The Dirty Deeds continues. There is much to cover in terms of Marketing With Attitude. Have a gander and I hope this helps with your endeavors:
Marketing With
Attitude
or
Practical Tips for
Indie Authors
by Robert W. Walker,
author of 56 Kindle titles, 33 audible.com titles
Trust me, Marketing Responsibly
can be a barrel of fun, if one comes at it with the right attitude. It helps if
you are, or have ever been, a closet Advertising Executive. It helps if you
have a steady stream of creative and inventive ideas streaming through your
skull or if ideas are being channeled through your fevered brain by the
deceased creator of The Pillsbury Dough Boy or the Ajax Dutch girl.
You definitely want to approach selling of your book with a
proper good emotional high that involves convincing yourself that it can be
done, and then going about doing the job.
Indie authors are lucky today as never before. With the ease
of a keystroke nowadays we can access our book on a site like Amazon.com/Kindle
and place our book cover and description onto our Facebook wall or pin it to
Pinterest or add it to our Twitter feed. This is tempting in and of itself, and
historic in and of itself, but don’t do it without flare.
How can one add flare to a post about one’s own book? First
get into character—the one you conjured up to pitch your book; the one who
wrote the book’s dynamic description. Own that character as the way to book
sales. You wrote copy for your book when you did the book description. You put
copy-writer hat on for that. Now it’s sales marketer hat.
It all begins with humor and insider information that only
you have ready access to. Information about your book and a self-deprecating
attitude toward your book. First off, do not be afraid to poke fun at your own
title or your genre. People love an author who can make himself the butt of the
joke.
In addition, everyone loves a clever SEGWAY and a good joke.
Use humor. Especially self-deprecating humor. For example, I might call my Instinct
serial killer series “palatable—raw yet crunchy and binding” followed by a
hehehe or an LOL. Else post a line in the story that might get a laugh, or a
bit of dialogue that might be humorous. I will also make jokes surrounding the
genre. A specific example here: Speaking
of my title Werewolf’s Grief, I might easily joke thusly: “And you thought only Charlie Brown
experienced GRIEF. It’s not easy being hairy all over.” The fine line between
humor and horror is as thin or as thick as blood. 50 Shades of Blood Read
Orange. You get the picture. Utilize what is current, what is in the hopper.
Read Orange not Red Orange. “Blood Red is the New Black.”
Another approach to getting a look-see at your opening pages
via the peek inside the book on Amazon.com for Indie authors is to work with
your platform or one of the issues
raised in your book. If autism, for example, is a part of the storyline or
child homelessness or the supernatural, or if said issue has a part in the list
of characters, highlight and emphasize the issues close to your heart in your
ads. These issues would not be in your book if not important to you, and if
important to you, then they will be important to others.
Finally, the tried, the true, the clichéd are all wonderful
boons to crafting clever commentary surrounding your gem of a book. A quick run
through of a book of clichés could really help here, but I simply use print
magazines. Pick up lines, I call them. “A book is a terrible thing to
waste…” or “Here is your book, here is
your book on speed!” Open any magazine
and scan the advertisements for any and all products, be it cereal or soap or
electronics. Clever advertisers utilize that which is familiar. Familiar comes
from the collective unconsciousness ala
family. Familiar is warm and cozy.
A familiar line such as “The Sky is Falling” actually fits
in my Pure Instinct where the sky indeed is predicted to fall and it
does. So I’ve utilized the phrase for that title. You see an ad for Campbell’s
Soup that reads: “It warms you to the bone” but for my suspense novel it reads:
“It WARNS you to the bone.” I often cite the “Surgeon General’s Warning”
against reading my books while anywhere but below covers, and certainly to not
listen to one of my audiobooks while driving.
A familiar turn of phrase or new twist on one is an
immediate attention getter, and that is what all advertising is meant to do –
get attention for your book. So you find
an ad in a magazine for a muscle car that reads – “Finally, a car with real
muscle and torch.” You rewrite it for
your sales ad to:
“Finally, a book with
muscle, torch, and verve enough for the most jaded reader.” Almost any print ad can be helpful in posting thusly. I suspect
you can find between 5 to 10 ads in a single magazine that you can apply to
your book. With magic marker, mark out the word CAR and replace it with Book or
your title or Novel.
Without a dime out of pocket, these three steps have helped
sell many of my books. Set your timer. Go on social media for a set time, visit
your book on Amazon, keystroke the link for other venues and ADD your AD.
Remember keep a positive and humorous attitude. People respond to confident and
positive and humorous and clever approaches to selling any product. Why not the
same with a book?
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