The-J
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If any of you have been reading my blog, you may know that my mother wrote a book.
A current problem I am having is promoting my mother's book. She has a website, a blog, a Facebook, a Twitter, and she is very active on them. Problem is, almost all of her 'fans' or 'followers' are fellow authors and family (like me). She had the idea of using a contest for promotion, and now she's giving away free signed books with the original award seals on them. (Yeah, she got published and won awards and such. But that doesn't change the fact that only a hundred people read the book. Also, her publisher is going bankrupt so now she has a stack of about a thousand books to sell.)
Problem is, she has no fanbase so the only people who will be getting the books are people like me. So I was thinking... in the Internet age, how do we promote a book, garner a solid fanbase, and parlay that into a Fastlane solution?
My options are:
1) Give away more popular books, like The Hunger Games. Sure, she doesn't really have the right to do this on a large scale but I don't think it would be a problem if it were five books or something.
2) Use the power of tags to drive traffic to her site. I don't know if this is going to work, to be honest. It would garner irrelevant traffic that doesn't stick.
3) Get on as many Web sites as possible, whether it be advertisements or review sites. I think we're going to go with number 3, somehow. If people see it, it gets in their heads. If it comes up in conversation, someone may say 'Hmmm maybe I'll go read it; it looks interesting.'
If any of you entrepreneurs have some sort of solution for this, let me know. I've been pondering for months on how to go about this AND turn it into a fastlane for other authors in the same boat (and there are tons of em) and so far I've got nothing. I know it's a little bit inappropriate to ask for help with a fastlane idea since everyone around here seems to have ideas but, I'm doing it anyway and if anyone wants to delete this feel free.
P.S. Her book is a fantasy novel. A series. Kinda like Wheel of Time, and probably going to be just as long-winded.
A current problem I am having is promoting my mother's book. She has a website, a blog, a Facebook, a Twitter, and she is very active on them. Problem is, almost all of her 'fans' or 'followers' are fellow authors and family (like me). She had the idea of using a contest for promotion, and now she's giving away free signed books with the original award seals on them. (Yeah, she got published and won awards and such. But that doesn't change the fact that only a hundred people read the book. Also, her publisher is going bankrupt so now she has a stack of about a thousand books to sell.)
Problem is, she has no fanbase so the only people who will be getting the books are people like me. So I was thinking... in the Internet age, how do we promote a book, garner a solid fanbase, and parlay that into a Fastlane solution?
My options are:
1) Give away more popular books, like The Hunger Games. Sure, she doesn't really have the right to do this on a large scale but I don't think it would be a problem if it were five books or something.
2) Use the power of tags to drive traffic to her site. I don't know if this is going to work, to be honest. It would garner irrelevant traffic that doesn't stick.
3) Get on as many Web sites as possible, whether it be advertisements or review sites. I think we're going to go with number 3, somehow. If people see it, it gets in their heads. If it comes up in conversation, someone may say 'Hmmm maybe I'll go read it; it looks interesting.'
If any of you entrepreneurs have some sort of solution for this, let me know. I've been pondering for months on how to go about this AND turn it into a fastlane for other authors in the same boat (and there are tons of em) and so far I've got nothing. I know it's a little bit inappropriate to ask for help with a fastlane idea since everyone around here seems to have ideas but, I'm doing it anyway and if anyone wants to delete this feel free.
P.S. Her book is a fantasy novel. A series. Kinda like Wheel of Time, and probably going to be just as long-winded.
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