper navigation menu). Likewise, you could really expand your onsite search engine optimization by using all the meta tags, alt tags, image tags, title tag, etc. Once you get that down, then you can begin to build links with your keywords in the anchor text on various sites. There tons where you can list your book, submit articles or press releases, submit it to directories, network on various forums or social networks, etc.

Best of luck, I know Sentient (they are two blocks from me) and they have a decent distribution network and marketing program. However, they work best when their authors "brand" themselves, as you are trying to do.
 
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