I’m off on the family camping trip this week, and I’ll be too busy wrestling moose, bears, and cougars to write up blog posts (actually, the place we’re staying is just too rustic to have internet or even decent cell reception), but I’ve arranged some reading for you.
All this week, the good indie authors from the KindleBoards are sharing their favorite promotion tips. Thanks for reading their advice and checking out their work!
To kick things off, we’ve got Samantha Warren, author of Vampire Assassin.
There are as many ways to promote your work as there are stars in the sky. But the most effective method tends to be passive promotion.
What is passive promotion?
It is promoting your work without actually doing any promoting. Makes no sense, right? Wrong. It makes perfect sense. In this day and age, people get tired of in-your-face promoting. If all you talk about on Facebook, Twitter, forums, or your blog is your newest book, you’ll soon lose all your followers.
The key is to participate in all those places as a normal person, adding to discussions, asking questions and answering them, and just being personable. Put your books in your signature, info page, on a separate Books page on your blog, or what have you. People will be drawn to you as a person, then they’ll seek out your books.
It takes longer to build a buyer base, but it will have a stronger impact in the long run.
Hope you’re having a great time, Linsday.
I think that’s true, Samantha. Write a great book then be generous and connect with people.
I think you’re absolutely right, Samantha. I checked out your link on Twitter because you had responded to one of my tweets in conversation. Your marketing works! 🙂 But truly, the constant links just make me skim over it. It’s the people who actually talk to me that motivate me to see their writing and books. And I’ve seen that at work with my own writing too. It also helps me look at marketing in a “share the love” kind of way rather than “swim with the sharks” because it feels more organic.
This is such a great blog entry and I agree 100%. I may be writing a book, but I’m a person, too. How do you connect with potential readers if you don’t engage with them? There’s something to be said for getting your name/title out there, but at a certain point; enough is enough. I want to know why I should care. Sure, a premise may sound great, but I have a backlog of a hundred books. Why would I move *yours* to the top of the stack? You know? I don’t want to be another obnoxious sales goon. I want people to buy my book because they are genuinely interested… And on occasion, find me mildly entertaining on twitter/blog thingie. 😉 Thanks for the post… Gotta go share it now!