Self-Pub Nikki 10
06nov11,
As one of the marketing measures for Dome Child I have decided to place an ad on a certain SF related site and I asked the site's owner about his advertisement opportunities. Let's see when I get a reply.
12nov11,
Unfortunately I received no reply yet from that SF site where I would like to place an add… Seems I have to send them a reminder.
Too bad that the author page on Amazon US is not transferred to all the other Amazon entities. Would be a nice point of improvement for them. Since that doesn't happen automatically, I made an author page on Amazon UK and translated my bio into German (that was fun!) and also created my author page on Amazon DE.
Next I dived a bit more into the Goodreads features. I added my blog feed and threw some random books from my memory into my read list. Since the other SF site is not answering concerning the advertising issue, I have now asked Goodreads – they also seem to be offering advertising packages for authors and I'm thrilled what those packages will look like.
19nov11
Well, the advertising is an interesting topic. The site I originally targeted is simply not answering me. Therefore I turned to Goodreads. I filled out a form and told them my monthly advertising budget is 50 to 100$. I got an email back telling me, I can use the self-service ad stuff if my monthly budget is below 2500 USD… Wow. So, for 2500 $ a month they give you a personalized ad campaign I suppose. For anything below that you can use the self service feature. This is what I did now and I have chosen to run a one month campaign for 120 $ because the Yen is so nicely strong at the moment. Lets see if this is worth the pains (and the money).
Busy day, I also ordered one thousand postcards for Dome Child. I used the same company two years ago for my Dark Matters postcards. This time around things went so much smoother and easier – Japanese efficiency. You select the size, paper, amount of cards on their website, hack in your address, upload a zip file for your front and back of the postcard and that was it. I remember doing email attachments and some emails back and forth with them two years ago. Now they just print your stuff and you pay the delivery service person who will bring the cards to you. Impressive.
To continue this day of marketing I also finalized and released my first press release ever. For what it's worth…
20nov11
I've been looking for some more sites where I can post my press release, but have not yet found a site similar to PRlog. Man, there is so much stuff out there.
I also browsed the site of Author Buzz. I wonder whether their services are worth the money… If anybody has experience with them, please let me know.
26nov11
The Goodreads ad does not run all that well I'm afraid. They send me a daily statistics and it says there is an average of 1000 views per day but so far the only one who clicked the ad was myself, haha! The 120 $ seem to get deducted per click. If that is really the case, the ad will be up there for a long while – until those 120 $ are used up? I am not 100% sure yet about that part of the deal.
Nevertheless, this shows the difficulties of marketing. There is just too much stuff out there. How do you persuade people, apart from friends and family, to buy your book? I have a full time job and not the time to surf the net for 8 hours a day and leave comments on 500 blogs… So what do I do instead? Pay a 1000 $ after all for an Author Buzz program? I'm feeling a little bit at a loss at the moment as to what to do marketing wise.
