WELCOME BACK
And I’m welcoming you back to the second part of Mike Friedman’s article about marketing, so get comfortable, grab a snack and let’s do it!
THE SECOND HALF OF MIKE’S GUEST BLOG
For a small fee an ad offered to drive x number of visits to your site. ‘That’s sound great’, you think, here is my money. And right on time the stats showed a big jump in traffic. Great you think, where did all this traffic come from? So you find out – http://theteaguide.com/. That’s right a tea room in India. Pinged (I think that is the term) my blog page 19,000 times. The page rank may or may not have moved. No eyes read my offer.So unless you have a dedicated web site for your book which is already receiving traffic, I do not recommend this idea.
TWITTER, that’s it, get your message out on Twitter. (write a note on a scrap of paper near your computer). Find out what is a Twitter.
Respond to an ad, for a small fee, I will send your message to my 45,000 twitter followers. “Great, here is my money.” Order sent, I suppose. My email was hacked and mailings from Indonesia and Malaysia started showing up in my inbox. Twitter – ok – I tried twits.
Pinterest, I have heard of that. I’ll get the word out through Pinterest. For a small fee I will send your information to my 4500 Pinterest followers. Ok, here is my money. Pinterest is a fascinating place.
I see an ad, “I will place your ad on our emails that we send out daily to over 1000 accounts.” That sounds great a thousand people will see your book title. “Great here is my money.”
Increase your Alexa/Google reading. Great … You know the rest. Not recommended unless you have a dedicated web site.
I see an ad, “I will tweet anything you want to my amazingly wonderful, engaged, reply happy 275,000+ followers on Twitter.” Don’t fall for this.
I see ads “Air your commercial on popular internet radio section. Air your commercial on Los Angeles NBC radio affiliate advertise your product. I will play your ad on my radio show for 1 week. I will play your ad on my radio show for a month.
Tough to measure this method. I wrote ads, had them recorded sent out mp3 files and listened to the ads over and over on streaming Internet Radio. This had the most solid feel of the methods used.
Air YOUR radio commercial to 100,000+ listeners. Done.
This was the most fun. The ad read, Create and give you an impressive and attractive Commercials Intro Video Animation with Your text and Images
This is the results of weeks of self taught Book promotion. Scoreboard zero sales, through these efforts. But all is not lost. There have seen sales sent my way. When I asked ‘how’ from the person who brought the sales in, the answers were, “I told my neighbor. Oh, I work with her.” Etc.
Start over from the beginning.
THANK YOU, MIKE
I think there’s a valuable lesson to be learned in Mike’s article….word of mouth is free and oh so valuable. Establish relationships with your readers, produce quality work and let the cards fall where they will.
FLASH FICTION
Someone asked me on the Mailbag the other day whether I thought flash fiction was a viable genre to publish in…a collection of flash fiction….and I honestly don’t know. Flash fiction is really just another way of saying short stories, and short stories have been popular since, well, a long time ago….so I see no specific reason why a collection of self-published flash fictions wouldn’t sell.
Flash fictions are very popular these days among writers, but do they sell? Not as well, on Kindle, as full-length novels, but there are writers who do quite well on Amazon selling novellas….checking sales figures, anthologies do not do well and I have no reason for that.
My personal opinion: the writing market is undergoing one hell of a fluctuation, and when it will stabilize, and what it will look like once it does stabilize, is anyone’s guess. The best we can do is work on our own craft and try to catch the wave when it develops.
SEE YOU NEXT WEEK
So much to do, so little time.
I’m outta here. Have a great week of writing!
Bill
“Helping writers to spread their wings and fly.”
Billybuc
Artistry With Words 