Social Media Marketing Part 2: Fighting for Exposure

It's not even possible to put a number on the ways that there are to utilize Social Networks or the internet to market whatever it is that you do.  Basically, any time you put your name or product out there, isn't that considered marketing?

The problem is that with an infinite number of places and ways to get your name out there, which ones are the most helpful and will yield you the biggest response?  This is something I am currently trying to work through and let me tell you, there aren't enough hours in a day to figure it out any time soon.

I blog.  Obviously you know that because you are here and reading it.  I never did the paid posts thing.  For a while there was a site called "Entrecard" that was sort of like an "I'll stop by your site if you stop by mine" and it drew traffic to your site and somehow made your site more relevant in search engines.

They went away.

I have followers here but to be honest, I follow a lot of sites that I just don't get around to visiting on a daily basis.  Or weekly.  Or monthly.  Heck, I think I follow some sites that I was only on a couple of times and never went back to again.  It wasn't that they were bad sites, but I just don't have the time that I used to.

I tweet.  I have almost 600 followers on Twitter.  Apparently this is a good number.  My son was highly impressed.  So I tweet.  I put out news about my books, promotions, when I need help and people to go to a site and click LIKE for me (curse you Amazon!) but basically, I'm certainly not getting results from each of those nearly 600 people.  

I'm on Facebook.  I'm on there as both me and my alter-ego.  I have over 800 friends on there.  My alter ego has almost 300 likes on the page.  Does that amount to anything?  Not really.  I post all the live-long day about where I need a little help from my friends and you know what I notice?  People will click like all day long on a cartoon or a picture of Grumpy Cat but I can't get nearly the same amount to click on a link for me.

I did Facebook advertising.  I spent a lot of money and got little to no return.  Sure, people looked at my page but that did not equal book sales or likes on the page.  They liked my AD, just not my page.  Awesome.

The funny thing with Facebook is that in order for a page to be a somewhat successful marketing/promotional tool, you have to have a lot of followers from all over the country/world.  If your group is just people who are local to you and you are not getting any help from the locals, don't waste your time promoting anything to these people!  WASTE O TIME!  I don't have time to waste on sites, pages or whatever that aren't going to support of promote me.

I heard of this thing called laddering.  I'm not sure I understand it but it's sort of like the whole Entrecard thing - you like my Facebook page, I'll like yours.  Great, your Likes go up but again, if you aren't promoting me or my product and vice-versa, where is the benefit?  Stats only mean something if it's helping you to promote your business!  You can have 5,000 likes on your products page.  That doesn't mean that 5,000 people have purchased your product.

I'm on Goodreads, Google +, Shelfari, YouTube and more.  And you know what?  I'm spending 3 hours a DAY on getting my name and my book out there and for all of that time and energy (and in some cases, money), it is not equaling book sales.

What am I doing wrong?  We're told that getting the word out, getting your Google rank up, getting your Facebook likes up is all what we should aspire to.  But what good is that high number when nothing is happening for you?

So here's my thought...why am I killing myself on this?  Why am I missing out on family time?  There are over 1,000,000 books on Amazon that I am fighting against.  I'm in the 20,000's.  Not a bad stat after less than a week, right?  But when will Amazon fix it's issues to help their author's who are using them exclusively and put the Like button back?  

In the case of Amazon, that's a stat that I am interested in!  That stupid Like button and the ranking are a very coveted thing!  Why won't they fix it?  Why won't they help the authors whose money they are benefiting from?  Help an indie author out.  Please go to Amazon and click on the link for Ever After and leave me a comment on whether or not your see a like button.  I would love to present them with some stats.

And while you're there, get your copy of "Ever After".

 

 

Countdown to "Ever After"

So we have less than five days to go until the release of my newest book, "Ever After".  I am learning so much about publishing and marketing and promotion and I'm hoping that it will get easier with each book because right now it is still exhausting!

I feel like we are all over the web and very easy to find and follow.  That is truly the best way to market your book.  I am still feeling no love whatsoever from the local community - bookstores, newspapers, etc.  It was kind of depressing at first but then I realized that I want a much bigger audience than they have to offer and so, really, they are doing me a favor.  Plus, they are missing out BIG TIME!  LOL

I was blessed this week by two great websites.  Riley Banks did a wonderful interview with my alter-ego and published it two days ago.  It's titled "Samantha Chase gets her happily 'Ever After'".  Pretty clever right?  You can read it HERE.

