Re: succesful ways to promote
Hi all,
For my first novel,
The Ezekiel Code, I created a couple of 8.5x11 posters (printed on glossy stock) and put one on each of the side-back windows of my car. I also made an 18"x4" banner for the rear window. I have no idea whether they helped sell any books but, over a 4-year period, I know thousands of people saw them.
Like Lon Dee, I also made business card sized promo cards with the cover pic, website, review blurbs, synopsis blurb, etc. I just dropped them off where ever I went. The local Half-Priced Book Store let me leave a stack of them at the check-out counter.
Other than that, I did all the typical internet promo, facebook, twitter, myspace, etc. For nearly three years I spent a minimum of 4 hours a day on the internet
doing whatever I could to promote the book.
It took about a year for sales to really amount to anything but it slowly gained momentum. Eventually it became a "bestseller" on amazon and bounced around from the top 10 to the top 100 for over 57 weeks. It was an amazing run but I had a terrific advantage. The storyline revolves around the 2012-end-of-the-Mayan-calendar thing. The niche market for that particular pop-culture phenomenon was really big, not to mention the boost my book got from the blockbuster "2012" movie.
I should also mention the importance of "tags" on your amazon page. The higher the number of clicks on your tags, the further up the list your book will appear when people are using tags to search for particular types of books. With the help of a lot of other author friends (on an amazon forum) my tag clicks were somewhere around 120 as I recall. Whatever the number was, it was enough to put my book at the top of the list of books that came up when anyone searched amazon using the tag "2012". So, try to get as many people as you can to go to your amazon page and click the little box next to your tags.
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