Critical events of the past little while.
1. Today my iPhone packed up and did nothing but wink its little bitten apple at me, despite my pressing all the buttons recommended by the internet. Eventually plugging the phone into the mother ship (Mac Air), it righted itself and I received a useful phone call. In my racing through the web for answers, I found lots of scary notifications about the possibility of losing everything stored on the iPhone if a reset was required for any function to be restored. So people: Crashes, fires, earthquakes, rockets, thefts, equipment mishaps can occur at any time, unexpectedly and catastrophically at any time. I use automatic Carbonite, iCloud, Dropbox, external flash-drives, and the occasional email attachment to myself as backup. Also paper printouts of current versions important stuff, Sadly as yet, I don't remember which backup has the most recent stuff. Nor have I had to recover lost stuff from any of my backups. Also I lack an organized system of identifying not only the site but also a way of dating of most recent files on all of these backups. Take my advice. NOW. Back up in multiple ways all of your important stuff and learn how to retrieve it.
2. Okay, That's out of the way. (But it's not! iPhone packed up again while writing this).
Marketing. A morass as stated in prior blog. What's required? Focus. On what? How to get folks to buy your book.
a. Collect emails. Everybody says do that, but what to do when you have them? I gather one should send each a polite offering with a brief option of viewing one's Amazon or other book vendor's page, as well as buttons to click to buy, or to refuse any more emails from me on this subject. Question: how to do that? Especially, with the emails needing to appear personal and not just shot from a single cannon at many folks, clearly a put-off. Are there ways to individualize occasional emails?
b. Amazon ads. Everybody says do this, as Amazon is the elephant book seller in the world. There are books on this and, yes, the learning curve is not trivial, so I'm trusting Wheatmark Publications to do this for me. They said they would.
c. Other ads. I'm getting into the middle of the novice stage with FaceBook ads. They can be inexpensive, and on my Wix website I can track the results of ads graphically. FaceBook also gives ways to do broad selection of groups to target. For me so far, that's U.S. women 18-65+ giving the highest response rate to ads. I plan to explore BookBub and GoodReads for ads as well. On Linked In, I can bag a lot of emails from NICU MD's and RN's, also medical ethicists.
d. Signature on all my emails with link to buy the book. Check, both on Mac and iPhone.
e. Requesting, pursuing, asking, pestering, begging, groveling for Amazon reviews. I'm talkin' about you, Jay, (and the rest of you know who you are).
f. Giving free copies to neighborhood bookstores (fish chum) and chatting up the owners. Then telling family and friends where they can direct the local hordes to buy the book.
g. Free books to other folks: friends, family, teachers, blurb writers, anticipated influencers, etc.
h. Bookstore and in-home launch parties...anticipated but not yet planned.
i. GoodReads giveaways. Complicated and expensve. I think I may have mailed (from Amazon) two, not one, copies of the paperback for the ten winners. Would be less expensive to do giveaways with ebooks. Don't yet know if that's possible.
j. Swag. Coffee cups, book marks, business cards with buy links, and other free stuff.
k. Local booksellers. Here in Jerusalem they include the newly opening Rehavia Books on Emek Refaim, and Katamon Books on HaPalmach. There you can buy the trade paperback without paying the cost of shipping. Both B&N and Amazon have the Baby Doe ebook
l. Approach media, book bloggers, podcasters. A couple of folks, a reporter, and a blogger, may publish reviews somewhere, (or not, but hey, I'm new at this).
m. Occasional book pics to Instagram and Pinterest. I'm not a TikTok personality.
n. Maybe a video clip for the book. Perhaps after my iPhone is fixed. If ever.
Next week. Metrics for Selling the New Novel.
