Promoting Erotic Fiction -- Ideas for self-promo & for working together w/ multiple authors

Ann_Mayburn

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Buying Ads on Blogs

If you are going to buy and ad on a blog, I would HIGHLY suggest you make sure that link goes to your website page where you have the book and all the buy links. Why? Because that way you can see if you're getting any actual clicks from that blog leading to your page. Yes you may sell some books because of that ad and the reader going directly to Amazon, etc, but if you aren't getting any traffic from that blog you know that no one is paying attention to your ad there and know that in the future you should probably invest your money elsewhere.
 

Ann_Mayburn

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Book Giveaways During Blog Hops/Whatever

If you chose to do a giveaway of your book to a commenter, don't make it the newest release and/or the book you're promoting. Do a giveaway of the readers choice from your backlist. Steer them to your website and give them the opportunity to really look at your books and pick what they like. At the very least they'll have an idea of what it is you've written.


--to piggyback on what Ms LaylaCakes said, you must remember that being an author is a marathon, not a sprint. Make sure whatever you do for promo it isn't burning you out and taking all of your energy. Your next book is ALWAYS the best promo you can do for yourself. Ever. --
 

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You can definitely get away with not having any of the above, but here's how I would rank the various social media outlets - Blog, Twitter, Facebook - in terms of utility.

1) According to my wordpress stats, there are people who land on my blog (blog hop, link from different blog, twitter, google) who then click on buy links. I can't confirm that they ended up buying (no sales data yet), but I do know they went to amazon/b&n/Goodreads after they dropped by my blog. Some also click on links to the reviews posted about my book. As such, I do think a website/blog is worth having as a landing point for people researching book purchases (one need not blog everyday...just have pertinent links)

2) I mainly use Twitter to network with other authors and review sites. The most useful aspect of it is when other authors I'm following get reviewed, it pops up on my twitter feed (I do the same - I link to a new favorable review if I get them). This helped me build a list of places to submit review requests where I have a slim chance of getting accepted (so many review sites aren't accepting requests, some have really long waiting lists, etc.). I also tweet my blog posts, which leads people to my blog, where I try to lure them with strategically placed cover art that leads to buy links :D (I sound so mercenary right now...oh well).

3) I have a facebook page mainly because Wordpress and Rafflecopter don't like each other, so I need a place to run a Rafflecopter giveaway my wordpress blog can link to (I've invested too much effort into my wordpress page to switch to blogger...). It also lets me join groups using my author page instead of my real name. Otherwise, I haven't been able to leverage it and I would love to hear how people have used it successfully.

That said, are any of the above time investments yielding viable royalties? Nope. Not even close. I think the idea is that you're getting your pen name out there and as you build up a back list, people are more likely to buy your book. It's a really really really long game that we're playing *sigh*, and it's so easy to lose steam.

Thank you. It's good to see the pros/cons. I need to make my website work a little harder I think.

You and Ann are right, too. It can get really time consuming and a little disheartening if you can't track what's effective and what isn't. Just write becomes the only calming option.
 

thethinker42

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Multi-author anthologies are good promo, too. Look around for submissions calls with various epublishers, and submit some short stories. This will give you a foot in the door with the publisher's audience as well as any fans of other authors in the anthology, especially if you wind up in a book with a well-known author. It doesn't cost you any money, just the time and effort it takes to produce a story and go through the editing process, so it's absolutely worthwhile.
 

amergina

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There are some weekly blog hops that I do, one being sneak peek Sunday. The first week I posted an excerpt from by book, I got several sales on amazon the next day. But I find that you also have to take the time to comment on other folks posts.

(I do SFF Saturday on my non pen name blog, since that one is PG excerpts only)

I keep my eye out for other opportunities, like Fil does. I still think the best thing I can do is get a back list. I've not gotten many reviews, and I think that's mainly because I'm unknown.
 

thethinker42

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I keep my eye out for other opportunities, like Fil does. I still think the best thing I can do is get a back list. I've not gotten many reviews, and I think that's mainly because I'm unknown.

