Category publishing

Oct 2 2013

Authors Have Two Audiences—not One

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Marketing is most effective when the content, packaging, and marketing are all geared toward attracting the target audience.

But there’s a catch: There isn’t just one audience; there are two.

One audience consists of the readers who are likely to enjoy your book, but who haven’t read it yet. The second audience includes fans who have already read your book.

This distinction is important.

For example, a fan doesn’t need to see reminders or hints to purchase a book that he or she has already read. A fan who enjoyed the book enough to find your blog or email you would probably enjoy bonus material.

On the other hand, if you catch the interest of people who read your genre who haven’t read your book, you want to give them opportunities to discover your book. Some supplemental material is less likely to interest people who haven’t read your book—especially fiction, maps, images, or poems that are best understood by someone who is familiar with the book.

Fans may be interested in learning more about you on your blog, whereas content relevant for your target audience is more likely to attract new readers to your blog. You could mix in a little of each, or you can put some of this on a fan page.

If you have a series, fans are looking forward to the release of your next book, whereas you want new readers to discover the first volume.

When you promote a temporary sale price, you want new readers to learn about this, while fans might be a little frustrated to see the discount if they paid full price.

When you interact with people in person or online, if you’re able to determine whether or not they have read your book, this can help you. For example, when communicating by email, you can have a signature line that links to your book for people who haven’t read your book, but a signature line that links to a fan page that has supplemental material for fans.

Part of your online platform should be geared toward new readers, while there should also be some place that fans will appreciate.

Think about your dual audience and how it might impact your marketing efforts. For one, marketing pages that you include at the end of the book should be geared toward fans, since, obviously, they have already read your book.

Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing)

Oct 2 2013

Read Tuesday Pictures—Second Try

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Melissa Stevens (www.theillustratedauthor.net) read the opinions expressed in my previous post and offered the images that you see at the top and bottom of this post.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the first round of images. Although it’s impossible to please everyone—especially, when opinions may be contradictory—since we will all be able to use the Read Tuesday images, I would like for everyone to be happy with them.

Let me add my opinions, which I didn’t express in the previous post. In the originals, I favored the stars and the gold bow, and was also concerned about clutter around the date. In this new set, the stars are more concentrated around the bag (to me, it’s as if they just popped out of it). The gold stars don’t seem as obtrusive to the text. I kind of like the red bow if we go with the gold stars.

But Read Tuesday isn’t my event, its our event. So your opinions are just as important. You are encouraged to express them.

In case you haven’t heard, Read Tuesday will be a big day for selling and gifting books, like Black Friday, except for books. You can learn more about Read Tuesday (but note that the name has changed) through the link below:

https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/red_tuesday_idea_for_boosting_book_sales/

Chris McMullen

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Oct 1 2013

Read Tuesday Pictures—Need Suggestions

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Artist and cover designer Melissa Stevens (www.theillustratedauthor.net) has put together these drafts for the Read Tuesday image. You can find the alternates at the bottom of this post.

I need your help with this.

  • Do you like this concept?
  • What would you like to change?
  • There are many possibilities, like changing colors, brightening or darkening, adding or removing elements, adding other details. The door is wide open.
  • Which version appeals to you best?
  • Which colors or features do you like best?
  • Which colors or features do you like least?
  • What could we do to make this better?
  • If you would prefer something vastly different, please say what you would like.

Read Tuesday is for everyone, so if you have any opinions, please share them.

In case you haven’t heard, Read Tuesday will be a big day for selling and gifting books, like Black Friday, except for books. You can learn more about Read Tuesday (but note that the name has changed) through the link below:

https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/red_tuesday_idea_for_boosting_book_sales/

Chris McMullen

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Sep 30 2013

Draft of Author Sign-Up Form for Read Tuesday

Read Tuesday Curtains

I made a draft of the author sign-up form for Read Tuesday. (In case you haven’t heard about it yet, you can learn more about Read Tuesday—a bookselling event like Black Friday—by clicking on the link below.)

https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/red_tuesday_idea_for_boosting_book_sales/

The draft has ten questions and a note at the top. Some of the questions will be optional, most will be required (which are required should be clear when filling out the form).

