Now that I have completed the self-publishing a my chidren's book, "A Lesson My Cat Taught Me", [ www.createspace.com/3447169 ]it's time for me to begin the marketing process again. The are many ways of being able to market your book(s). The cost ranges from being totally free to costing hundreds of dollars. It is for you, the author, to decide how much of your own money you are willing to spend. Since I currently do not have the funds necessary to really market my book, I'll be looking for all the freebies I can find/get.
While I had a contract with my publisher, I started by contacting my college, and I succeeded in getting into the electronic newsletter of the college, this lead me to getting an article written in the campus newspaper [paper and electronic]. I also got into several newspapers. It will be hard trying to use these avenues again, but I will still make an attempt, the worse answer I could get is that they're not interested.
In the past year I've joined several groups on LinkedIn.com and elsewhere. The groups which I belong to deal with specific topics, and I have begun to do posting to discussions, etc of these group; writing specific postings depending on what the group deals with. I just did a posting to a select portion of these groups [for me it involved 9 groups, the membership of these groups totals approximately 8,500 [but in calculating a more accurate number I need to deduct a percentage for possible duplicates, as more than one person could belong to multiple groups discussing the same topic. In the next few days I will be postings some of the other groups I belong to.
I've also did a posting to the LinkedIn Group I am the owner of
[NEW AUTHORS NEED MARKETING IDEAS]
It is a tedious process, and the best way to handle having to post the same posting to several groups is to simply write/save them in word, and then do a copy/paste to do the actual posting.
Sweberuno - simply having contacts will not work very well. People need to feel they have a relationship with you, these days, if they are going to spend money on a book.
ReplyDeleteYou need to cultivate a kind of usefulness: what do others learn from you. How much fun do they have in your presence? Hitting them with a copied and pasted 'tedious task' is going to feel and sound exactly like that. When's the last time you bought a book marketed to you by someone in a group? Just ask youself that.
I am not being negative just for its own sake: I would like you to realise that contacts and friends and connections do not guarantee sales. You have to do far more than that. The postings need to be frequent, personal and entertaining or controversial.
There's much more to this than compiling a list. You need dialogue. We all do.