A backlist is definitely your best bet. The more books you put out, the more people will see you. As has been discussed in the Bordello, I've often heard the magic number is 7: once you have 7 titles out, you can usually expect to see a pretty solid uptick in backlist sales every time you put out a new book. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I did find it to be true with both of my pen names once they each hit their 7th title. And even if your sales are slow for your first 5, 10, 20 titles, all it takes is for one to really take off, and the rest will pick up too.

For that matter, sequels can drive sales too. Obviously you don't want to write one unless the story lends itself to a sequel, but if there's potential for one, it's worth exploring. One of my sequels turned out to be my bestseller by a significant margin, and the sales of its prequel (which had been out for about 15 months when the sequel was released and had sold fairly well) tripled within a few months.
 

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I'm interested in whatever anyone can tell me. I've done pretty much zero advertising for myself other than what my publisher told me to do, because I am terrified of making a poor impression. My latest scheme is writing a free novel on my blog, but I have so little traffic I doubt it will do much. I have requested reviews, but the only site I have tried so far is Jessewave and nothing has come of it yet. They did say they would send out the blurbs of some of my books to their reviewers, which is as much as I can hope for.

The ideas of blog hops and such sound cool, but I wouldn't know where to start, really. I found a site called the GLBT bookshelf and tried to register, but haven't gotten the email that I was apparently supposed to get that lets me put up my author information.

I really fail at this stuff.

I will say, though, that despite being a marketing moron I have pretty steady, though not stellar, sales. I have the magic number 7 books released, and each time I released a new one my sales spiked. I'm trying to do the marketing thing while I work on my next avalanche of books, but it seems like my time might be better spent just writing faster.
 

thethinker42

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How to do a blog tour:

Contact some blogs that review or otherwise discuss your genre (can be as general as M/M or romance, or can be as specific as vampires, menage, etc). Don't be afraid to ask other authors. Also, don't be afraid to hit up smaller blogs with light traffic; you can drive traffic to their blog, and they can drive traffic towards your book.

Tell the owner you have a book coming out, and would like to arrange a blog tour. Your best bet is to do this well in advance (at least 3-4 weeks) to make sure they have space. Popular sites like Cup of Porn are very popular and book way ahead of time, so you might contact those the second you have a release date for your book.

Once you have a list of blog slots secured, write your posts. They can be anything, really. I have a hell of a time coming up with topics, but you can't go wrong with an excerpt, a character interview, a few paragraphs about how the book came to be, or something like that. If a host is willing to do an interview, that's perfect (plus you don't have to think of a topic for that stop!). (Also, if you find a particular "type" of post -- i.e., a character interview -- works really well during one tour, absolutely use it during the next one!)

Submit all your posts to the blog hosts at least a week in advance to give them time to put them up. (Some may require that you send them in sooner. Make sure you know the rules for each blog, and send your posts in on time.)

A few days before the tour starts, announce it on your own blog, and list what stops will happen when and if there will be a prize or something for people who comment (highly recommended). Then put the links up for each stop as soon as you have them.

Tweet and post on Facebook for each stop. (I recommend one tweet in the morning, then a second in the evening to cover your followers in other time zones, but no more.)

Make sure you stop in and comment too! Respond to people who've commented, thank the host for having you, etc. Engage readers.

And don't forget to draw your winner at the end.
 

thethinker42

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How to do a blog hop:

In general, at least from what I've gathered, a blog hop differs from a blog tour in that it's multiple authors instead of a single author on various sites.

For example, let's say I decided to do a blog hop with Filigree, A.P.M, Amergina, and Fallen.

Day one: I would post on Filigree's blog. At the end of the post, I would link to A.P.M.'s blog.
Day two: Filigree would post on A.P.M.'s blog. At the end of her post, she would link to Amergina's blog.
And so forth.

Like a blog tour, a prize is a great incentive for readers to follow the hop. And with multiple authors, you can wind up with a pretty big prize. I did one last year where the prize was an ebook from every author who participated. We ended up with a long list of participating authors, and the prize was huge. Needless to say, we all saw a jump in our blog traffic.

