Hi everyone.
As most of you are aware, our debut novel The Language of Flowers is about to come out.
Because of its themes and non-conventional love story, we chose to go the Self-Publish route which means that all the marketing is on us. There’s a fallacy that if you write a good book, have a good cover, and put it up on Amazon, that you’ll sell books.
You won’t.
We put our story up for pre-release on March 29, so that we’d have it up in time for our panel at @animeboston. However, between the pre-release going up and April 6 we only sold 3 books (and we know who bought two of them.)
Yeah.
In all fairness, Rose and I have no idea what we’re doing. We’ve read a lot of articles, watched what @caitlynlynch did when she promoted Red Hots. We also don’t have a whole lot of money. So with that in mind, Rose and I decided to dedicate $150 to paid promotion and see where it takes us. We’re also doing a few other things that don’t require money to be spent, just some time and effort.
Now we know we’re going to do it wrong with this book, as a rule you want to do a huge marketing blast to try to get the all important story rank up there. Success breeds success as they say. But because we didn’t have a strategy and we didn’t plan in advance, our marketing is going to be more spread out. Crappy for us, great for you guys.
Why?
Because I’m going to share the success and ROI of each marketing push, which includes things we didn’t end up paying for. I’ll evaluate each technique/site for overall effectiveness.
It’s going to be an interesting ride.
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