Marketing

I'm going to share some Sun's Golden Ray Publishing, LLC intellectual capital with you guys here.

Yeah, that's right. 48 hours old and we already have competition-sensitive intellectual capital. #consultant

In my day job, I do a lot of strategy and plans. Planning the strategy. Strategerizing the plan. Not so much executing the plan, but that's for another blog post.

If you haven't noticed, there's been a marketing plan since March for Double Life. There's a course of action, there's metrics, and the measurement of those actions for a course correction (if needed). For example, when I started out, I was focusing on Facebook and Facebook ads. I found that Facebook is not very effective - although a nice place to put my FreeBookFridays, I didn't see enough interested parties to warrant more cash going into it, other than the occasional boosted post. So I've moved to Twitter as my primary engagement source, and have found better returns on investments.

Beyond tool use, some of the other facets of my marketing strategy revolve around content, hashtag use and twitter chats, major events (like conventions), and helping other authors. Hell, even my trip home was a marketing opportunity (#sushergoeshome).

My #1 is to not be an annoying spambot, and to not overkill people with ads for my book, but provide content that I write with my voice. I'm a real person, and I think I'm pretty likeable (if not up my own ass), so I figure if I keep doing that, people will flock.

I've made lots of new friends on Twitter through twitter chats like #NewAgent and #NALitChat, which has been nice because it affords me the opportunity to share other authors' work. At the end of the day, people are going to get tired of hearing me talk - hell, even my Mom gets tired of hearing me talk. So I want to use my fledgling media empire to boost other authors - but I don't want to just spam people with, "This book exists!" because that doesn't help anyone.

That's why I've decided to start #FallfortheIndieBook2014. It's going to be a two-pronged effort:

Prong A is me hosting fifteen independent authors on my blog for a week at a time.

Prong B is crowd-focused: You guys can pledge to read and review fifteen independent or small press authors during the fifteen week competition.

I'm thinking there will be a giveaway at the end for anyone who completes the challenge of a gift card or something like that. But this post isn't about that, and I haven't finished developing that strategy yet, so stand by for more.

I got sidetracked.

One of the things I've realized over the past six months is that everyone else is not in my head. So they don't know that June was Release Campaign or July was #SUsherGoesHome Campaign. They just see tweets and posts as they come and forget about them.

For me, I wanted to have one thing going on at a time because I thought it would confuse people otherwise. And for the most part, I still think that's a good strategy. But I noticed that Twitter is a different audience (mostly other authors and bibliophiles) than Facebook (mostly people I grew up with and random thirteen year olds). So I can run multiple campaigns at once - I can do a GoodReads giveaway at the same time as #FallfortheIndieBook2014, and still promote #RaziaDoubleLife

In reality, everything I do is to promote Double Life. But you know, gotta be sneaky about it. I'm gonna make you fall in love with me the author, and then you'll fall in love with my book.

That's competition sensitive. :D