So how do you do it?

Easy.

Contact a bunch of authors. Tell them you want to do a blog hop with some sort of connected theme (a holiday, books of a similar genre, a season, etc). Once you have a confirmed group of authors, decide who's posting on whose blog and when. Send out a schedule to the whole group. Usually the authors will contact each other work out specifics (i.e., in the example above, I'd contact Filigree for how she'd want my post formatted, but wouldn't need to contact Amergina since we wouldn't be posting consecutively).

Make sure you post your guest's post on time, and make sure the link is active to take the reader to the next blog in the hop.

That's it. :) Now you have a blog hop.
 

thethinker42

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Contests and giveaways.

Let's face it: people like free stuff, yo. They also like fun stuff. So...fun giveaways are awesome.

One of my favorite things (and I haven't done this in a while, but I need to) is what I call my Ridiculously Easy Giveaways. I offer up a prize, which is usually a choice of ebooks off my backlist, or a signed paperback. Depends on what I have handy, what I've recently released, etc. How do they win? By answering a ridiculously easy question. Something like, "What color shirt are you wearing?" I'm not kidding when I say it's ridiculously easy. I'll also pose questions like "What's your favorite menage combo?", which gives me a sneaky peeky into what readers want. Or if I'm feeling exceptionally silly, "Tell me something outlandish about yourself (lying is encouraged - be creative!)". The winner of that one had a Pomeranian named Cujo. Sometimes the winner is randomly drawn, sometimes they win based on their answer, and sometimes I'll do both (a creative answer wins, and so does a random one).

On my Riptide blog tours, one of my staple posts now is a "Fact or Crap" post. I'll list ten "facts" about the current release, and readers have to guess which two facts are actually crap. I make them pretty challenging, so the prize is a free ebook to anyone who gets one right, and two ebooks to anyone who gets both right (plus everyone who answers at all is entered in the overall drawing for the blog tour). Those posts have gotten a very positive response. To give you an idea of how they work, here are the Fact or Crap posts for The Left Hand of Calvus and Something New Under the Sun.

Mass giveaways are your friend. I recently did a giveaway on my blog where I gave away over 30 M/M books to readers who'd never tried the genre before. Nearly every author I asked was more than happy to donate, PLUS they helped to promote the giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, and their own blogs. That giveaway brought nearly 800 hits to my blog (I have a handful of posts that have broken 400-500, but most are usually 20-50).

So those are some ideas for contests and giveaways.

The keys to keep in mind when putting together a giveaway:
1. Make it worth the reader's while (a cool prize, like a book or something).
2. Make it FUN. It can be hard (the Fact or Crap posts usually are), but it should be fun.
 

KimJo

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I've done blog tours, but I didn't see much payoff from it. In some cases, the host of the blog didn't do any promo for my post whatsoever; it was all on me. And I have trouble wrapping my head around the concept of having to promote my promotions, so the blog tours just plain didn't work for me. I had the same problem doing guest appearances on other authors' blogs and hosting other authors on mine (I would promote the guests I hosted, but they wouldn't bother promoting their posts.)

On the other hand, I've had a lot of success doing blog *hops*, because everyone involved promotes the hop, and I sign up for ones that have a central site listing everyone's links. I promote my own post, which links to the central site, and everyone else does the same with their own posts, and everyone wins.

For 2013, I've decided to only do blog hops and guest spots on either group blogs or non-author blogs (like review blogs, etc.). Some of the review blogs and industry blogs with great traffic offer guest spots and interviews to authors; I just signed up to do a guest post on my birthday in June on the All Romance Ebooks Cafe, for example. And some of the sites that review my books have asked if I wanted to do an interview/guest post to go along with a review they were doing.

Other promo that has worked for me: Facebook and Twitter. I know it doesn't work for everyone, but for me it does because I have *conversations* there. Of course I post new release links, and once in a while I pimp a backlist book there, but about 90% of my posts and tweets are along the lines of "Wow, it's cold out!" or, "Uh oh, Tobias and Kyle are fighting" (which was a status/tweet I posted the other day about the book I'm currently working on). I also sometimes share/retweet other authors' stuff, which builds some goodwill and some reciprocity. When one of my favorite YA authors, who has something like 10K followers, retweets my new release announcement because I did the same for her (even though I only have 410 followers)...that's huge.

