Reflections on What Worked and What Didn’t

Reflections on Marketing Children of Dreams

Reflections on marketing Children of Dreams brings me to some interesting conclusions. The things I thought initially would be the most effective weren’t. Some of the things that cost nothing except my time were. To focus my efforts on my next book and its marketing, I will share some of my results. Hopefully, I can help another person to make wiser choices about where to invest their efforts, who, like me, may be a new author without huge sums of money to spend.

Children of Dreams was originally written as a memoir and published through print-on-demand (POD).” If you have published a romance fiction or nonfiction book as an expert in some field, or some other type of book, your results may be different using these same marketing strategies.

Now to the Marketing Aspect:

Most of the things I spent a significant amount of money on marketing Children of Dreams, I doubt I would do again. The marketing people will say, “We guarantee exposure, not book sales,” and they have that one right. You can easily Google my name and find twenty or more pages where my name pops up. Based on these results, you might believe I am a best-selling author. I am not. What marketing experts guarantee is exposure, not book sales.

As far as I am concerned, considering that information is now borne out in experience, it makes me much less likely to invest dollars in the future on expensive marketing campaigns.

Some of the methods I used included the following:

1. Email blast. I spent around $250 on an email marketing campaign. I’m not sure I sold a single book out of it, and for that amount of money, not being able to document its success, I feel like it was a waste of money.
2. Email my book cover and relevant information to all libraries and independent bookstores in the United States and Canada. This cost around $400, and again, I’m not sure that I sold a single book from this campaign. Would I do it again? No.
3. RTIR, or Radio-TV Interview Report: Costs around $400. I was promoted two weeks in a row on the radio only and received two radio interviews. I am not aware of a single book that I sold as a result of it. One of the radio stations was in Canada, and one was in the Boston area, I think.

Would I do this again? Yes. I felt that it provided me with a great experience, and I enjoyed being interviewed. I was also able to take one of the interviews from the radio station’s website as an MP3 audio and post it on my website. If I had the money, I would have done the TV portion of the promotion, but it is very expensive and I couldn’t afford it. Perhaps with my next book, instead of wasting money on email campaigns, I will invest it in this marketing venture.

4. Other things I did that were free or inexpensive and more effective in terms of book sales.

Videos: Make lots of videos. I made five and posted them all over the web, not just on YouTube. There are many other video websites, and they get picked up in search engines as if they were magnets. The interview with me personally wasn’t particularly “exciting,” I suppose, but I think what the viewer can see is who I am; my character, and that I am a real, live, living, breathing human being.

Besides, I know the next one will be better because the first one of anything is always the hardest and usually the worst. You are testing the waters, breaking new territory, going where you have never gone before. Experience counts for something.

Book Reviews: I found it very challenging to get friends to post reviews of my book on Amazon.com (or any other platform). Most people, unless they are in the writing or marketing field, are intimidated by the thought of having their words on the web. I submitted free books and e-books to several different sites for free book reviews, which met with only limited success.

Would I send out free books for reviews again? No. Most of them produced no reviews, and it’s likely that they took my free books and advertised them on Amazon.com or eBay. Some of the free eBooks I sent for reviews, however, did produce reviews.

My goal was to get twenty-five reviews on Amazon. When I found it so difficult to get book reviews in a timely manner, I paid for a service that was very reasonable and legitimate, in my opinion, and rounded my review total to twenty-five reviews for five stars.

Was it worth paying for some of the reviews? Absolutely. They were real people who read my book, whom I did not know. I wasn’t paying for five stars. I was paying to have my book read and reviewed, and I don’t mind doing that. I would look at a book that has twenty-five reviews with five stars before a book with only two reviews, even if they are all five stars. I feel this was money well spent.

Also, the inside-the-book program on Amazon is excellent. If I can’t look inside someone’s book and I don’t know the author, I won’t buy the book, plain and simple.

The Masters of Marketing: The elite, the best, I believe, in the U.S. and probably the world, is QVC. I close caption it almost daily and have watched with interest how they can sell so many kinds of products and make millions annually. From hours of captioning, I have observed the following.

The head person of the company actually appears on the network programming (and I mean “the boss”), and they are passionate about their product. They eat it, sleep it, dream it, and whatever else comes to mind. It is their life. I watched an hour of a product that I had absolutely no use for, and by the end of the show, I was convinced that I couldn’t live without it. That is advertising and marketing at its best. If someone can be passionate about cleaning supplies and vacuum cleaners, I better be passionate about my book. Otherwise, I am in trouble.

To sum up what was only going to be a few comments: You must believe in yourself, in what you are writing, and have a passion that never gives up or compromises. Finally, give your book every ounce of tender-loving care that you possibly can. Then it’s your job to be the best writer you can be.

That might mean you need to hire an editor to help you. Then you need to do everything you can to be that excellent writer—attend writer’s conferences, enroll in writing classes, read books about writing, and search the web for all the information you can find. There is also a wealth of free, valuable information available.

Ultimately, your book must contain something that will make a meaningful difference in people’s lives. It’s your job to convince everybody they can’t live without your book. I know that’s easier said than done. But with POD, you have that time. Your book never goes out of print.

Don’t forget, you need a good website, you need to have a blog, you need to be on social networking sites to connect with people, you need to be willing to get out and speak to the public about your book, and you need to get on as many free e-zines from marketing people as you possibly can. There is more I could write, but this is a start.

Am I discouraged I have only sold about two hundred books so far? Hardly. I have the rest of my life as a POD author. I am working on my next book in connection with my Master of Arts in Creative Writing, and I look forward to “meeting” new people on the web, appearing on more radio shows, blogging about things that interest me, and sharing information like I am doing here.

I have complete control over my book, Children of Dreams. I love marketing, and as far as I am concerned, it doesn’t get much better than that. I truly believe the sales will come because I won’t give up. I will continue to write about the things I am passionate about, doing my best to promote good information that people can use. Since we live on a vast planet, with the Internet, I know there are others out there who share my interests. My job is to find them. It’s intriguing to me when I see people have visited my website from as far away as Japan and Israel.

If you have learned anything here, please let me know. Hopefully, my reflections will help you to use your money more wisely in your own marketing campaign. Happy Writing and Marketing in 2010 and beyond.

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