Daily Archives: October 5, 2014

Oct 5 2014

Promoting Scary Books

SCARY BOOKS

‘Tis the season to dress like a zombie and scare up some sales.

Even if your book doesn’t relate to Halloween, it’s a great time to read scary books.

Here are a few ideas to get your brain churning:

  • Create an event. It could be a zombie run, or it could be a Halloween bash. Here is an example of a Halloween-related event at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/596532817124822.
  • Contact local newspapers with a press release. An article mentioning your book in the context of Halloween helps to stir interest in Halloween among the community, which actually helps local businesses. If you want to get your book in the news, you have to try, and you have to come up with an angle that makes it newsworthy.
  • Join or start a group that features horror, scary books, Halloween, or a related topic. Facebook has groups, for example.
  • Tweet with relevant hashtags, like #Zombie for a zombie book, or #Halloween. Research hashtags. Find authors who are highly successful with Twitter and ask for suggestions.
  • Get together with other authors who have scary books. You might be able to find creative ways to promote the group of books, and you might feel more comfortable with this than self-promoting just your own book. I recently added a Scary Books page to my blog: https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/scary-books. (Want on the list? Use the Contact Me button on my blog.)
  • How about a cool scary bookmark—one that doesn’t look like an advertisement, but does mention your book?

Chris McMullen

Copyright © 2014 Chris McMullen, Author of Self-Publishing with Amazon (Boxed Set: 4 Books in 1)

Now available for pre-order for Kindle: http://amzn.com/B00O6MT158.

Follow me at WordPress, find my author page on Facebook, or connect with me through Twitter.

Oct 5 2014

Thank You, Thunderclap Supporters

Congratulations to Charles for reaching his Thunderclap goal. In this post, he not only shares his experience with the promotion, but offers several valuable tips. Thanks to everyone who supported his promotion.

Legends of Windemere

Yahoo Image Search Yahoo Image Search

Now that I’m fed and have gone on-line, I can talk about my experience with Thunderclap.  I got 102 supporters and it went live at noon.  So you can imagine the boost in sales I got for my books:

Well, you’re going to have to imagine it because nothing happened.  Wait!  Don’t go running away just yet.  There are benefits to this experience even if sales didn’t occur.  As an indie author, you have to think outside the box.  Did anything beneficial happen from this experience?  Yes and I’ll get to it after I make a few points:

Thunderclap Observations

  1. My highest joining days were the first 24 hours and the last 24 hours.  It seems you’ll get your trusted allies at the start and then you’ll have people step in to save the day at the final hour.
  2. A LOT of people retweeted, reblogged, or shared…

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