I second whoever recommended Love Romances Cafe. The Yahoo loop gets a lot of traffic, and they also have a Facebook group with specific promo days (for example, Monday is general promo, Wednesday is "post your best cover", etc.) Dawn Roberto, who runs the joint, also reviews books, and she recommends books to others when she likes them.

Dawn Roberto also runs a promo service, which won't work for everyone, but I signed up with her because I know how far her reach extends and her rates are incredibly reasonable. I pay her $15 a month to post promo about my books in various online venues; yes, that's something I could do myself, but she has more connections/venues available than I do, and having her do it frees up time for me to actually write my books. There are a lot of promo services/companies; some are well worth the money, and others aren't, so if that's something you'd want to do, make sure to do your research. (I chose Dawn because I know her fairly well online, and because other authors who use her services gave her high recommendations.)

The Romance Studio has frequent "release parties" (at least 2-3 a month, usually) where authors can pimp a book or two; they also have longer parties for things like Valentine's Day or their anniversary. There's a ton of traffic to their party site; you can offer a giveaway but don't have to; and they promote the parties heavily as well as the participating authors all promoting it. I've gotten a lot of attention and some sales through those parties.

Another advantage of The Romance Studio parties is that people who sign up for the prize drawings can opt to be included in authors' newsletter mailing lists. I take full advantage of that; I offer a prize each time, so I'm sent a list of all entrants, which includes whether they're willing to receive newsletters. I do a monthly newsletter through MailChimp, and thanks in large part to the TRS parties, I have over 400 subscribers. Many of whom actually read the thing... For some authors, doing a release-only newsletter might work better; my subscribers tell me they prefer the monthly one, and since I have a new release almost every month anyway, it all works out. I don't just pimp my books in the newsletter, though. I also include a message, just something chatty like "Wow, that blizzard dumped a lot of snow" or "My daughter is mourning her pet mice" so readers see me as a *person*, not just an author; I include a short excerpt that's exclusive to the newsletter; and I have a contest every month.

I used to question the wisdom of "build your backlist", because that wasn't working for me at all, but in the past few months it has been. So if you use your backlist to help boost readership, be aware it might take time to actually show results. (My first romance was published in March 2009, and I didn't start to see the "backlist bump" results until July of last year; my first YA was published in January 2010 and I'm still waiting to see the backlist pay off. For those who like numbers, I have 39 published romances, including freebies and stories in anthologies, and 16 published YA books.)
 

KimJo

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Oh, and networking. Re-reading my previous post, I forgot to mention the power of networking, though I touched on it when I referred to sharing/retweeting things from other authors.

Some of the best promo I've gotten hasn't come from me. It's been because I did something for another author (retweeted them, hosted them on my blog, etc.) and they reciprocated. For example, someone who I was friendly with on Facebook and who I'd retweeted/shared things from a few times started a new review blog focusing on YA GLBT titles. I wasn't even aware of it--until she contacted me and asked if she could review one of my books and do a spotlight feature on me. Something she did because I'd been friendly to her and had pimped her a bit.

Some authors unfortunately treat this business like a competition; I've seen them backstabbing other authors, telling their readers not to buy books by a particular author, etc. I've seen authors who are seeing success, suddenly start ignoring the people who helped them get there.

But I don't think it should be that way... I support other authors because I like their books, or because I "knew them when" and am excited to see them succeed. And although I don't do it to get anything back from them, sometimes that happens, and it's an added benefit of being a decent human being.
 

thethinker42

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Some authors unfortunately treat this business like a competition; I've seen them backstabbing other authors, telling their readers not to buy books by a particular author, etc. I've seen authors who are seeing success, suddenly start ignoring the people who helped them get there.

But I don't think it should be that way... I support other authors because I like their books, or because I "knew them when" and am excited to see them succeed. And although I don't do it to get anything back from them, sometimes that happens, and it's an added benefit of being a decent human being.

