First up, Sphinx Origins is up for $0.99 this week!
Second, I’ve got a new cover for Evie Jones and the Shadow of Chaos that fits the genre much better and fits in with the other covers, whereas the last one, well, didn’t 🙂 See?
I’m also asking people about my blurbs for both of these to help give them more punch.
So what do these pretty pictures and a sale and blurbs have to do with marketing? I mean, sure the girls are hot so maybe people would want to look at them, but what’s the point besides that?
Everything!
Covers, blurbs, sales, even releases are all part of your marketing plan.
What is a marketing plan? Isn’t that you spending money to advertise and figuring out where to advertise? I’ve talked about this before and I will again. Yeah, ads are part of marketing. They are how you get the message to an audience that may be interested in your product. And they are important, but they’re just one part of marketing.
First of all, the release, you can’t advertise what you don’t have, so get stuff out there. 🙂 New stuff tends to get more attention on platforms like Amazon, so people will see it, go check it out, and see that you have other stuff. So a new book acts as marketing for everything you already have up, and if someone likes it, it’s marketing for the next book too.
Then sales. That gets the attention of the bargain seekers (guilty!) who won’t mind shelling out something like $.99 to take a chance on a new author. But you can also try out the sales promotions pages. I’m still working on finding them (Working on it right now to promote my novella that’s on sale :). Most of the ones I’ve found besides readfree.ly/ require you to have a certain length or a certain amount of reviews. Neither work for me because I only have shorts and novellas out right now and only my first short has more than 5 reviews. I’m working on it 🙂
And that brings us to the next marketing tool. Reviews. This one you don’t have that much control over. You can ask, but don’t get on people about them and for the love of the written word, do NOT buy reviews. Amazon is cracking down on people selling reviews and the authors that bought them. Reviews are meant to give readers an idea of what the book is about and the quality. That system loses a little credibility every time someone posts a false review. Reviews help readers find you and help promote you so they are incredibly important.
So be grateful for every review, even the bad ones. The bad ones will bash it for something, but that something could be the something that sells it to another person because they like it.
Take Sphinx Origins. It’s an origin story for one of my series, but also a paranormal romance, because it’s when the two people with the romance subplot through the series first meet. And it gets a little steamy.
The guy’s also a vampire.
So you can imagine how many people would say, “Not another vampire going after some young girl, please! Buffy, Anita Blake, Twilight, it’s been done!”
For every person saying that, there’s someone else saying, “I love it! Give me more!” So when they read someone bashing the novella for being a vampire romance, they’ll say awesome and buy it.
You see my point.
I did a post on blurbs here. It’s not even close to comprehensive. If it were, my blurbs would be better 🙂
So, now that I’ve given you a little map of marketing, what’s your plan? What will you release when? What are your blurbs, your covers? How do they all fit with the genre? When will you do a sale? Put a book up for free? What channels will you use to promote it? And finally, how much money will you put towards advertising and where?
Happy Writing 🙂
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