The results of the Red Rock publicity and promotion experiment are in, and I’ve been analysing the results. Hmmm.
Red Rock was originally published in September 2013 through a traditional publisher and I had all the advantages of having a marketing team and a designated publicist helping me. I have spoken elsewhere on this blog about the promotional activities which we did.
For the re-release I avoided repeating those, although with future books there are definitely options I can pursue. But I did take the opportunity to try out a few other publicity activities largely geared towards the e-book, and focussing on what I could achieve online. This was mainly through the medium of social media. For example:
1. I set up an author Instagram account and make regular posts about my writing
2. I promoted Red Rock on twitter with a cover reveal and in general increased my interactions on that platform
3. I increased my activity in the various writing/author groups to which I belong and talked about Red Rock and what I was doing about re-releasing it
4. I revived my author facebook page
5. I enrolled in a Kindle countdown deal setting the price at 99p for one week
6. I timed the countdown deal to coincide with Earth Day
7. I participated actively in #IndieApril on Twitter
Of course, there is the disadvantage that most of my immediate network have already read the book (if it is to their taste) so I was really trying here to extend my reach outwards to find new potential readers. I certainly learned what doesn’t work, (pretty much everything listed above) and I found the whole exercise an interesting if rather depressing experiment.
What is clear is that producing a quality product, editing, formatting, cover art, is the easy bit. Finding readers is a lot more difficult without the backing of a publisher. Even those who expect the author to do a lot of legwork can still make a huge difference to sales through their review networks etc.
So where do I go moving forwards? Well I still intend to self publish my Science Fiction novels, but I’m going to keep aiming at the mainstream market with my thrillers and I will be giving them priority. I have a new novel on the go, but you will be seeing one of my SciFi novels hitting the virtual shelves in the not too distant future. But more on that later. For now I have some writing to do.
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