Please look the draft over. If you have comments or think of something we should consider adding, please let me know.

We’ll have a separate form to sign up books (rather than authors), and we can also add separate forms for any small publishers or booksellers that may wish to participate in the event.

Remember, it’s just a draft. (So don’t try to complete the form yet.) Once it’s ready, I’ll post a link to the form, and all you’ll have to do to participate is complete the form online and press a magic submit button. Then I can create a database of the answers at anytime.

Click on the link below to open the form. (It’s a PDF file. Be sure to scroll down to the subsequent pages, or you’ll only see the first few questions.)

Author Sign-up for Read Tuesday

In the note at the top, you can see that I gave myself a silly title, just to show you that I’m really unimportant—that’s what titles are for, right? (Read Tuesday is about many authors providing a great program for thousands of readers, not about any one person or group of people.)

Regarding the image above with the red curtains… I got this idea that we might be able to stir up a little pre-launch buzz for Read Tuesday, and I thought closed curtains like you see in a theater just before a big show might be a good idea. However, the primitive method that I used resulted in a highly pixelated image. I put an image on the Read Tuesday website, the Twitter page, and the Facebook fan page, so at least anyone who visits these sites will see that something is in the works. (These sites are otherwise empty.) I was going to suggest that we post this picture on our blogs, and perhaps even create a few posts to try to stir up some pre-launch buzz for the Read Tuesday event (you can see one image on my sidebar to the right), but since it’s rather pixelated, I decided not to suggest this.

Actually, it’s hard to notice the pixelation on the small sidebar image, so adding these red curtains to all our sidebars might not be a bad idea after all. Feel free to add it to yours and to spread the word. You’re welcome to copy the red curtain image (either above or from the sidebar).

In about a week, we should have much nicer images to work with to help brand the Read Tuesday program. When these are available, I will let you know, and that’s when the Read Tuesday sites will launch.

Chris McMullen

Sep 30 2013

Authors: Try Giving Yourself Advice

If another author asked you for advice and you checked out the other author’s book, would suggestions come to your mind? Maybe you would comment on what you do or don’t like about the cover. You might have suggestions for the blurb. If you found something in the Look Inside that put you off, would you mention it?

People generally love to give out advice. That’s why everyone tends to receive a lot of advice, even when it wasn’t sought. People form opinions easily, and many people don’t hesitate to share them.

Even if you don’t share your opinion so freely, you still form opinions. Suppose you’re checking out a book. You’ll know in an instant if you like or dislike the cover, if the blurb attracts your interest or not, and if there is something that you do or don’t like about the book.

But a funny thing about advice is that while people love to give it to others, they often don’t take their own advice.

  • Evidently, you don’t have to have a good track record in your own relationships in order to give dating advice to others.
  • Apparently, you don’t need to have any skill in a sport yourself in order to give tips to others.
  • Clearly, you don’t have to make the best work-related decisions in order to advise others about their career paths.

Here’s my point. If you’re looking at someone else’s cover, you might find yourself wondering, “How can you put that on your book?” But if it’s your own cover, you don’t tend to be as critical. If you’re shopping for a book, you might think to yourself, “That blurb doesn’t try to catch my interest at all.” But when it’s your own blurb, you’re already interested in it. When you pay five bucks for a book, you tend to get disappointed if you catch several typos. But when it’s your own book, you often read what you meant to write instead of what you actually wrote.

There are two things you can learn from this:

  • You need to try to step aside and evaluate your work critically. Take a break from it and try to approach it as if you were seeing it for the first time, and try to evaluate it as if it were someone else’s book.
  • No matter how hard you try, you can’t see your own work as if it were written by someone else. There is no substitute for external opinions. Getting this before you publish is invaluable.

I know a few authors who will think that they judge themselves more harshly than anyone else – i.e. you feel that you are your own toughest critic. Many of us feel that way.

But we’re our toughest critics only in certain aspects. You’re not your own toughest critic in every aspect. You judge yourself harshly only in the areas that you care about most. You give yourself a large allowance in areas that you don’t care much about.

However, those areas that aren’t so important to you might be very important to shoppers. So even if you are your own toughest critic in some regards, honest external feedback – if you can get it – is still very likely to help you find ways to improve your book.

