A book Promotion: What worked, What didn't and Who cashed in.

*This is a couple of days early, but since I had it ready, I decided to announce it today along with the winners*

The quick and dirty version of how the promotion was laid out was this.--> Four books pushed over two days to get their Amazon rankings hopefully high enough that they would catch fire and keep going. What we were hoping for was a snowball effect. If you want the long version of the contest, click here.

How the promo got set up.--> We put a call out for bloggers, asking them to put up a post for us that we would prep ahead of time. All the bloggers had to do was cut and paste. For doing that, the blogger with the most comments on their blog got a $20 Amazon gift card.
There were great prizes and overall it went pretty well.

Here are the numbers.

• 75 bloggers participated

• The top selling book sold 45 books, 22 on day one, 23 on day two- Best Ranking was 4800 overall

• The next best selling book sold 35 books, 20 on day one, 15 on day two- Best ranking was 5700 overall

• The next best selling book sold 26 books, 14 on day one 12 on day two- Best ranking was 7500 overall and this book also ended up #49 in their category of top 100

• The last book sold 23 books, 11 on day one, 12 on day two – Best ranking was 8500 overall

• Total book sales between the four books was 129.

What worked--- Offering Amazon Gift cards as a prize
                         
Getting other bloggers on board

Having multiple authors

How we had the participants enter

What didn’t work --We had almost a 20% drop out rate of bloggers, people who signed up to help and didn’t follow through. Apparently this is common and asking around, we actually had a very low drop out rate. It is usually closer to 50%.

Never use anything except blind carbon copy when conversing with all the bloggers (BCC) I mistakenly put the group into the “to” section and then people hit reply all and then the poop hit the fan. It was my mistake, but it pissed people off and I think it’s where I lost a few bloggers.

The sales were good, but not fantastic. When other groups have done this, they are hitting closer to 80 sales per day which gives them the snowball effect which we didn’t quite manage. This I think was in part to the two day spread.

Would I do this again/was it worth it? Yes and yes. Sales are sales and readers are readers, even if there was only 5 per book, that is still 5 readers we didn’t have before.

I would change how many days we did this, condensing it to a single day, lots more advertising of the contest well before the day it happens, I would start planning it more than a week and a half in advance and I would try to get at least 300 bloggers signed up. If I’m going to assume that half of them won’t follow through, you have to go big. We were lucky by all accounts to have fabulous bloggers who stuck to their word!! :D I would have the promo on the weekend, when sales already tend to be high and I would find a way to encourage people to go to the participating blogs. Lots to think about.

Now, on to the good stuff. The winners!!

The blog with the most comments belongs to Reena Jacobs!

The first $5 Amazon Gift Card goes to Lynn Hallbrooks and her comment on The Beauty Brat

The Second $5 Amazon Gift Card goes to Stina Lindenblatt and her comment on Heather McCorkle’s Blog

And the grand prize of $100 goes to Crystal Fulcher AND because she bought all 4 books she gets a bonus of $25.

Thank you everyone for participating, the event could not have happened without all the support from the bloggers, readers and tweeters!

Promotion vs Scaring People off

Promoting yourself is a necessity, something that every good little writer must do whether they want to or not. Some use Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, a blog, a website or a variety of other social media sites that they can put their name and their book beside it. But that is not what this blog is about.

When is too much promoting doing more harm than good? As in, you’re tweeting about your new book, blog or contest every hour for the entire time you’re awake and you wonder why you don’t sell more, get more followers or get more entrants. I think the reason is simple, when we over promote ourselves, we start to sound . . um . . desperate. Last I checked, desperation never sold a single book.

What to do though when you need to get the word out, but are afraid to turn people off? Well, first off, interact with people, don’t just pitch them. There are people I follow on Twitter that I never see any tweets EXCEPT those aimed at me buying their book. Guess what, I’ve never gone to any of those sites. I go to buy the books of those authors who take a little time to talk, share and interact. Those who've taken the time to promote not just their book(s), but who they are as well. Secondly, it’s okay to promote yourself, we all expect it, but try to keep tweets like, “Hey! Check out my new thriller/YA/fantasy/erotica for a limited time!” to a minimum.

Here is what a few of my Twitter friends had to say on the subject.

@Tanisharule Several times a day is okay as long as every tweet is not a shameless plug.

@jaimecallahan When it's the only thing you tweet about or if you mention the same thing (like a blog entry) more than 2-3 times a day.

@lisajanicecohen Too often is when most your tweets are about yourself, or RTs of what someone says about you, or links to your own content.

Siri_Paulson Oh, and too often = more than a couple times a day. Maybe a bit more leeway if you tweet a lot.

So there you have it. Promote yourself, absolutely. Every freaking post, tweet or status? Not unless you want to scare your potential audience away.

Promoting Yourself and Your Book

This sounds simple, easy even on the surface. Of course, you don’t start promotions until you get a contract with a publisher or until your self-published e-book is on the shelves, right?

Wrong!

Any industry professional will tell you that you should be promoting yourself and your writing 2-3 YEARS before you ever hit the shelves. Which means that you need to be promoting yourself now, not when you get an agent, not when you get a contract, but before all that. It’s how buzz is built and you start to get some following now, people who when your book does hit the shelves are ready to buy it and perhaps even help spread the word.

So what can you do to promote yourself now? Blogs of course are huge in this arena as are Twitter, Facebook and numerous other social media sites. Networking is all about meeting people and how better to meet the world than on the world wide net?

Another great idea that I’ve seen is book trailers. One of my lovely gal friends that I met through Twitter, Natasha, has a book blog for her yet unpublished work. It’s an amazing trailer and she’s developing quite the following just from that, at last count she's had over 12,000 hits! There are, numerous sites that can help you build a book trailer if you aren’t savvy enough on your own. Animoto is a book trailer site that has won many awards for their work and has been recommended to me by those who have used it.

So how else can you promote yourself? Attending writer’s conferences are not only educational, and give you a chance to pitch your work, but they allow for person to person networking. It was at a conference that I met Sharon Lynn Fisher who has Robin Rue for an agent, Tor for a publisher and is a finalist of the Golden Heart Award. Not to mention that she is a fabulous lady who has been great to correspond with about my own bumps in the road. I’ve met people who’ve become part of my local writers group and people who’ve become part of my long distance writers group, all who have knowledge and experience to bring to the table. I’ve found this to be one of the most fulfilling ways to promote yourself and network and try to attend at least one a year now.

Of course, there are more ways than I can fit in a single blog on how to promote yourself, but I will leave you with two final tips.

1. Don’t just push your writing and your brand so much that you push people away from you. Make friends, even on Twitter where you only have 140 characters to write something. Reach out to others and help them promote their work, show your interest in them and it will be returned.

2. Don’t let the promotional/networking take over your writing time. This is an easy thing to have happen and when it comes right down to it, your writing is what sells you. No amount of great PR can make people love a book that isn’t well written, the characters are flat and the dialogue hum drum.

Any last thoughts? Promotional ideas that you’d like to share?