promoting your book online – 2

Earlier this year I wrote a how-to on the online promotional campaign I put together for Whisper to the Blood, the 16th Kate Shugak novel (February 2009). It’s for sale on Kindle and iTunes, but so many people have written who want one who don’t have a Kindle or an iTouch/iPhone that I’m going to post it here in seven parts. Share (see icon at bottom of post) or download away, just please properly attribute the authorship. That would be to, ahem, me. Thanks!

(last week: introduction)

2-a calendar of events

October 17th

*the Kate Shugak series (abridged) posted to YouTube

I wanted to do something more than a book trailer, so many of which look like detergent ads for prime time television. It had also been two years since the last Kate Shugak novel had come out and I figured some remedial Kateology for the fans couldn’t hurt. I wrote the script and hired a local videographer to shoot me speaking the lines sitting at my desk, and then he took it home and edited it.

He’s an artist and he wanted to make it beautiful and perfect, and I had to talk him down from that. I told him I wanted Looney Tunes, and suggested sound effects. Once he recovered from the shock, he really got into it, and while the result didn’t go viral it has been steadily racking up views and positive comments ever since.

I’m not going to tell you how much it cost, because it’ll give you a preconceived notion of the price tag and might inhibit you from even trying. It was by far and away the biggest ticket item of my approximately $2,000 campaign budget. Bottom line, either find a filmmaker or use the camera on your computer, but get on YouTube. Everybody else is, and a lot of them read.

One additional note: Amazon and Barnes and Noble post book trailers to their websites. Barnes and Noble, no problem. Amazon, inexplicably, decided that since the Kate Shugak series (abridged) was a trailer for fifteen books that it wasn’t a book trailer and wouldn’t put it up.

I wasted five seconds being pissed off, and then I remembered, Ding! I’m an Amazon Connect author. This means I have a profile page on Amazon, to which I have RSS’d the feed of my blog. This in turn means that every single time I post to my website, that post appears on every single buy-this-Stabenow-book page on Amazon.

I just made sure I included a link to the Kate Shugak series (abridged) on every single blog post of the campaign.

Update on Amazon Author Connect Page:
Alas, Amazon no longer posts your blog’s RSS feed to author book pages, only to the Amazon Connect Author Page. Much less effective from the author’s point of view, because who is going to bother trying to find this page when a simple google makes your personal website address pop up first?

*a newsletter sent out to 5,000 subscribers, aka the Known Readers Club

Yes, five thousand subscribers. I have spent over a decade building a subscriber list, and I add to it every day. One name at a time, which means you need to start on your list right now. Offer everyone who comes to your website an easy subscribe button and a graven-in-stone privacy policy, collect email addresses at every appearance, tell your friends and relatives it’s required, solicit your Facebook friends. Then give them three things:

1. An entertaining newsletter.

2. Your promise to never give their email addresses to anyone else, and

3. An easy, obvious unsubscribe button.

This last may seem counterintuitive, but it is essential, and I think the most important of the three. If a subscriber doesn’t want to receive your newsletter any longer (or if someone else subscribed them and they never wanted it in the first place), you are morally obligated to give them an easy out. Don’t be spam or you’ll defeat the entire purpose of your newsletter.

One note: When I first started the newsletter, I ran a contest with the Danamaniacs to name it. Give fans as much ownership of your online presence as you can. Everyone likes to be included.

*Chapter 1 of Whisper to the Blood posted on www.stabenow.com

I stole this idea from Jim Butcher, who I know posts his first four chapters online prior to publication because I go to his website and read ‘em. I’m not the only fan who does so, and his books are consistent best-sellers. It works for him, so maybe it would work for me.

When you’re putting your promotional campaign together, surf the Web to see what other authors are doing. If it’s working for someone else and you like the look of it, give it a try. One of the few inflexible rules of an effective Internet promotional campaign is that it is made up of many, many different parts.

*a free copy of the book’s ARC given to one of the newsletter subscribers

I strong-armed half a dozen advance reading copies out of my publicist. I didn’t waste them on reviewers, I gave them to fans who had subscribed to the newsletter. Everybody likes prizes. The first one went to a fan in Tasmania. I’m not even published in Australia.

(next week: a calendar of events continued)