You shouldn’t necessarily change everything based on external feedback. But first you need to know what that feedback is before you can decide whether or not you feel it merits attention.

Have you ever come across books where the cover, blurb, Look Inside, category selection, or something else probably could have benefited from a little advice? Of course, if you send advice to all of those authors and publishers, some of them won’t want it. I’m not telling you to go advise others about how to publish their books. I’m suggesting that we all need to evaluate our own books more critically, and especially to benefit from more external feedback prior to publishing.

We just don’t look at other books the same way that we look at our own. In this regard, books are kind of like kids. Your book is your baby. It’s not like other books, is it?

Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing)

Sep 28 2013

Preparing to Launch Read Tuesday

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In case you haven’t heard yet, the idea behind Red Tuesday is for authors to get together and provide a book-oriented version of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You can learn more about the idea here:

https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/red_tuesday_idea_for_boosting_book_sales/

As you may know, we’ve been making several preparations for launching the Read Tuesday event:

  • We have an artist who is working on a logo and images of assorted sizes, like various headers and portrait sizes, with and without text.
  • We have a website, http://www.readtuesday.com, but it’s presently empty. We’re making content for the website so that readers, authors, indie bookstores, and small publishers will be able to find helpful information about Read Tuesday.
  • We’re creating forms that can be completed easily and conveniently online, which will help to compile handy information, like a list of participating authors, catalog data for participating books, a list of participating bookstores, or a sign-up for an email newsletter. Presently, we’re testing out Google Docs to see how those forms work from both ends.
  • We have a Twitter account and Facebook page, but, like the website, they aren’t up and running yet. We’re working to get all of these pages ready before we launch. (It’s pretty cool when you Follow a huge company like Amazon and they Follow you back – even if it was automatic, it’s still pretty cool.) If you want, you could find us and follow us, but there isn’t anything there to follow yet. As soon as these pages are up and running, we will share them with you.
  • We’re looking to add accounts at LinkedIn, PInterest, and more. If you have other suggestions, please feel free to share them.
  • We’re putting together a promotional strategy to try to make Read Tuesday a success. We’ll definitely need your help. You can help create buzz. You can show your participation by filling out the forms (once they’re ready). You can participate with your books. You will be able to use the Read Tuesday images (once they’re ready) to help promote your own books while simultaneously helping to create buzz for Read Tuesday.
  • We’re considering a little low-cost advertising. If you have special requests, feel free to share them. Funding is limited, but we will give expressed ideas consideration.
  • We already have several ideas for how to spread awareness for Read Tuesday. We’ll begin sharing these ideas as soon as the website is up and running. Again, if you have any ideas that you’d like to share, please feel encouraged to do so.
  • We’ve only had a couple of suggestions in the way of slogans or marketing text. More suggestions would be welcome.
  • Would there be any interest in flyers, bookmarks, business cards, brochures, or other printed marketing materials? If so, we could make a file for a flyer, for example, and anyone who is interested could print them. We’re not going to sell promotional materials; but if there is interest, we can make files so that anyone who is interested can order their own (from a supplier of your choice). You just have to express your interest.
  • We need ideas for things to include in an email newsletter for Read Tuesday. If you come up with an idea for an article that may be relevant, contributions will be considered. We’ll consider contributions for content on the website as well as for a newsletter.
  • We’re lacking in the video department. Suggestions, ideas, volunteers, etc. would be quite welcome. If you make your own Read Tuesday trailer, for example, you can feature your own books in the video, promoting your own books and Read Tuesday together. Hint, hint. (Once they are ready, you’ll be able to use the Read Tuesday images with this.)

It’s taking time to get all of this ready. We’d like to launch Read Tuesday all at once. So right now, we’re thinking of launching Read Tuesday – the website, social media, sign-up forms, making the images available, etc. – the week of October 6 (on the 6th or even before, if possible, but at least some time that week).

Remember, Read Tuesday is scheduled for Tuesday, December 10. This gives us two full months to get as much participation and to create as much buzz as possible. (Then we’ll have 12 months before the next Read Tuesday – and a little experience – to make the next one even better. Don’t forget about White Wednesday – or maybe the name will change; but we want this to be a “secret” until Read Tuesday is over.)

