What's the point of this blog!

I'm documenting the marketing for my YA book series "The chick friends rules". I want to see which marketing strategies will work best in creating buzz and hopefully income. So, sign up below and take the journey with me.

Friday, October 21, 2011

How would you spend $5000 if that's all you had to promote your book?

Hmmmmm....I'm really curious and I invite authors and publishers to chime in and share. I honestly don't know. Personally, I think I would spend most of it on giveaways and hope that word of mouth would follow. Let me know your thoughts.

6 comments:

  1. I like the look of this blog. Good plan. I wish you all the best with selling your book. I'll enjoy following your progress.

    And I have no idea how I'd spend $5000 on book promotion either :)

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  2. I would say half on giveaways.. then contact authors to see if they want to do something like a duo-giveaway where they giveaway your book on their blog with the incentive of giving a signed copy of theirs too.

    the rest? spend on publishers and other stuff that I don't know about because I'm not an author or a publisher.

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  3. WHat is your publisher doing to help promote? I would spend my money on promo to give away and for some books to give away.

    With 5,000 you could also place ads online too...

    Good luck!

    Lisa :)

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  4. (9 published books so far...)

    $5,000. I would plan on that $5,000 being the only $5,000 I ever had to work with. I would make damned sure it would work hard. First I would hire my foreign rights agent for a year. Cost... about $300; gets me into the Frankfurt Book Fair (hey! I am there today! Well my latest book is). I would spend $15 on Brent Sampson's book on how to sell more books on Amazon and do everything in it to fix my Amazon page until it shines like a diamond. This is labor intensive but free. I would spend $80 on Serif's WebPlus software. It makes making professional web pages so easy it is ridiculous. I did this for my tarot site and forums (linked here) as well as other sites. I hate making web pages. I swear by this program.

    Now, assuming I have not already hired my editor I would hire her. About $400 if I have done my best to fix up my book before she tears it apart.

    Next, I would take a good hard look at my cover. If it is not **better** than what I can find at Borders--oops! I mean Barnes and Noble now... then I would go on guru.com or elance(.cm) and hire a book cover designer. Cost allocation, about $1,000. People judge a book by its title, and then by its cover.

    I still have a lot of money left. I wouldn't waste more than $500 on FB ads, but I could get 5 million highly targeted impressions on FB for that price. I have done it before. It is most likely a waste of money but it just feels so good to do. FB ads don;t translate into book sales in my experience, but they do get the word out.

    I might spend $100 on that "amazon bestseller course" where you gather with people and give away a ton of stuff to anyone who buys your book on one day. The top authors in the world do this, even though it feels a bit cheesy to me.

    I would definitely have 100 books set aside to mail out for reviews. Mailing books individually is expensive! I would focus on people who really would be interested in reading the book. Dan Poynter has an email newsletter I would place an ad in for reviewers. I would not waste a lot of time on professional reviewers at first. They are swamped with publishers shoving books at them. Those books have super-professional media kits.

    I would invest a hundred bucks with my friend Joe Sabah and his radios course. This is all DIY but it is a lot cheaper than Steve Harrison. If you had $50,000 to blow Steve is the way to go though. You need the extra $45,000 to really *do* the stuff he teaches you for #$3-$5,000.

    Well, that would be a start. I have some other things I would do, but these would get my books selling.

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  5. This is a tough one because book promotion is an ongoing thing and you can never make back what you put into it. If I had $5000 I'd spend it on some larger events that I can't afford right now - travel and hotel and the events themselves (cost of tables/booth, et cetera). The biggest thing is that because I have educational books, I need to go to teachers' conferences and social studies conferences in order to get my name and books out to the right people. Just the three social studies conferences, two teachers conferences and one librarian conferenceI had to turn down in the 2011-2012 school year would have cost me over $2500 just for booth spaces, add travel, food, hotel and ordering books to have on hand to sell and you are looking at another $1000 or so and then giveaways to tie into my geography books as well as my other stories - and the $5000 is gone. - It doesn't take long and I keep hoping all this hard work will start showing a turnaround on my books supporting me instead of me supporting them. Hang in there and eventually it will be worth what you put into the books for promotion.

    Ma America, The Traveiln' Maven
    Author of the JGDS, 50-state, mystery, trivia series
    Where will the adventure take you next?
    http://jgdsseries.blogspot.com
    http://jgdsseries.weebly.com

    Elysabeth Eldering
    Author of Finally Home, a YA paranormal mystery (coming soon); The Proposal, a humorous romance (now available on Kindle); Butterfly Halves, a YA fantasy (coming soon); The Tulip Kiss, a paranormal romance (coming soon); and Bride-and-Seek, a paranormal romance (coming soon)
    http://eeldering.weebly.com
    http://elysabethsstories.blogspot.com

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  6. Vici,


    I would spend just one-tenth of that sum on a good publicist. My self-promoted book "Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things" series was already selling but I wanted to see what a pro could do and...it was definitely worth it.

    First, just working with a pro publicist is important because they will give you info about other campaigns and clients that will improve your own before you launch it.

    Second, if you have some sort of unique slant, you will get your money back with media exposure and book sales (and a sales recorde that you can exploit).

    I recommend checking out Paul Krupin (he is on the Self-Publishing group on Yahoo and I used him a few years ago. I recommended him to to other writers and they were surprised at the response.


    Another list-mate, the writer of Curious Critters noted that he spent 1/4 of the price with Paul than he did with another publicist and received over 150 media inquiries.
    See: http://curious-critters.com/

    (Tomorrow Paul will send out the news release for my 8th "Sneaky Uses" book.)

    Whether you go with Paul or not, consider hiring a publicist.

    Hope this helps,

    Regards,

    Cy Tymony
    www.sneakyuses.com


    You can contact Paul @Paul@DirectContactPR.com
    http://www.DirectContactPR.com

    ReplyDelete