Then the wonderful blog, Book Addict Mumma not only is promoting me as the author but is doing a giveaway for the set (The Christmas Cottage AND Ever After)!  You can go to the site HERE and enter for your chance to win the ebook set.

Both of these sites are amazing and it would be greatly appreciated if you shared the links with your friends, too.

So if you're thinking about doing any book marketing and promotion, where should you go?  Well here's the list of where to find me on the web (besides here at All Stace - lol):

Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/SamanthaChaseFanClub 
Twitter:  https://twitter.com/SamanthaChase3
Tumblr:  http://samanthachasewriter.tumblr.com/ 
Website:  http://samanthachaseauthor.com
Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Samantha-Chase/e/B006CZWRGC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

I'll be honest with you, there is about another half dozen sites to go to but these are the main ones.  Check them out, like the pages and mark your calendars for Monday, February 25th, for the release of "Ever After".

New Release Anxiety!

Okay, so here we are, mid-February and it has begun; the pre-launch marketing hooplah for the new book, "Ever After".  I'm not going to lie to you, I really enjoy getting the word out and seeing people share it but this is the first time that I've ever done it PRE release!

When I wrote "Jordan's Return", I sort of just published and waited.  Not a good plan.  Clearly you have to market and promote your book in order for it to sell.  Then with "The Christmas Cottage", it wasn't supposed to be anything but a way to keep my name out there until I possibly heard from the agent in New York on a full-length novel I had written.  My assistant was AMAZING in getting the word out on it and we sold 15,000 copies of it in the e-book format!

Not too shabby!

So now here we are with "Ever After".  The release date is February 25th and we want to hit the marketing bandwagon hard so that we generate excitement and get people ready to purchase.  I am not going to lie to you, I would LOVE to match the number of sales that we had with "The Christmas Cottage" and even surpass them.  Realistically?  I'm not sure that lightning will strike twice.

So what's a writer to do?

Well, we keep moving forward.  Each book is it's own entity.  I have learned that sometimes even your favorite author - whose work you love - can sometimes put out a book that is less than stellar.  I can name a few right now but I'm not going to.  That just wouldn't be right.  I'm not here to bash anyone, I'm just saying that even the best writers can't put out books that are awesome all of the time.  All I can do is sit and wait and pray that people will enjoy it.

We're hitting the Samantha Chase fan page hard; I'm hitting my own personal Facebook page hard.  I will be blogging, I will be using Twitter.  My son is making me a Tumblr page and basically, anywhere and everywhere that I can get the word out about "Ever After", the better.  You know where I CAN'T promote the book right now??  Amazon!  The one place that will be primarily selling the book will not let me do any pre-launch, pre-release stuff on it!  How wrong is that??

Won't you help spread the word too?  Tell your friends!  Share the links!  Share this post!!  Send them to the Facebook fan page.  Let's make the week of February 25th a huge success!!

 

Free Book Marketing With Ask David...

So in my constant quest to be an Indie author with a successful book, the main thing that I have to keep at (besides writing!) is the marketing.  As I've mentioned in previous posts, this is exhausting.  It's time consuming at after working a full day at a full-time job, I hardly have time to come home and spend time with my family before I have to be back in front of the computer writing and marketing to keep the book out there.

We are closing in at the five week mark since "The Christmas Cottage" was released and the sales have been impressive.  I'm not ready to quit my day job or anything but I have been thrilled with the response to the book.  So while I was searching for ways to promote the book on my limited budget, I came across askDavid.com.  What's askDavid.com?  Here's a blurb from their site:

About this site
This site promotes books and publishes reviews submitted by the community. In order to ensure high quality, all reviews are manually checked before they are published. Only reviews are accepted which can not be found elsewhere on the web. So far there are 3994 reviews published.  

Basically, I submitted the required information on "The Christmas Cottage" and askDavid.com will promote it through their Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and the like to get the word out to more people than I possibly could.  Sweet, right?