Can you think of anything else that we should add to the list above?

Read Tuesday isn’t a person. It’s not a business. It’s not a program. It’s not really even an organization. It’s an idea. It’s an event. It largely consists of a great number of independent authors getting together to bring a huge sales event to people who enjoy reading (and gifting) books.

This means you are just as important to Read Tuesday as anyone else. So, Mr. or Mrs. Important Read Tuesday Participant, please feel free to share your Big ideas. 🙂

Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing)

Sep 25 2013

Unpublishing, Republishing, and Updating Your Book

Ideally, you would publish your book perfectly the first time, everything would work out nicely, and you’d live your happily ever after publishing fairy tale.

Ah, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

For whatever reason, suppose you’re considering whether or not to unpublish your book.

Before you decide, you should learn exactly what will happen when you unpublish it. Here are some questions you need to ask:

  • Will the book disappear completely? If not, in what ways will it remain visible?
  • Will the book remain on your author page?
  • If you’re only unpublishing one edition, will the reviews stay linked together?
  • If you republish a revised version later, will old reviews return?
  • How long will it take for the book to be unpublished?

Of course, different publishing services have different policies, as do different online booksellers. So you want to consider all the possibilities.

A book won’t vanish from Amazon. However, an unpublished e-book can be removed so that customers won’t find it when they’re shopping. Print books, on the other hand, are permanently listed for the benefit of anybody who might have a used copy to sell.

At Amazon, once you add a physical book to your author page at AuthorCentral, it will evidently remain there forever. If you publish a paperback, for example, and add it to your author page, even if you unpublish the book, it will remain on your author page. The rationale behind it is that a previous customer could potentially have a used copy to sell, and this allows other customers to purchase such copies.

That’s something to consider when you sign up for an author page and when you add a new book to it. Think it over very carefully to make sure you won’t want to remove it from your author page in the future. (Suppose you have a Kindle edition already on your author page and then publish a paperback edition. If these become linked together, your paperback will appear on your author page even though you didn’t specifically add that edition to your author page.)

However, this isn’t an issue with e-books. If you unpublish a Kindle edition, the e-book can be removed from your author page. If it’s linked to a print edition, the print edition will remain on your author page, but the Kindle edition can be removed.

Suppose you have Kindle and print editions linked together. Some reviews may declare that they are for the Kindle edition or for the print edition. If you unpublish the Kindle edition, all of the reviews for both editions will remain on the print edition’s product page. However, you can politely ask AuthorCentral to unlink the two editions once the Kindle edition is unpublished, if you wish to have the reviews from the Kindle edition removed from the print edition.

A print book can’t truly be unpublished from Amazon. You can disable the Amazon sales channel. If you publish through CreateSpace, you can disable all other sales channels, too. You can even ask CreateSpace to retire the book for you once the sales channels have been disabled. However, the book will still continue to appear on Amazon, even though customers won’t be able to buy new copies directly from Amazon. This allows any customers or vendors who have new or used copies to resell them on Amazon.

If you unpublish an e-book and republish a revised version later, any reviews that you had before could suddenly appear on the republished e-book. It might be a month down the line, if not sooner. (I’ve never tried republishing an e-book, but other authors have discussed their experiences with this.) If it does happen and you’ve made significant revisions, you might contact Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and politely explain this. Nevertheless, nothing prevents a customer who left a review the first time from finding your e-book again and leaving a new review.

You could republish an e-book with a new title or cover. However, this may confuse customers to the point that some of your previous customers buy a second copy of the same book by mistake, which could result in negative reviews. (Perhaps a clear explanation in the blurb could help minimize this.) With a new title, old reviews are unlikely to show up on the republished e-book.

If you just need to revise your book, you may not need to unpublish it. It depends on the circumstances. If it’s desirable to prevent the sale of your book until the corrections are made, then for an e-book you must unpublish it in the meantime, and or a print book you must disable the sales channels until the changes are made.

It’s not necessary to create a new edition (with a new ISBN, for a print book) when revising your book. You can simply update the current edition, perhaps mentioning this briefly in the blurb. Include the edition number (or something that you’ll recognize) in the Look Inside for your own benefit. This way, when you check out the Look Inside at Amazon, you’ll be able to tell precisely which edition is showing; and if a customer shows you your book or inquires about the content, you’ll be able to check which edition the customer is referencing.

