Giveaways make people feel like they are getting more bang for their purchase. It’s a way to offer an incentive to the customer to purchase your book, and reward those who were probably going to purchase it anyway.
As a writer, my primary product is storytelling. I can dabble in videos like this jokey one we filmed in the snow
and sell promotional posters like this but let’s face it, those things are not my primary focus. Since I am an author first and foremost, my product is a book. The best giveaways to promote what I do are going to be books.
Of course economically, giving way books isn’t always going to make sense. But there are other ways to give out your writing. In part one, I talked about maintaining a blog that offered free material. Another idea is to offer a free download of a complete story. It can be a short story, a e-book novella or a full-length novel. The idea is to reward people for purchasing the book.
Here’s one way it can work. If you sell the books yourself, send out a download link (zip files and pdf documents are the standard for book downloads) to your buyers. They save the files to their computer and read them at their leisure. It’s definitely not as sophisticated as a book reader like the kindle but your customers will still recognize it as a value-added component of the sale.
Another way is to ask them to e-mail their purchase receipt to an e-mail address you own. You set up the autoresponder to send them back an automated message which includes the ebook link to download. Whether they choose to participate is up to them, but it offers your customers a reward for their loyalty. And the workload on your part is manageable. (If your e-mail skills are subpar you could respond to each e-mail individually).
One caveat to all of this: Whatever you offer electronically, whether it’s hosted on a website, or included in a download, you have to assume it could be shared around the world. There is just no realistic expectation of keeping people from sharing it. And why would you want to?
One simple and effective way to promote yourself is to offer a free sample of your writing. Excerpts are not only easy to put together, but your more avid readers expect to see one.
Amazon does book previews once your title is available for sale, but you can also do it yourself. If you aren’t familiar with the technical aspects of creating .pdf documents, you might want to talk to someone who is (you can always use the contact form to e-mail me and I’ll do my best to help). However, generally speaking, your digital sample needs to have:
1) An introduction page that clearly states the book title, the author’s name and contact information on how to purchase the book.
3) A 7-10 page sample from your work
2) A concluding page that restates how to buy the book
It’s best to use the professional design that you using in the book’s interior instead of just formatting your excerpt in a Microsoft Word document. The consistent look helps your reader make the connections between the excerpt and the title. Of course, this depends on whether you have access to your book’s files. Once you have your sample put together, you can then link to the digital download from your website and let people know it’s available.
Hopefully, people will get a sense of your writing style and what might be in the book – and intrigued enough to buy it. Want to see what an excerpt might look like? You can download one by clicking on this link. Note, most computers today can unzip a file even if you don’t use specific zip software.
An excerpt isn’t the only way though. You can also create a webpage with the specific intention of writing in the style similar to what is in your book. For instance, idontdozombies.com is a “blog-like” fiction tale that actually takes place between two books. In this case, the blog helps bridge the gap between the original title and its sequel and keep your fans interested and invested while you are crafting your next book. It also gives potential new readers a chance to experience your writing without spending any money.
Finally, another idea that might make sense for you is to give away an entire book. You will need to figure out if it’s a cost effective way to advertise and if you have the resources to distribute the free books. People always appreciate something free, but what are you getting in return? Did they sign up for your mailing list? Did they agree to fill out a survey? Will they buy your next book? A lot of new authors can’t afford to give away their books. It is simply not a viable business plan. However, if you are creative enough, maybe you can find away to give away a book and get something in return.
It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But how do you know if it works? (Click here for part one or part two of this article)
There are some obvious answers. 1) It works if your friends forward your message to other friends and their friends forward it on to people who you would never reach otherwise. For instance, the best viral videos get 100,000 hits or more, usually within the first few days. 2) If you have a subscriber-based service (like a podcast or mailing list) you can measure success in the increase in subscribers that you gain and keep. 3) The most obvious of all: did you see a spike in sales?
Depending on how technology-savvy you are, you can gather a lot of hard data on the success of your campaign. You can track the number of times an e-mail was forwarded. You can google search for your campaign keywords and see how many results pages come up related to your viral campaign. You can use some facebook metrics to track the popularity of your fan page. You can use twitter search to look at the trends for your particular keywords (by the way, trend tracking is available even if your keywords aren’t appearing a lot – they do not have to be in the top ten most popular trending topics for you to track them). In addition to that, your website can have a hit counter, google has its own analytic package, and you may be able to track clicks through any of the social networking tools you end up using.
