Assessment, Part Three

This is the final post regarding my promotional activities for September and October. It helps me to write about it, and maybe it will improve my game in future efforts. Judging from your comments, you guys are finding it helpful too. There will be more topics in this post, and I'll try to keep each one brief.

I joined the Rave Reviews Book Club Back to School Book and Blog Block Party. (Try fitting that in a tweet.) This project ran the entire month of September, and there were generally two sites per day participating. Every host site had to offer prizes, and the club monitored the comments to hold a drawing. I participated on every site, and I won some great stuff. My stats spiked that day, and my book sales showed a bump too. There is a benefit from cruising around and being friendly too. I gained blog followers during the month.

I participated in Teri Polen's Bad Moon Rising campaign in October. This was dedicated to horror authors, but I managed to fit in anyway. This one didn't come with prizes, but was still a lot of fun. I participated on every post, and tweeted the daily posts. I gained quite a few Twitter followers as a result.

I approached multiple book reviewers going back to August, in hopes that reviews would land during my push. Most of them came through, and I'm still waiting on others. They will come through sooner or later.

I want to mention that Rosy's Book Review Team is extremely helpful. All the review sites are great, but they go the extra mile. These folks not only post to Amazon and Goodreads, they blog about the review too. Approximately a month later, Rosy posts the data on the main team blog. This generates a ton of interest, and Twitter seems to go crazy for them too. I can't recommend them highly enough. Will O' the Wisp wound up in a top ten list on Rosy's sidebar. You can bet I captured that and tweeted the heck out of it.

The reviewers sold books too. A couple of them invited me to guest post on their sites. It's kind of a neat trick to post a review, then have the author show up later. This is one of the unexpected things that happened along the way.

Unexpected benefits were the most fun part. So many people pitched in and tweeted, posted unexpected reviews, or invited me over that I can't name them all. I want to single out P H Solomon though. He really made an effort on my part, and it was completely unexpected. He still makes Goodreads recommendations for Notebook, and I know he sold some copies for me. I also want to specifically thank Charles Yallowitz. He reblogged many of the posts, and included me in one of his own posts. This involved the monsters in his Windemere world. When he posted about the cockatrice, he included a cover and link to The Cock of the South. There were several sales of this book right after that post, and they almost had to be because of him.

I can't thank everyone in a post like this, but the unexpected goodwill is overwhelming.

I was able to pull this all together by planning it as far back as July. It takes Sean Harrington time to produce the Lisa art that accompanied her guest posts. It takes time to garner a book review, because the reviewer has a list to work through. I needed to prepare all the blog tour posts, mine, Lisa's, and Lorelei the Muse even got in on the act.

This preparation allowed me to accept any invitations that came along. I did a couple of blog swaps, because I planned ahead. In many cases where an author visited my site, I appeared on theirs. I had time to custom write a few things, because the blog tour data was ready ahead of time. Macabre Macaroni was all written ahead of time.

I'm in debt to everyone that helped me along the way. I need to get reading some of their books, and will be here when they need my blog space for their promotions.

It was a combination of things that moved copies of both books. I think this is more important than any single thing. Oh how I wish there were one specific thing that would move ten thousand books. There just isn't. At the end of two months, my footprint has grown. More people know about me than did in August.

I'm tired too. The next time, I might not push two books back to back. I think this was a benefit, but it was tiring. It required special circumstances of a fresh release, plus a Halloween themed newish book. That chance doesn't come along every day.

Did I miss a trick in all this? I'm almost certain I did. Tell me about something you've done that helped grow your audience.