With Kindle, it is possible to notify previous customers that a file has been revised, but it depends on the circumstances and what KDP (not you) decides. You can find a place to send a request to KDP from the KDP help pages.

  • If KDP determines that the issue is minor, they will not contact customers. However, if a customer visits the Managing Your Kindle page at Amazon, the customer can receive the update there. The problem is that the customer won’t know to look for the update.
  • If KDP declares that the issue is critical, your e-book will go off sale until you correct the problem. When you fix it, notify KDP of the update. Then there may be a lengthy delay. Once KDP approves the revision and puts the book back on sale, customers will be notified.
  • If the issue is major, but not critical, in KDP’s eyes, then customers will be notified that an update is available.

There may be lengthy delays if you use an e-book aggregator like Smashwords, if the e-book has already been distributed.

The best action is to do everything possible to get the book right the first time. You only get one chance to make a good first impression.

Chris McMullen, Author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers

  • Volume 1 on formatting and publishing
  • Volume 2 on marketability and marketing
Sep 23 2013

What would you like to see on our Read Tuesday website?

Read Tuesday

As it may help anyone who participates on Read Tuesday, I would like you to think of the Read Tuesday website as our website, rather than my website. So I encourage your suggestions, comments, ideas, concerns, feedback, etc. 🙂

Reminder: The Read Tuesday concept is our effort to provide readers with a Black Friday or Cyber Monday type of sales event specifically for books. You can learn more about it through the link below.

https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/red_tuesday_idea_for_boosting_book_sales/

I’ll list some of my thoughts here, and invite you to add yours in the comments section.

  • The Read Tuesday banner, once it is ready.
  • A description of the Read Tuesday concept.
  • A separate list of quotes from authors and readers who are looking forward to the event. If you’d like to contribute, all you need to do is give me your quote, whether you’re speaking as an author or reader, how you’d like your name or nickname to appear, what I should put for your location (or leave blank, if you wish), and if you would like me to include, say, your author website. You can contact me by email from my about me page, or leave a comment (whatever you prefer). I intend to sprinkle some throughout the website, and have one page dedicated to it if there are enough.
  • A Like button for Facebook, a Follow button for Twitter, etc. once those pages are setup.
  • A page with information for readers and a page with information for prospective authors.
  • Contact info.

Can you think of other content? What other kinds of images? Other types of pages?

If you have any requests for the style or structure of the website, those suggestions are encouraged, too.

I could try to make a page of participating authors, with names and maybe photos. But if the list gets really long…

I could also try to make a catalog of participating books (perhaps not to be released until closer to the event date). But again, if it gets very long… If anyone can think of a way to make it very easy to add and update, please turn on the lights. 🙂

Of course, all authors can promote their own books through the Read Tuesday event by mentioning their own books while simultaneously spreading word of the program. Similarly, authors can get together in groups (by subgenre, for example, but not necessarily) and make sub-catalogs, featuring their books that will be in the program. Such smaller catalogs could prove more beneficial than a master catalog.

Sep 22 2013

Red Tuesday: Initial Brainstorm

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The idea behind Red Tuesday is for authors to get together and provide a book-oriented version of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You can learn more about the idea here:

https://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/red_tuesday_idea_for_boosting_book_sales/

The purpose of this post is to brainstorm the ideas that we’ll need to get started. Most of this should be done in the comments section below. We’ll need more brainstorming sessions as we go. Here we should focus on just getting things underway.

Red Tuesday is an opportunity for otherwise ‘independent’ authors (we largely behave this way when we sit down to write and when we market, even those of us who are traditionally published) to organize together and form something special – without, hopefully, too much more work than we would do just to have our own separate promotions. Here at WordPress, there is a strong sense of community among authors and artists. If we participate and harness this community feeling, we may all benefit from Red Tuesday.

It’s not about one person succeeding from the work of many others, and it’s not about one person being in charge. It’s about several people collaborating together. The beauty of the marketing involved is that every author can promote his or her own books while simultaneously promoting Red Tuesday.

