Day 10. The 30-Day Book Launch Challenge

By Nina HarringtonThe Writing Life

DAY 10. Week Three: Mon. 04 Dec. to Fri 08 Dec.

List Building and Email Marketing

  • Create a new Sophie Brent subscriber list in Mailchimp. This list is targeted at readers of cozy mysteries.
  • Create a GiveAway of bestselling cozy mysteries linked to this new email list for Sophie Brent.

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There are two ways of reaching an audience for my new book:

  • Organic reach through my email list, social media and blog posts etc.
  • Buying attention through paid advertising.

It has been my experience that the most effective way to promote my work is by using the power of my email list and social media followers.

Buying attention is not only expensive but it is throwing money into the air and hoping it lands safely. I think it is only worth doing if you are planning a series of linked books and thinking long term, if that makes sense.  When you have a lot of book reviews for a series of books and much kudos, then you can think about paid adverts to boost rankings. Amazon marketing is my best bet at the moment.

So this month I am focusing on building an email list for my cozy mystery books and the new Sophie Brent author brand.

Derek Murphy on CreativeIndie has some great blog posts on how to use book giveaways to build an email list of readers for a specific fiction niche in a short time. You can read lots more HERE and HERE and watch videos HERE and HERE.

So – I am going to use Kingsumo, which is a plugin designed for my wordpress website, to create a giveaway of similar books to the niche I am writing in, and then link that to a new email list for Sophie Brent.

You don’t have to buy expensive software like Kingsumo, you can run a free giveaway with a Free Trial on Rafflecopter  or InstaFreebie and use social media to tell readers about the book. Find out more options HERE.

You may have to manually collect email addresses, but as long as readers know that they are subscribing to your email list when they enter the contest, that’s okay.

My plan is then to write blog posts and other articles to support readers of cozy mysteries and combine them into an autoresponder welcome series in Mailchimp.  So it is NOT about pitching my work, but providing useful content as a reader who loves murder mysteries, which I do.

Tasks for this week:

NEW EMAIL LIST and GIVEAWAY

  • Create a new Sophie Brent subscriber list in Mailchimp. This list is targeted at readers of cozy mysteries.
  • Create a Giveaway of print copies of the top 6 Cozy Mystery Kindle Books on the paid bestseller list on Amazon.com this week – set it to run for 10 days or so, starting this week.
  • Create images for the giveaway using com. Like this:

  • Link the Giveaway to the new Sophie Brent reader group in Mailchimp, so that all the entrants to the contest are added to the new email list for readers of cozy mysteries.
  • Share the giveaway everywhere. Use the author hashtag on Twitter – the author might share it with their readers.
  • Buy all 6 bestselling kindle books and read them and review them. One every few days. Link to the Giveaway with every review. Share everywhere so that readers recognise the name and take up the offer.

While that is running in the background, back to the writing. Have a good one! Nina.