Clark Hays's Blog - Posts Tagged "cantina"

#50DaysofFiverr - Like the Star Wars Cantina for Marketing

The worst part about writing is anything that’s not writing (that means you, marketing)

At the end of a long day of work (writing internal communications masterpieces for a financial services company), all I really want to do is come home, pour a nice tumbler of whiskey and spend a few hours … writing about cowboys and vampires and death cults and metaphysical energy fields. I would too, if wasn’t for the need to market our books.

Sadly, at least for indie authors, marketing is almost as important as creativity and foundational writing skills. Without a marketing plan, you can’t connect with readers and even the best books may languish in obscurity.

That’s why many (most?) nights find us working on marketing plans and studying website trends and designing ads.

Kathleen and I really don’t like marketing, but if we ever hope to achieve our goal of having our creative works contributing to financial self-sufficiency, we have to do it. A lot. Which is why we’re constantly on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and forever thinking about ways to make our limited marketing budget work harder for us.

Then we stumbled across Fiverr.

It’s a website that connects artists, graphic designers and creative types of all stripes with customers in need of logos, testimonials, writing help, graphics, illustrations and more. It’s like the Star Wars cantina, only for creative types, and yeah, we’re Luke in this scenario.

The trick is that the starting price for any service is just $5. You can add more sophisticated components that send the price up a bit, but not much. And they can be delivered crazy fast.

Being thrifty-minded authors (read: broke), Kathleen and I came up with a crazy idea: What if we pooled our limited marketing budget and spent it on fifty $5 products and shared them across our social media channels?
#50DaysofFiverr was born.

It's part marketing campaign, part experiment and all fun. We’re using the considerable talents of the Fiverr community to do the creative work for us – focused on cowboys, vampires and our books (and we've received some truly epic deliverables) – and then we’re going to share it out with the world and see what happens.

Come along for the ride.

I’ll share a few things on Goodreads (check out my photos for a fun caricature), but the best way to participate is by connecting with us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/cowboyandvampire), Twitter (@cowboyvamp) and Instagram (@cowboyvampire). And remember, it’s #50DaysofFiverr.

When it’s all done, 49 days from now, we’ll have some fun stories and hopefully a few lessons to share.

Oh yeah, and there’s a contest. Share your favorite pieces of work to be entered into a drawing for a $50 (of course) gift card.
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