What's Working for You?

[John Kremer]

I'd like to start a new forum where people can talk about what's working for you right now in marketing your book.

I think this will help other authors to prioritize their activities if they can find out what's working for other people. This would be especially valuable to new authors.

I've share the hottest tool that I'm using right now. And that's Twitter. As you will note on the main page of this Book Marketing Network website, both my http://www.bookmarket.com website and this network have been rising in Alexa ranks (and visits) because of my use of Twitter.

[Steve Miller]

Edie,

Can you tell us a couple of Twitter tips and specifically how it's bringing you a following? I, too, feel that Facebook isn't the best avenue to get the word out about my books. First, these are my true friends and I don't want to pester them. Facebook was a good place to originally let them know I'd published the book (friends want to rejoice in that with me, and some bought books), but not a good avenue to do continued promotion, at least in my mind.

How much time are you putting into Twitter? What are you posting - tips on dog care? links to interesting articles? etc.? And do you feel the need to follow those people who are following you, making comments on their comments and re-tweeting their stuff? To me, it seems like if I got a large following, that a high percentage of my publicity time would be eaten up with Twitter. And I wonder what percentage of those people who are "following" are really reading my tweets?

Any thoughts?

Steve Miller, Author of Enjoy Your Money! How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Give It - http://www.amazon.com/Enjoy-Your-Money-Make-Invest/dp/098187567X/re...

[Edie Jarolim]

Steve, I've found that it's evolved over time to the point that there are certain people I have "conversations" with about topics of mutual interest, such as dog training, dog food, etc. Many times followers will post articles that I'll comment on. Other times those conversations have inspired blog posts, which in turn, spurred interest in my blog on Twitter. The articles I link to are less "how to" -- although some of my blog posts are of that nature -- than opinions on different topics. You'd be surprised how controversial many dog issues are.

Generosity is key, but it has to occur naturally. That is, if I retweet a blog post or article that I'm interested in, others will return the favor. I don't do it just for the sake of getting followers.

I follow back a lot of people who aren't dog people but who have similar interests, just to get the news about a variety of topics. Of course, it's easy to find the dog people -- like me they often have dogs as avatars!

Edie Jarolim, Author of Am I Boring My Dog and blogger at http://WillMyDogHateMe.com

[Steve Miller]

Thanks Edie for the specifics. Now I think I better understand!

[John Kremer]

I spend about 2 minutes a day on Facebook and 20 minutes on Twitter. My main online activity is still responding to all the email I get and creating/updating pages at http://www.bookmarket.com.

My Twitter Mania Manual tells you how to Twitter and how I've twittered successfully. You can download it for free at http://www.bookmarket.com/50WaystoTweet.htm.

[Steve Miller]

John,

Downloaded it and I'll look it over. Thanks! btw, I regularly recommend your 1001 Ways to Market Your Books http://www.bookmarket.com/1001ways.htm . First I read it all the way through. Then, I keep going back to it as a reference manual each time I try a new tactic. WONDERFUL book!

[Dr.Mani - Internet Infopreneur]

Edie, I revived my Facebook activity after a long lull (except for auto-posting Twitter tweets to my profile) - and agree with John Kremer about it being a time-sump, and worse, not really worthwhile in terms of buzz or responsiveness (though, of course, I am biased, and spend 4 to 5 times more time on Twitter than Facebook - your mileage may vary!)

Facebook, though, allows you to create and make available many cool things for book marketing - like video book trailers (you can have a high resolution version right within Facebook), photo albums (see the one I made for my book launch), and now with the integration of FriendFeed into their Wall, you can conduct mini-conversations that get threaded right there on your Wall.

And don't forget FAN PAGES for your book. Done right, and with time invested into them, fan pages can be great.

But after spending almost 3 hours categorizing and grouping my 1,130 'friends' on Facebook into smaller groups/mini-lists of 20 each (because Facebook won't allow you to send direct messages to larger groups!), only to receive a warning about 'suspicious activity' when I messaged 20 of those groups about my book launch, and then noticing ONLY 3 replies to the nearly 500 messages sent, I decided this was the WORST R.O.I. on my marketing time and effort of all that I've done in the past few weeks!

Just my 2 cents worth about Facebook :-)

All success
Dr.Mani
http://ThinkWriteRetire.com/launch.htm
(nearing launch date, Aug.25th - wish me luck!)

[John Kremer]

Great feedback as always - based on your own experience.

Note to others: What works for one person may not work for you. What doesn't work for another might work well for you. Just a caveat.

But I do hope this forum continues to help you find things that work for you.

[Sunny Frazier]

Okay, I don't Tweet, but I'm active on about 35 Internet sites. My trick? I keep a folder with "blog items" so all I have to do is cut & paste into forums, discussions, blogs. I have a backlog of blogs from a newspaper column on writing; I set it up so one automatically posts once a month. That covers me for the next year.

I only work on social sites on Sundays, but I devote the whole day to them. I keep a list of sites (in alphabetical order) and write what changes or additions I have done. I color code by month, so at a glance I can tell which sites haven't been updated in awhile.

Sounds like a lot of work, right? WRONG! I'm organized and this makes it possible to look more productive than I actually am. I've created shortcuts that still make my writing look fresh and spontaneous.

And folks, I just copied this piece to use elsewhere. Always thinking ahead.

[Dr.Mani - Internet Infopreneur]

Awesome! I'm saving this post to my 'advice' folder - and will work on it. Do you mind if I contact you for clarification once I get started on this, Sunny? Thanks for sharing, I'm sure it'll be a time-saver :-)

[Steve Miller]

Sunny, this is great! These sites that you're posting to - are they all your personal sites? Or, do you have columns going on other people's sites?

I'm finding that organization is critical to my marketing plan. In my marketing notebook, I have dividers for sections on Blogs, Reviews, TV and Radio, Magazines, Local Sales, Schools, etc. I write down every book I've sent out for review, and keep a copy of every e-mail requesting a review copy. In this way, I can follow up on requests, check to see if I've been reviewed, and keep notes of what's working and what's not.

J. Steve Miller, author of Enjoy Your Money! How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Enjoy It - http://www.amazon.com/Enjoy-Your-Money-Make-Invest/dp/098187567X/re...

[Dr.Mani - Internet Infopreneur]

Last night, on a whim, I sat down to try and list out all the things I've done over the last two or three weeks to build momentum for my book launch that happens on 25th August (Tuesday).

I was surprised to see how many bits of content across different sites and services I've created - using pretty much similar content that didn't take too much time to tweak and modify.

You can see the list here - it may help you in some way.

All success
Dr.Mani
www.ThinkWriteRetire.com

[Steve Miller]

Great list, Dr. Mani! Looks like your ducks are all in a row.

Praying for you and for your book launch tomorrow! (Anybody who's reading, purchase Dr. Mani's book tomorrow and it will help him achieve a high ranking on Amazon. By the way, I don't work for him. Just trying to help one another out in this marketing thing!)

Over time, could you please keep us up with what you think is working best and what least? Out of the thousands of things we can do to market our books, it's necessary for us to narrow down to our best bets. Sure, different things work for different authors and different books, but the more we know about what's actually working for other authors, the better we can decide which paths to try out.