Here’s a strong caveat: if you have to beg your friends to help viral your message, then you already don’t have a strong campaign message. It doesn’t hurt to ask them to spread the message along, but the true success of viral marketing is to get other people to do the work for you. Remember, what you have at its core is a word of mouth campaign. The success of your campaign is grounded in your ability to create a message that people want to share on your behalf. You are capitalizing on a culture of endorsement for your product. Whether you achieve that through humor or creating a thought-provoking message or some other catch that makes your pitch shine, it is really the power of your message that propels it to viral stardom. But the vehicle that takes you there is other people’s interest.
__ Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But how does it work?
A viral campaign at its heart is a word of mouth campaign. (Click here for part one of this article) You create a message to advertise your product and send it out to as many people as possible. The vitality of your campaign depends on those people then forwarding your message on to others – specifically potential customers you wouldn’t reach otherwise.
To design a campaign, you first need to look at the specifics of the product you are selling, the time available to produce the message, the resources available and how best to reach your target audience (since you should always pitch to them first). Start by writing down your top-level outcomes. For most of us it would be “to interest new customers in purchasing my product” but there could be other outcomes for you as well. Perhaps your outcomes are “to get people to sign up for my mailing list” or “to announce a special sale starting soon.”
Then decide how you want to get the message out to potential customers. Videos, weblinks, comic strips, podcasts, and sound clips are all viable viral vehicles for your campaign messages. But it helps to work within a medium that you are comfortable with. Videos tend to be looked on as a universal medium for viral marketing, but if you don’t know the first thing about putting together an effective video message then you might want to start somewhere else.
Once you’ve have decided what kind of message you are going to create, you need to figure out how to present your pitch. It helps to create an outline or even a storyboard to plan out how your message is going to look, feel or even sound. Then look at the overall scope of your campaign and ask yourself:
1) Does the message make sense for the product?
The best campaigns not only make obvious connections to the product, but the campaign actually makes sense for the product being pitched. Dancing babies are great, but what do they have to do with what you are selling?
2) Is there a clear call to action?
A call to action is a specific instruction for the customer to take action after viewing the message. It can be to direct them to a sales website. It can be “come by our store today.” It should be very specific and it should match your top-level outcomes.
3) Is the message eye-catching?
This is the short-attention span generation. You need something within your message to get your audience to immediately take notice. The good news is that for viral campaigns, it’s not necessary to keep their attention for very long.
So what happens if your product isn’t glamorous, exciting or particular flashy? What happens if you don’t know the first thing about marketing? What happens if you just are not familiar with the technology to start a viral campaign? Then ask yourself:
1) Is this the type of marketing project I should be embarking on at all?
2) Should I pay someone to do the work for me?
3) Do I have the time and resources to complete the campaign myself?
My recommendation is to create a sample message – short and sweet – as a test run. For instance, create a 20-second video clip using your phone’s video recorder and post the video to YouTube. Ask your friends to watch the clip and provide some feedback. Or draw out a comic strip with your pitch and post it online. Ask people to leave comments about it.
By trying it out, you also take the process from start to finish and possibly identify some pitfalls that maybe you weren’t aware of. Here’s one that you may not have thought of: what if Facebook isn’t working the day you want to link to your campaign on the site? Technology fails all the time, websites go down, internet connections are lost. A test-run gives you the opportunity to see where things might go wrong before you spend a lot of time and energy on a large-scale campaign. I would also recommend keeping a list of all the things that may not have worked the way you expected them to so you can plan for it next time.
Finally, before you move on to a full-blown campaign, ask yourself:
1) Is it clear what I am selling?
2) Is it clear how to purchase my product?
3) Is it visually interesting?
4) Am I achieving my top-level outcomes?
If the answers are ‘no’ then tweak your campaign. Once you are comfortable with your test message, it’s time to move on to the full-length pitch.
Part three will look at how to measure the success of your viral campaign.
__ Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But does it work?
Viral marketing is a word of mouth campaign using one of the various free social networking sites, of which facebook, youtube and twitter are probably the most heavily played to. You post a link or a video to the site and your friends share the link with their friends and you’re in business. Instantaneous increase in your potential audience ten-fold.
