Marketing

Marketing / Publishing — No Comments
25
Jan 09

Do I Want a Publisher? (Self-Publishing, Part 2)

A question I’m often asked when discussing my novel, The Trouble With Being God, or the book I’m currently working on is: who’s your publisher?” Of course, my answer is that I am my own publisher. Still, it doesn’t mean I never ask myself if I would rather be working with a “traditional” publisher.

So when I pose the question “Do I Want a Publisher?” I’m really asking “Do I want to be published by a traditional publishing house who has multiple clients and an established place in the publishing marketplace?”

My next immediate question, and the question I encourage all authors (or any creator for that matter) is this: “Why would I want a publisher?”

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Marketing / Publishing / Technology / Web — 1 Comment
19
Dec 08

Should I Self-Publish? (Part 1)

Please note this is first in a series.

As most of you know, I work for an online publisher/retailer (albeit, for music publishing) and we sell several million dollars of downloadable content every year. Some of this is extremely popular, and some of it has a very small, but very devoted fanbase.

Our top 20 sellers make up less than 10 percent of our sales. Most of our sales comes are of products that are quite far down the long tail (if you don’t know what that is, go read The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson). They are far down the tail in a combination of actual sales numbers on our site, as well as through general public knowledge.

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Marketing / Technology / Web — No Comments
19
Dec 08

Amazon Tags: The Latest Book Marketing Experiment

As I mentioned previously, my debut novel, The Trouble With Being God, is now available for purchase in both paperback and kindle format on Amazon.com.  Now that the book is up, I’m continuing my self-publishing marketing experiment, and trying out different methods of social viral marketing within Amazon itself, currently focusing on tagging.

As most of you are probably aware, tagging is the simple practice of adding relevant keywords to a product, similar to the way meta keywords were used in web pages. Instead of these tags being added by the creator, however, the tags are added by other members of the community, as it is assumed that tags from outsiders are much more relevant than those created by a self-serving advertiser/creator.

Amazon.com uses tags for their products as a way to easily filter what is relevant in a specific category.  They are primarily used within different groups on the site, as well as community discussions and cross-sell opportunities (tags on their listmania lists are used quite a bit in this manner).

So, what I’m doing now is focusing on getting my reader base to tag The Trouble With Being God with appropriate tags, such as “murder,” “crime,” philosophy,” “thriller,” “suspense,” and other tags they find relevant for the book to help drive the book up in relevancy in Amazon’s rankings.  Simply put: the more times a book (or other product) is tagged with a specific term, the more relevant it appears to be to that topic on the Amazon website.

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Marketing / Writing — No Comments
15
Dec 08

Debut Novel on Amazon.com / Switching from Freemium to Premium

As already stated on the official book site, my debut novel, The Trouble With Being God, is now available for purchase at amazon.com.

Due to this wider availability of the book, the book is no longer available as a free download.  Previously I suggested that content creators offer their material as free to build up a fan base, and I still stand by this suggestion.  One thing I failed to mention, however, is that once you’ve achieved that base, if your goal is to sell a product, then you need to switch gears.

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Marketing / Web — 2 Comments
30
Nov 08

Free As a Brand Builder: Give It All Away for the Freemium

Everyone likes to get things for free. That’s pretty much a given. In the past, however, giving things away for free meant a large cost to the provider for the creation of the free product. With the Internet, however, we all know that giving things away for free can really be done with minimal incremental cost. Yes, there is always the cost of creation – and in many instances this can come with a very high price tag, but with most media at least, other than the cost of creation, the distribution is very close to free.

Still, there are many who argue that giving things away for free is a horrible idea. My response is this: you are living in the past and you are destined to fail.

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Marketing / Web — 5 Comments
6
Nov 08

Advertise on Facebook Effectively: Tips On How To

For some time now, advertising on Facebook has been considered one of the most difficult channels to receive a return on your investment.  What people don’t realize though is that Facebook can be one of your most effective advertising channels, provided you understand the basics of how to advertise on facebook effectively, as well as what to expect from using Facebook as an advertising channel. (If you’re new to Facebook here are some tips on how to set up an effective Facebook page.)

I’ve used Facebook most recently for promoting the free download of my new thriller novel, The Trouble With Being God, but I’ve also used it for a variety of additional sites and products. Throughout the promotion of these different products, there have been several lessons learned that I’d like to share to help you advertise on Facebook effectively.

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Marketing / Technology / Web / Writing — 1 Comment
28
Oct 08

You As a Brand vs. A Popularity Contest vs. Just Plain You (Twitter)

I’ve been on Twitter for (logs on to personal twitter account and looks at history) for four months and nine days as of today.  So even though I wasn’t an early adopter to the service, I definitely have been on for long enough to as where I am really starting to see some trends in use and misuse of Twitter.

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