Michael R. Hicks

I’ve given a lot of thought to how I should go about promoting In Her Name. None of this is rocket science, but it’s sort of a half-baked plan to at least start with. So, here are a few of the things I’ve been pondering:

1. I’ve set a goal of posting a minimum of two messages on up to half a different message boards that reach potential readers (rather than just other writers!) every other day (or daily, if possible). These are to be QUALITY posts, not just cereal filler, with the “ad” normally just being my signature file with a link to the site, unless there’s an appropriate and tactful opportunity to link to the site or In Her Name on Amazon.
2. Start sending out requests to exchange links with other sites. This seems to be a little known secret in many corners of the web, but exchanging links has a direct effect on how much traffic comes to your site. And I don’t mean just in terms of moving up the ladder in Google rankings, or whatever. In the largest of my other sites, which gets about 10,000 unique visitors per month, about 28% of the total visits are from search engines, while another 25% are from links from other sites. So even if that site’’s Google ranking dropped like a rock, I can still rely on those incoming links from other sites (and of course my site is providing traffic to them, too). So my goal for this is at least a dozen requests sent out every other day. The downside is that it seems like more and more sites aren’t interested in exchanging links. Blogs are a bit difficult, too, but like with all things, it’s a matter of perseverance (I hope!).
3. Press releases. I put out one so far on PRweb.com, but I need to be a lot more consistent on this: you can’t expect any results if you just plop something out there and don’t follow up. It’s a factor of “exposure pressure,” not just for press releases, but for just about any of these endeavors to get your book into the public eye.
4. Reviews. In Her Name already has a number of reviews, both on independent sites and reader reviews on Amazon and Mobipocket. More can’t hurt!
5. Make some T-shirts and/or other goodies on Zazzle.com It doesn’t cost anything to do that, and anybody who happens to buy the stuff (including myself) is a walking advertisement for your book.
6. Setting up accounts on Facebook.com and possibly MySpace.com to try to connect to related groups of users. I have a lot of contacts on Facebook (I didn’t bother with MySpace – just not enough time in the day!), and while it’s been beneficial for a number of reasons, I don’t think it’s really helped much in terms of promotion. The main phenomenon, I’ve found, is that you attend to attract and group with other writers. That’s not a bad thing at all, but it’s not really where you want to go: you want to hook up with readers.

Anyway, there are a few thoughts for you. There are a lot of resources on promotion and marketing out there on the web, on Amazon, etc. – everybody has to find their own approach that maximizes your strengths and takes into account your weaknesses…

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Book Promotion, Exchanging Links, Facebook, Myspace

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 5:59 pm and is filed under About Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.