marketing sites

3 Marketing Tools

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

I’ve been working this week on developing tools I’ll need to market The Child on the Terrace.

Booklaunch.io: This site offers the development of landing pages. So of course I asked: What is a landing page? Turns out it is a page dedicated to a new book, ready to embed on a website, blog, Facebook etc, with all the information needed to market. It’s easy, once the book is listed on Amazon, the booklaunch software grabs the information and the design process begins. Lots of customization all ready available, with more to come, I’m sure.

The Child on the Terrace doesn’t have an Amazon number or 10 digit ISBN as yet, so I used No Motive for Murder as the practice book. See the page at https://booklaunch.io/10202081974970941/nomotiveformurder

The aim is to make buying the book as easy as possible to someone who lands on the page from anywhere: this blog, my website, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Mailchimp Part of marketing is an email campaign and Mailchimp has thousands of users who send newsletters to their customers with information about their products along with other content the user may like.

For example, a newsletter may be simply an announcement of the release of a new book, along with content such as the first chapter or the cover art, or a short story featuring the characters of the book.

I’ve been developing a sign-up form as well as a campaign ready to send when The Child on the Terrace is released.

I’m having trouble integrating the form with my blog because it seems I may have to upgrade to get the features I want, including the sign-up form. The form is all ready to view and for sign-up on the Facebook page for Dangerous Journeys as well as on my Twitter feed @ginnywinters

Book Reviews: To generate book reviews I’ll send advance reading copies to those kind people who have reviewed my other books, contact websites such as The New Kindle Book Review and the Gumshoe Review, and perhaps ask other authors that I’ve met or corresponded with to review for me as well. Anyone interested in reviewing, please contact me by commenting below.

That’s about it for this Sunday in December. The rest of the day I’ll devote to wrapping presents, phoning distant relatives, and deciding what to make for brunch for my visiting family on Boxing Day.

Happy Christmas to all.

Five sites for marketing the book

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

After three novels and many short stories that failed to make me the wealthy writer, I set out to learn about marketing. Hiring a firm to do PR for the novel is out of the question for me and I suspect most of us, but buying pieces of the marketing is not. Some of what I found is below.

I started by, of course, googling the idea on Firefox to check the Alexa rating of the various offerings. For those who don’t know, lower is better and means more visitors to the site.

AskDavid.com Alexa rank 95,082.A free service for listing your books and promoting them on twitter. . The site starts with 5 free tweets and a further 30 are $10 dollars, and expands the reach of your own twitter account, at least for me.

1888PressRelease  Alexa rank 18,430. I’ve used this one twice at the 50$ level. It performs as advertised. They vet your release and send it out when you want. Many levels of distribution including Free.

Book Buzzr Alexa rank 130,343. I set up my free site on BookBuzzr this weekend. It includes a number of goodies including a flip-book feature for the my page on their site as well as on my website. Check that out at virginiawinters.ca. I haven’t added a subscription as yet but I may when my new book, The Child on the Terrace is released.

Books go Social Alexa Rank 569,998. No Motive for Murder is listed on this site(for a fee). The Facebook group is active and after the first book, new ones can be added for $39. Owner Lawrence O’Bryan tells me there are more than 300,000 followers now. He’d like three reviews and then he will promote on the site. A good site to look for books from indie authors.

Enchanted Book Promotion Alexa rank 910,437. This site sets up blog tours, release parties(on-line), writes press releases, develops full marketing plans: all for different fees. One author I contacted said that he had signed up at the Princess level($100) and the site performed as advertised. He didn’t know if it increased sales or not. Levels start at $29 and go up from there with additional tour stops or services at increasing cost.

If you have any other sites, strategies or comments, I’d love to hear from you.