Wednesday Ramblings

Confession time; I haven’t gotten any writing done this week. I’ve been busy on the promotion front, and several things with this blog have kept me busy. This is by choice, because October has always been my best sales month. There are some big things coming up in October. There are a couple of group tours involving books with a paranormal theme. (Halloween, and all that.)

If you’re in the mood for some seasonal reading, I have three novels that might fit the bill. There are also two Notebooks with spooky stories in them.

Aside from supporting all the things I already have in motion, I want to do some individual promotions. There are a lot to choose from, but none of them seem to be a magical portal to author success. There are Kindle Countdown Deals, Amazon giveaways that are like a Rafflecopter, Kindle free days, Amazon advertisements, and even Facebook boosts. I’ll probably run all of them at one time or another.

Part of the problem I’m seeing is when the “deal” expires. Most of my heavy promotion is going to be for Will O’ the Wisp. If I run a discount during the tour, eventually the discount ends. I can’t quite see how that will influence the rest of the tour. Feel free to let me know your thoughts.

Any promotion I do for The Playground or Panama doesn’t have that problem. I’ve kind of decided to set up some free days for Panama in the first week of October. This is before the blog tours all start, and might prime the pump a bit. I may even do a small Facebook boost to go along with it. The Rave Reviews Book Club is big on supporting free and 99 cent deals, so I can leverage them a bit too.

Rumor has it that if you do a FB boost, your subsequent postings get squeezed out. Does anyone have any insight on this? I don’t want to hurt my guests for Lisa Burton Radio, or perhaps my own Halloween themed micro-fiction.

Somewhere along the way, I’ll probably do a 99 cent sale for The Playground. It absolutely has some paranormal themes, and I’m not ready to give it away yet. It’s a new book for cryin’ out loud. Maybe I could run an Amazon ad to support it while the deal is running??? Do any of you have any cautions or experience with doing both things at once?

That leaves Will O’ the Wisp as my Amazon Giveaway candidate. I could set up five free books as prizes and maybe, by then, could support it with another FB boost. The question here is if I should require following my Amazon Author page as the price of entry. It’s always been an option, but I don’t know of anyone who’s done it. In fact I’ve never seen anyone write about getting followers of their Amazon page at all. This blog feeds directly into mine, so it’s not a stagnant page. (I smell an experiment brewing. You know how I get with experiments.)

There isn’t any sense getting crazy with either Notebook. They are permanently 99 cents already. If you might like some Halloween themed short fiction, both books have some. Speaking of themed micro-fiction, Macabre Macaroni will post on Tuesdays this year. Those are free on my blog. Question for you guys: Would it be acceptable to mention whatever I currently have going on at the end of those posts? I know it’s my blog and all that, but should I just leave the stories for what they are?

I have three guest posts already scheduled, but two of them are this week. (Friday & Saturday.) I’ll reblog those and support the heck out of them. Obviously, I’ll accept all the help I can get during all these gyrations. If you have things going on, let me know and I’ll try to support back. Tuesdays and Thursdays are kind of committed on the blog though. Other forms of social media are like Jello, there’s always room for them.

In other news, I’ve been accepted into an anthology that will be coming out in October. I haven’t gotten the word to release much more than that, but I’ll be promoting it too. They were willing to accept something I’ve used before, so my inclusion is one of last year’s Macabre Macaroni stories called There’s a Cat on my Grave.

Part of the deal is that I’m supposed to do kind of a beta read before this weekend. Hahahahahahaha. (Sorry) The fact is that my wife and her sister have plans tonight. I’ll probably tackle the reading, to whatever degree I can, tonight. At least I don’t have to read my own entry. I’ll bet the other stories are good too, judging from the author names.

I’m nearly at deer-in -the-headlights mode, but not quite. All I have to do is schedule the Panama free days, and it will all break loose. Let me hear from you. Do you have insight on my questions? Have an opinion on my plans? Have a better idea that I haven’t thought of? Know any dirty jokes?