While scoping out pics for a blog post on marketing, this one totally fit the bill. Why? Because creating a marketing plan often feels like driving around on crazy looking roads like this.
Learning how to market your books is a never ending battle. You find something that works once, then never works again. You have a random day of awesome sales you can't credit to anything other than dumb luck. You research and put everything to use only to see no change. Like I said...it's a battle.
So, what have a learned since the last time I griped about marketing?
Hire someone who knows what they're doing. Caitlin Bauer of Royal Social Media is one of these people. She came highly recommended to me by other authors, and she's totally held up her end of the bargain in training, graphics, ads, everything we've done together so far. She also breaks everything down at the end of the month of ads to explain what the heck happened. I can't recommend her enough.
Facebook groups posting does work. Now, that's not to say it works as well as it once did before the almighty Facebook decided to screw around with how people see pages and groups. That's a whole other rant, trust me. However, I have the ability to watch the direct sales on 13 of my 15 books, and I can attest to the fact that it affects my sales. For me, posting in 30-50 groups per day works best. For you, it might be different.
Participating in other authors events is awesome...and fun! I've done quite a few Facebook page takeover and events over the last few months, and not only is is gratifying to help another author out, you get to meet new readers you might not have before. Games that work well are having them like and comment on your FB page to be entered into a raffle for a cool prize, "Caption This" games, name the characters who said..., guess the symbol (I use a lot of symbols in my books), and this probably won't apply to every author but having people tell bad date stories in honor of my Date Shark books was a HUGE hit! Get creative, help another author, and have fun!
Consistent interaction with readers. Honestly, this has been the biggest eye opener for me. I've heard this said a zillion times, but only after Caitlin showed me how to put that advice to use did I begin to see what a difference it makes. Schedule posts/tweets/pins to post regularly so your readers always have new content. Follow a pattern or make it random, whatever works best for you. Use your analytics to see what times are best for posting. And don't forget to ENGAGE with your readers when they do comment or like something. Talk back, start a conversation, make a lifelong friend. It makes a huge difference.
Specifics:
I recently tried a few new promotional avenues and thought I'd share how they went. Book Tweeters was very effective and reasonably priced. I plan on using them for future release day events. HeadTalker and Thunderclap campaigns have worked well for other authors, but for me I didn't see any increase in sales or traffic on the posting day, so I don't think I'll be using them again since they're very time consuming to reach the goals.
