Companies You Like

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Everyone has been telling me that it's all about promoting yourself and the material.

[Ddrak]

I hear Pirate Bay is promoting people at the moment.

Dd

[Alluveal]

Freecare, I think it can be about that, yeah. Konrath actually has some good advice on promoting your work, but it doesn't always work his way for everyone.

In all honesty, I think the best way to get people to read your stuff is to pay frequent reviewers to read your book. That can get some great attention (and you can see these reviewers have a LOT of reviewing under their belt), it's not just some ghost account created to spam-review.

But, the link that Harlowe gave made a solid point. The author was very proud of her work and thinks she wrote a pretty damn solid manuscript. If she's writing for the Huffington Post, then she has some writing skills here. If you write crap and contact these reviewers to review your work, well, they might give you shit reviews.

Let's say I get an agent and procure a deal. My Marketing will consist of paying some frequent amazon reviewers to read my work and give honest reviews. In truth, you don't want a book that has a 5 star rating. Most books, even great ones, will fall in the 3.5-4.5 territory, so a few mediocre reviews aren't going to hurt you.

I also have solicited an artist to draw scenes and characters from the book and my husband is working on music so that I can put it all together for a kick ass book trailer. Most book trailers suck the pie, so I want mine to be full of winning. Blog posting. Tweeting. I still need to look into internet advertising like google ads and whatnot. Should I get a few thousand dollars advance, that'll likely go into marketing and PR (above and beyond what my agency, publisher are already doing).

That's my ideal scenario. Of course, it could all fall through and I might consider self-pubbing. We'll see. I'm definitely going to exhaust all traditional routes first. Many of the agents I've been researching are folks who are dabbling in ebook sales as well, so I'd like someone who will have print and digital ties here.

We'll see! I need to finish the damn thing first. I'm plugging away, but looking at completely rewriting the first 1/3rd. I do feel like it has legs, so I'm pushing hard to get it done. When I have a tolerable draft complete, I may pester some hard-core readers here to see if they'd be beta readers for me.

Free, I think what your sister is doing is so fuggin' fascinating. Can't wait to hear more. Does she have a blog or anything right now where she talks about this stuff?

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Starting a specially devoted thread to this