Here's a listing of what benefits askDavid guarantees:

- We will create a book promotion page for each of your books

- We will link to your website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest sites

- If there is a video on YouTube related to the book, we will display it

- We will display your profile picture if you want

- Users will write reviews of your book – you can quote them on your website

- You get automatic notifications of new reviews of your book

- Social Marketing:  visitors promote your book on Facebook, Google+, Twitter & Pinterest

- We will send a tweet about your book to our 8400 followers on Twitter

- This all will create awareness about your books which leads to more sales

- We link to you book’s Amazon page so visitors can easily buy your book

I am just signing up and getting started but I am very excited to see what kind of results we get for "The Christmas Cottage".  I am getting ready to start on the follow up book and won't have as much time to do marketing myself so I am looking forward to having more help.

I'll keep you posted on my progress! 

Social Media Marketing

This whole experience lately has been a learning process. What I figure out daily is exhausting.  I can now understand why people figured out that they can charge for this service and people will pay for it.

Social media marketing.

I am telling you, a year ago when I published my first book I figured I'd put it up on Amazon, tell some friends and word would spread like wildfire.

It did not.

I learned to list it wherever I could, blog about it, put it on Facebook and Twitter but it's not the kind of thing that can only be done once.  It has to be done DAILY.  Several times a day.  On multiple websites.  All. Day.  Long.  In the last year I have found quite possibly hundreds of sites that are for book reviews and reviewers, discussion boards about books, places where you can list your book (some for free, some not so much)...it would take quite possibly a month to just catalog all of the sites and figure out which ones will give you the most exposure.

As much as I love Amazon, I'm not feeling like I'm getting a whole lot of anything from them.  If anything, they've sort of stalled my progress.  I've had reviews removed because, to them, they seemed like the writer of the review was too personally close to me.  So basically they are saying that people who know me, who BUY the book and like it, cannot write a review unless it is something basic like "Loved it!"  Now don't get me wrong, I would love to have about a hundred "Loved it"'s on the site but that's not happening right now and I can't obsess about it.  So although they are getting money from my book, they aren't doing anything to help it sell.

Where is the logic in that?

Twitter is still a mystery to me.  I don't spend a whole lot of time on it.  I have almost 400 followers (and you can follow me HERE) but I wonder, do any of these people really read what I'm tweeting?  I just really started doing the tweeting about a month ago so in the world of Twitter, I have relatively few "tweets"; I'm rectifying it now.  But I know for me, I don't have time to sit and read the tweets of the nearly 800 people that I follow!  So how does this benefit me?  I don't know.

I have a Facebook fan page for my author persona.  Samantha Chase has 51 followers.  That makes me a little sad but the numbers are growing a little bit more ever week.  It's another slow process.  Every day, several times a day, I post the progress of the book or something about what's going on in my "career" but it's nothing exciting.  I have a website but a friend designed it and it's too complex for me to update and so it's a little stagnant right now - all of the Jordan's Return stuff is all over it; very beach themed and sort of clashes with the whole Christmas thing I've got going on right now.

I would love to get on a blog roll of some sort.  I need the exposure but there are some long waiting lists to get on them.  The other day I was a featured author on addictedtoebooks.com and I've got another site that is interested in doing an interview with me.  These are all great things but it's searching them out and again, figuring out who is going to get me the most exposure that I'm trying to figure out.

The local newspaper is supposed to get back to me about an interview and I have a display in a local bookstore...back in the day, these would be great things but local advertising really doesn't do much for you.  We have another local bookstore here in town that won't carry the book until he sits and talks with me.  That's going to take another week and being that the book is Christmas themed, I kind of feel like the time is NOW to get it out there.  No one has the urgency that I do and I'm growing frustrated with it.

So what have I learned?  I've learned that even well-known, multi-published authors have to do their own marketing.  Most of them have assistants to do that for them because the publishers are not doing it.  There is no magic fast-track to climbing the chart when you are a new indie author.  You still get blocked by the big guys.  So I sit and I wait, not so patiently, for my turn.  It can happen.

Daily Amazon Update:  #59 on Amazon's Best Seller List for Contemporary Women's Fiction and #1101 in Kindle downloads.  We're still moving up and it still feels great!  But I wouldn't turn down some more "Likes" and maybe a review or two...just saying...