BRANDING IMAGE: We want to brand the concept of Red Tuesday. Therefore, we need an image that we can use to help brand this visually. We want to include this image on all of our marketing materials for Red Tuesday. The more people see this image, the better.

We want to use the same image over and over, but we’ll need it to come in a few different forms. We’ll need a couple of headers for blogs or social media, an image to insert into our posts, a sidebar image, a thumbnail image, a logo, and anything else we think of. Essentially, we’ll need a variation of the same image in various aspect ratios.

TamrahJo drafted a good concept (see below). It will be easy to produce the image in a variety of shapes and sizes, it’s really suggestive about the idea of gifting books, it matches the color of the event (red), it fits with the holiday theme, and it has a cute play on the color and verb homophones. I made a similar image for this post (above).

http://wp.me/aZNrI-WF

What we need is an improvement on our efforts (or a better idea, if anyone has one). If you can make a better present, bow, font, etc.

Whatever image we use, we will need permission for every author who participates to use the image for their Red Tuesday marketing (except for possibly putting in a restriction to prevent anyone from abusing the idea). This means that any images or text used must grant this permission, also.

Again, we’ll need the images to come in an assortment of sizes, suitable for various purposes. It may also be desirable for some of the images to include text (a slogan, for example), but others to exclude it.

BRANDING TEXT: We’ll need a slogan, catch-phrase, strapline, marketing line, blurb, and/or whatever other short text may be useful to help us brand the concept of Red Tuesday successfully. Again, we’ll need permission for every participating author to use the ideas that we decide to go with. TamrahJo included a suggestion for some text in the draft of the branding image (along with font effects).

WEBSITE: Unfortunately, it appears that the ‘redtuesday’ domain has already been taken as a .com site. We could throw in a hyphen, but then anyone who misses the little hyphen will go elsewhere. Perhaps we could add the word ‘books’ to the end of it.

We should have one website setup that’s geared to tell customers all about Red Tuesday. This is a link that we’d want to include with all of our promotional materials.

I don’t mind springing for the domain name. I could put together something basic, or add basic materials that others prepare. But if there are any volunteers with web skills, maybe that could lead to something better. I guess we could start with a WordPress template, or I could get something from GoDaddy, for example.

To begin with, we want to include our Red Tuesday branding image and a description of the program. What else could we put here?

Perhaps catalogs (including subcatalogs) listing books by genre (or subgenre) that will be discounted on Red Tuesday. (We could also highlight a few books that have very deep discounts – good examples that may help to draw interest.) Depending on how many books wind up in the program, this could be an extensive catalog. We want to make it easy for customers to sort through it, appealing to look at, and easy to update as new authors join in. If there is an easy way to do this, maybe where authors can add their own books yet the formatting still looks nice, it would be nice to find it. It will probably take some volunteer efforts to put this together, but hopefully we can think of some automated services to help do much of the work…

Maybe an extensive catalog isn’t worth the effort. Being buried in a long list – if the list becomes long – probably isn’t the most helpful marketing tool. What will be helpful is when authors individually promote their own books while simultaneously promoting Red Tuesday.

(We could also have a humble page that gives credit to any volunteers who provide valuable services.)

What else should we have on the website? For now, we just want to get it started with the minimum, and we can add to it as we go along.

We want a different hub to direct interested authors rather than the website designed for customers (though some authors, like me, will be shopping for books on Red Tuesday, too). Our blogs can help with this. Remember, you’re welcome to create your own posts about Red Tuesday (reblogging isn’t the only way to spread the word, though you’re also welcome to reblog Red Tuesday posts).

MORE: There are other things we’ll need soon, but these are a few things that we’ll need right away. Can you think of anything else that we’ll need immediately? If so, please bring these up in the comments.

COMMUNITY: Through our involvement in Red Tuesday, we can be part of something much bigger than ourselves. The magic word is participation. Please share and discuss your ideas in the comments section below. Brainstorming isn’t about one person coming up with ideas, but about many people bouncing ideas off of one another and discussing them to see where it leads.

Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing)

Sep 21 2013

Red Tuesday: Idea for Boosting * Your * 4th Quarter Book Sales

Fourth Quarter Pic

This idea came to me this morning. It has the potential to help you sell many books in the fourth quarter. It’s a simple idea; it’s free; and it will be easy. It just involves a little marketing, but, as you know, marketing is exactly the kind of work that can move books.

I’m not talking about marketing for a few sales. I see potential for a great deal of exposure.

THE PROBLEM: Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge days for holiday shopping among retailers. However, booksellers probably won’t reduce the price of your book any more than usual, they probably won’t advertise your book as part of the sale, and you might even sell fewer books than normal because all of the customers are too busy buying electronics, toys, tools, and clothing.

You can discount your book significantly on these days and promote your sale to help stimulate some traffic during this time, but it probably won’t be any more effective than promoting your book this way on any other day of the year. In fact, it may be better to do this on some other day where you’re readers aren’t too busy shopping for other items.

THE IDEA: Thousands of authors participate in special one-day pricing of incredible discounts. We’ll call it Red Tuesday (a homophone with the past tense of what you do with a book). Actually, we’ll do it again just after Christmas, when everyone just got a new e-reader and still has holiday money to spend. We’ll call this one White Thursday (a play on “write,” perhaps).

It’s simple, really: Each author promotes his or her own discount while simultaneously promoting the huge event. You don’t do any more work than normal, but by being part of a huge group of authors involved in this, you can gain the enhanced publicity of the event as a whole.

For example, you would write, “Title of My Book will be 80% off as part of the Super Incredible Red Tuesday Extravaganza.” Take a moment to briefly describe what Red Tuesday is all about in addition to promoting your book. Link to the event page as well as to your book. Think of all the content you could post on your blog and social media regarding Red Tuesday, where you will also mention your own book’s participation in the event. Red Tuesday helps you with your marketing.

One author is really tiny. Together as a community, we can thrive.

All we need to do is spread the word and get super-mega-incredible participation among authors.

If we can get significant participation, it will open up many marketing opportunities that may otherwise elude us. Imagine the growth and buzz building up so large that the media takes notice. I have a list of other ideas below, and more will come. Together, we can help Red Tuesday go viral.

ELIGIBILITY: You just need to be an author who is willing to significantly discount your book on Red Tuesday and/or White Thursday. All authors are welcome, regardless of how you published, what you write, etc. (You don’t have to worry about your book being listed in an electronic catalog with an adult content book because we could always make separate catalogs for different kinds of books. At this point, there is no guarantee that there will be a catalog; that’s just one of the ideas below.)

If your book is already 99 cents, pretty much the only way to discount it is to make it free. However, many authors might want to just drop their prices, but not make them free. Why not allow for both? Any catalogs could easily come in separate editions for discounted titles and freebies. We could also feature the deepest discounts at the top to help catch interest in the program.

I have several e-books priced between $2.99 to $5.99. I’m thinking to drop all of the prices to 99 cents (except where the file size is so large that it prevents the e-book from being priced this low).

I also sell several paperbacks. These could be reduced, too. Or I could make a significant percent-off discount code for my CreateSpace eStore. Or I could sell them from my website at 50% off and take payments through PayPal.

The important thing is to make the book on sale during the promotion for a significant discount.

EXPRESS YOUR INTEREST: If you’re interested in this, please post a comment below to let us know. If there doesn’t appear to be interest, this idea will just slowly die out. The idea can only succeed through your participation. Please share the idea to help spread the news, so that we can find more authors who are willing to participate.

If there is plenty of initial interest, then we’ll move onto the next step and Red Tuesday may become a reality and a success.

We’re still in the planning stages. So if you have ideas, suggestions, comments, or concerns, this is a good time to express them. Nothing is set in stone yet.

There is no cost. You’re only commitment is to significantly lower your price for Red Tuesday and/or White Thursday. Any other work will strictly be voluntary. It would be wise for you to promote your discount and the event in order to help you get the most out of it.

MORE INFORMATION: As long as there continues to be significant interest, I’ll post information about Red Tuesday here on my blog. Please feel free to help spread the news – directly, by reblogging, or by creating your own posts about Red Tuesday.

