Tips for Self Promotion, Sales, and Advertising discussion

Greetings friends!

I recently wrote a series of articles for my website discussing the ways that I have successfully promoted and marketed my book utilizing various social networking sites.

These are just some tips and tricks that have worked for me and led to sales. Give them a read and hopefully they work for you too!

I'm in no way the master, so if you notice anything I may have missed, drop me a line.

Promoting Your Book Online with Goodreads.com
Promoting Your Book Online with Shelfari.com
Promoting Your Book Online with Paperbackswap.com

Best of luck to all of you!

Weston Locher

Weston, your comments were sent to my e-mail. What a great way to start my day! Your articles are wonderful. I will keep them and refer to them.
I read tid bits about you. Your wit and sense of humor seem to be refreshing. I look forward to getting a hold of you Musings of the Minuaite. (I hope I spelled it correctly.)Malika Bourne
P.S. I did not read anyting in your articles about comments getting Googled. Check it out!

Weston, your articles are excellent, quite thorough and informative.

Hey folks!

I appreciate all the positive feedback thus far! If you enjoyed the first few articles, I've added another to the series that you might find helpful:

Promoting Your Book Online with BlogTalkRadio.com

All the best in your promotion endeavors!

Weston Locher

Thanks for the info.

Hello Weston :)

Thank you for sharing this with us - very valuable information. I do have one question, however: after your giveaway, you emailed 1800 of the unlucky ones. Did you get any negative response from those you emailed, or from goodreads.com? The reason I'm asking is that a colleague of mine got a response from goodreads discouraging them from emailing the contestants who did not win.

Thank you in advance!

Hi Valmore!

I didn't receive any type of notification from Goodreads about emailing the unfortunate contestants. Since I sent personalized messages to 1800+ readers, it took a while and wasn't done in any type of Spam fashion. It was important to me that I thank them for entering the Giveaway, and many of them went on to pick up the book of their own accord in the following weeks/months.

Thanks for checking out the articles!

I'm so excited! CNNMoney.com did a feature that got picked up on CNN.com as well. Here's the link in case anyone is interested. I'm the last person.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/n...
The reporter said they had 1.4 million hits today.

Weston wrote: "Hi Valmore!

I didn't receive any type of notification from Goodreads about emailing the unfortunate contestants. Since I sent personalized messages to 1800+ readers, it took a while and wasn't don..."

Thank you for that, Weston. And I'm glad you made some good connections with readers with this daunting effort.

Great news, Nancy. Congrats!

Thanks for all the good suggestions, Weston. After you sent the 1800+ e-mails, did you see an increase in your book sales?

Tricia wrote: "Thanks for all the good suggestions, Weston. After you sent the 1800+ e-mails, did you see an increase in your book sales?"

Hi Tricia!
There was a small, immediate bump in sales, but they also trickled in over a period of time.

The next step I took was to target everyone who had added my book to their 'to-read' list to let them know that the Kindle version of the book was only $0.99. Knowing that they already had interest in the book, it was an easy sell for anyone who owned a Kindle. This has been my most successful promotion to date.

If you have a Kindle version of your book, I highly recommend setting it to a reasonable price. You won't make a lot of money (unless you sell a LOT of e-book versions), but it should be all about building your reader/fanbase anyway.


Cheers!

Nanette wrote: "Hi Weston,

do you know how to get your book onto Kindle?

nanette"

Hi Nanette!

You need to sign up with Amazon.com's "Authors Central" program.

If you haven't already, head to https://authorcentral.amazon.com and follow the steps. Once you have found your book on Amazon, there should be options to upload a Kindle version.

All the best!

Thanks Weston, this is great. I'm going to try the goodreads book giveaway and see how it does for a children's book.
Thanks, Lisa Ard
www.dreamseekeradventures.com

Weston wrote: "Greetings friends!

I recently wrote a series of articles for my website discussing the ways that I have successfully promoted and marketed my book utilizing various social networking sites.

T..."


Weston, have you any hard data on how the promotions improved your sales figures?

Hi Larry!

I chose to be a writer so I didn't have to do any type of math, so I can't give you hard numbers to show how successful each campaign was, but I can share that over time, my sales have gone up and I have had to do less and less active marketing.

My ideas and suggestions may not work for everyone, but if at the end of the day, it increases your exposure, audience, and income... that's a good day.

All the best!

Hey Weston! Can you post a link to your blog? I'd like to take a look at it.

I am blogging about my own experiences at thebookmarketingblog.com.

Thanks!

Hi Diane!

http://musingsonminutiae.com/

Enjoy!

Thatnks Weston! That is a great looking blog! Reading with interest.

Weston: I did the Goodreads giveaway but I don't remember getting addresses for the losers...only those that won. Was I missing something?

Hi Sheron!
You won't get their physical addresses, but you should have access to their user profiles and can follow up with them there.

All the best!
Weston

I guess I'm a few years late to this post as the links no longer work.

I did the Goodreads Giveaways and was only given the names and addresses of the eight people that won, nothing else. They were each posted (generously!) two books - A Small Inheritance and The Fog Index. I enclosed a note asking them would they give a review on Amazon. Result - zilch, and nothing entered on Goodreads either. Quite a cost for no result, complete silence.