But does it work?
Viral marketing, whether it’s a video or a web link or a photograph, relies on volume. It requires buy-in on a scale beyond your circle of friends and their circle of friends. It works by the sheer numbers, the likelihood that if you can reach enough people, someone is going to buy.
Viral marketing is completely contrary to the notions of conventional marketing. The whole point of marketing is to focus in on your target demographic and pinpoint your advertising to people who show a bent for buying your product. You aren’t marketing to make friends, gain fans or followers. You are trying to convert sales. Most viral marketing is completely untargeted. The people receiving your message may not be the ones you are trying to reach.
But does it work?
In a sense, word of mouth is the best way to sell a product. Unsolicited testimonials are hands-down the most effective type of marketing. Viral marketing taps into the notion by having your friends recommend to their friends whatever you’re selling.
But the untargeted nature of viral marketing means that your message may get lost along the way. You may be missing a call to action that urges people to make the purchase. As long as facebook and youtube and twitter are free, the only cost to you is your time. So yes, if you can make sales by this means and had minimal or no costs to launch a campaign, then the return on your investment has the potential to be high.
In part two, we’ll look at some ways to maximize your viral campaign. In part three, we’ll look at ways to measure your success.
__ Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
I recently completed and then shelved a writing project because it was missing something. Well, let’s face it, if you had read it you might have suggested it was missing a few somethings. My editor did.
That’s how it goes that even when you know what needs to be there, you can spend months writing and still not quite capture it all.
But these really aren’t nebulous components. While it does depend on what kind of story you are writing, unless you are James Joyce, you are virtually required to include the following: Someone to Love
The word protagonist is sometimes defined as “the hero” and sometimes more simply as the central character of the story. But it’s not enough for you to create a central figure around which everything rotates. Your book has to have a character your reader can love and admire.
A lot of writers get halfway there but then fail to make the spark. Whether you treat your character like an old friend, a lover or a parental figure, you have to inspire absolute devotion in your reader. It’s just like real life; you are a lot more invested when you care about the person.
In the book I wrote, I’m not sure I ever quite got there with my main character. I liked him, but even in 150 pages, I never quite connected with why you should like him, too.
And someone to hate
The best stories have the best villains. I’m not a big fan of the notion that villains need to have that nugget of goodness on the inside. If it makes them more interesting, go for it. Just remember, your villain’s job is to antagonize. Not just the other characters, but the reader too.
Does every story really have to have an antagonist?
One of the biggest flaws of my work was the missing villain. My character was mad at the world and he took it out on his friends. So I never quite settled on who was the bad guy. Was it him? Was it “the world”? Was it his friends even? You know, it doesn’t necessarily matter who the bad guy ended up being, but the fact that I didn’t know the answer pointed out a huge problem.
Storytelling of all types is about creating a bubble of empathy. Your job is to transport the reader into this world so completely that it blankets out the real world. While they are reading the book, they are in the book. It always, always, always starts with the characters.
A central thread
For the work that I shelved, I never fully developed the thread. I know that more than anything else, I was missing the core that kept all the individual chapters bound together.
I’ll give you an example. Dungeons and Dragons has been the template for epic fantasy since Lord of the Rings was published in the 50’s. (The series of books based on Dungeons and Dragons is officially called Dragonlance). If you pick up any of those titles, the books are massive tombs filled with dozens of central characters each with their own stories to tell.
But the brilliance of the works is that any one individual book has its central thread that you can trace from the first pages to the last – regardless of how many characters come and go, how many different locations they travel to or how many pages the book is.
For most books, the central thread is the plot. It’s the answer to the question ‘What is the book about?’ But it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes the connecting thread is a dominant theme or a character. Writers need to be more skillful to pull this off. But ultimately, think of it as the wick in the center of a candle. Without one, there is nothing to burn.
My work is shelved not because it lacked a central thread, but because I wasn’t skillful enough to pull it off. It’s hard to invest so much time into a project and then abandon it, but it’s important to know when it’s not good enough at that time. There may come a point when I dust it off the shelve and try again with that story. I now know what’s missing, I just need to make sure next time I get it all in there.
__ Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
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