If there is significant interest, I’ll send out a sign-up post on my blog, whereby authors can sign up. If you have a better idea for how to get authors to sign up besides just using the comments section of a sign-up post, please share your idea.

If several authors sign up, I will put up regular posts with information, ideas, suggestions, etc. here on my blog. Again, feel free to help spread this information.

DATES: In 2013, Black Friday is November 29 and Cyber Monday is December 2. Everyone is now exhausted from shopping. So my thought is to wait until Tuesday, December 10 to celebrate Red Tuesday. Then we’ll have White Thursday on January 3. (I liked White Wednesday better, but it falls on January 2, just a day after New Year’s.)

IDEAS: First we need to brand the concept of Red Tuesday. We’ll want to have a small number of images that we can all use with our blog posts and other Red Tuesday promotions. I can announce a contest to submit images for consideration. Then we’ll use the winning image to brand our image. Everyone should use this image with all of their Red Tuesday promotional materials.

We’ll also want to brand White Thursday (which will come about a month later). But we want White Thursday to be a surprise. We don’t want readers skipping Red Tuesday, knowing that White Thursday will come later. We want to generate huge exposure twice, not once. We’ll need a different image for White Thursday.

Some kind of catchy slogan, jingle, strapline, or something of this sort would be nice, too. I can solicit suggestions in a separate post.

Soon we’ll need to build a great deal of buzz and generate plenty of author participation. We can post and reblog about Red Tuesday to spread the word. Assuming this takes off, I’ll make a post in a couple of days with more ideas of how to help create buzz for this special day.

If we succeed in creating ample buzz for Red Tuesday, this may create additional marketing opportunities. Write an article about it and try to publish it in a relevant high-traffic zone. (Your article won’t go to waste because you can always post it to your bog if it doesn’t get used anywhere else.) We can try to get writers with a large following to write about Red Tuesday, and we can aim for a little media attention.

We can make a webpage specifically for the Red Tuesday event and everyone can link to it in all of their posts. If we’re able to make any electronic catalogs of books (volunteers can make this possible), we’ll post them on the event page and circulate them in others, too.

If many authors do a few small things in the way of promoting Red Tuesday, it will really add up. We all have different areas of expertise. If you’re a video whiz, for example, you can post a trailer on YouTube about Red Tuesday, and the rest of us can help get people to check it out. Remember, any marketing that you do voluntarily to promote Red Tuesday will also help you with your own book as a part of your promotion.

As we approach Red Tuesday, our marketing campaign should go nuts. Everyone should be posting and promoting in anticipation, and especially on Red Tuesday itself.

It’s very important to reduce your price in time, allowing for probable delays (which can be several hours or more – and may be longer if there is widespread participation) to get your book’s price reduced in time for the big event. Better early than late.

GREAT FOR READERS: Red Tuesday doesn’t just have the potential to benefit authors. It can greatly benefit readers, too. Red Tuesday would be a great day to stock up on books by all your favorite participating authors. It’s also a great day to buy books as gifts. There is ample reason for authors and readers alike to spread the word and make Red Tuesday a huge hit.

Sure, some readers will see Red Tuesday coming and try to hold off of buying books until Red Tuesday comes around. There will still be readers buying books before then. If your sales rank does slide somewhat going into Red Tuesday, just think what a potential avalanche of sales on Red Tuesday could do for it. The better you promote your discount and Red Tuesday and the more marketable your book, the better your chances of having a successful Red Tuesday.

NO GUARANTEES: There is no guarantee that this will improve your exposure or increase your sales. However, if participation is widespread, there is much potential for numerous authors to receive a marked boost in both exposure and sales. The more marketable your book (i.e. good content, appealing cover, effective blurb, well-formatted and -edited, attractive storyline and characterization, and good readability), the better the prospects for you to benefit from the promotion. Also, the more active participation we receive and the more effective we are, collectively, at marketing the event, the better the chances of success.

FINAL WORD: Ideas, comments, suggestions, and concerns are not only welcome, they are strongly encouraged. 🙂

We can be part of something much bigger than ourselves. The magic word is participation.

Chris McMullen, author of A Detailed Guide to Self-Publishing with Amazon and Other Online Booksellers, Vol. 1 (formatting/publishing) and Vol. 2 (packaging/marketing)