I think there's something to be said for that. We're *technically* competing, but we're not supposed to be adversaries. A reader who buys your book isn't necessarily *not* going to buy mine. I don't get why anyone feels compelled to try to step on other authors or push them down on the way up. We can all help each other, regardless of where we are in our individual careers.

Every successful author was unpublished and unknown at some point. Forgetting that doesn't do anyone any favors.
 

KimJo

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Exactly. And cross-promo can work great in some cases, if you and another author write something similar.

My thought on "competing" with other authors is that readers usually read more than one book. It isn't like selling cars, where someone's going to buy one car and that's it for five years or whatever. There are a lot of readers, and most, if not all, of them are going to buy more than one book, so why act like they're not going to buy my book if they buy someone else's?
 

thethinker42

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Exactly. And cross-promo can work great in some cases, if you and another author write something similar.

My thought on "competing" with other authors is that readers usually read more than one book. It isn't like selling cars, where someone's going to buy one car and that's it for five years or whatever. There are a lot of readers, and most, if not all, of them are going to buy more than one book, so why act like they're not going to buy my book if they buy someone else's?

Exactly.

And for that matter, that's one of the reasons co-authoring can be a very effective marketing tool. You're not "stealing" readers from your co-author(s), you're introducing yourself to their readers, and they're introducing themselves to yours. It isn't like my co-author's readers are going to stop reading his books now that they're reading mine, or vice versa, and in fact, we've both seen a lot of comments from people who've discovered one of us through our co-written stuff. i.e., some of my readers had never read any of Aleks's books, but after reading our joint stuff, they're checking out his backlist.
 

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Thanks guys, this has been really helpful! :) I'm definitely going to check out cup of porn for my newest release.
 

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Wow, fantastic advice and how-tos up there. I had no idea...

It's a shame about the adversary edge to this, though. I've got a lot of respect for any author who has work out in the public domian. It can be tough enough as it is without some authors feeling as though they have to push you under to get ahead.

On co-authoring, I have to admit, I'm enjoying the other variant of world merging with another author. It's nerve-wracking handling estabished characters and knowing how passionate readers are about those characters, but it's also such a buzz.
 

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This is all wonderful information, guys. *bows*

I'm really shy to talk to blog owners about a guest blog post. I need to start doing more, though.
 

thethinker42

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There was some discussion in the Bordello about the "tone" of posts for hops/tours, so I want to address that here.

There is no rule that posts have to be funny or serious. You can even have a mix of funny and serious in the same tour (I have a "Fact or Crap" post in the same tour as a lengthy post about what it means for our Nazi and American characters to fall in love). The only time you would need to keep them to a specific tone is if the entire tour/hop has a theme (i.e., the Hop Against Homophobia lent itself to generally more serious posts, while an April Fool's theme would have sillier ones).

I do recommend against politically-charged or divisive posts unless it's absolutely relevant. In other words, don't piss off your readers. I'm having to tread fairly lightly right now as I write a post about pairing an atheist character with a minister, and the Nazi/American love story may be somewhat incendiary too, though I'm trying to keep that from happening. My recommendation? If you're discussing something potentially controversial, read your post from the POV of someone who disagrees with you (or have someone else look it over), and see if the post evokes a response of "I don't necessarily agree, but I see what you're saying" or "you asshole!" If it's the latter, you may want to rethink the post. We're all welcome to our opinions, but remember a blog hop/tour is a marketing tool, not a soapbox.

Remember: THOU SHALT NOT ALIENATE THY READERSHIP WITH THY BIG MOUTH.
 

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Further to my comment above about alienating your readers...

It should be noted that that goes for Twitter, Facebook, AW, your own blog, etc. On any social media that's connected to your pen name, think about what you're posting. Be silly and irreverent, but know where the lines are. If you lose followers every time you tweet, you may be crossing those lines, and for every follower you lose, you quite likely have ten more that are muting you or scrolling past your tweets while wrinkling their noses. And I assure you, that WILL negatively affect your sales.