Book Marketing Tip of the Week
May 21, 2008: American Red Cross Birthday, Greek Philosopher's Day, Travel with God Day, National Throw Your Math Book Out the Window DayDetails on these days — and 18,500 others! — can be found in
John Kremer's Celebrate Today Special Events Data Files.In this issue . . .
-- A great bookstore promotion
-- 10 Million Eyeballs -- Why should you care?
-- Two more great promotional ideas
-- John Kremer's free Q&A call-in dayA great bookstore promotion
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Mike Walker, author of Cinemental Journeys, offers the following tip.I humbly wanted to pass on a little tip that helped me move some books that were stagnating on bookstore shelves. I was fortunate enough to receive an endorsement from Leonard Maltin. Some bookstores are so tight with space that they couldn't put up a 8 x 10 sign promoting Cinemental Journeys, but they let me make a little "T" sign that fits right under the books and takes up no space on the shelf. I cut the "T" and then the store creases and folds and places the long part of the "T" under the book so the flap shows.
To see a sample of his T sign, see http://www.bookmarket.com/Maltin.pdf.
Great idea. Probably the best promo tool you can offer a bookstore if your T is as vibrant and useful as Mike's T.
10 Million Eyeballs -- Why should you care?
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I apologize to all of you for not explaining why 10 million eyeballs matter. My fault. If you were to get 10 million eyeballs to see, hear, or learn about you, your book, or your website, here are a few of the things that would happen:1. The Alexa rank for your website would jump from wherever it is to somewhere in the top 150,000 sites in the world (out of more than 150 million sites and counting).
2. You will get from 60,000 to 200,000 unique visitors to your website every month. Some months your traffic would spike to half a million to a million unique visitors.
3. Based on that many visitors, even if you only convert 1/10 of 1% to
customers, that's 60 to 200 sales per month. For a $20 book, that means income of $1,200 to $4,000 per month.4. Even if you don't sell one book or any services, you will receive $500 to $10,000 every month from Google for AdSense and display ads.
5. If you decide to sell display ads directly to companies that want to reach your visitors, you should be able to generate $300 to $1,000 per page per month from display ads. The richer your website is in content, the more you'll make in ad income.
If you attend one of my Ten Million Eyeball Events in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Denver, or Atlanta -- and follow my advice -- I guarantee that you will generate at least 10 million eyeballs in the next two years and could easily generate 5 to 10 million eyeballs every month within a year or less.
For details, go to http://www.tenmillioneyeballs.com.
Two more great promotional ideas
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David Shepherd, author of a debut novel called Resurrecting Randi, sent me two great ideas for doing a book tour. Here are his tips:1) Meetup.com includes book discussion groups in most cities. They stipulate the type of books they're interested in, and the group leaders can be emailed directly from the site. As we all know, book groups are becoming more and more influential, and are also being targeted by major publishers. Still, notifying them that an author is appearing in their city and offering them an advance copy has had some positive results for us.
The link http://writers.meetup.com will take you to a page that shows the total number of groups worldwide (410), the number of cities (251), and allows you to search for groups by city or zip. Once you've found the city you want, select the group you want and MeetUp will tell you how many members that group has, how often they meet, and who the organizer is. The organizer will have an email address though you have to register for Meetup.com to access these addresses. That's no big deal and there's no charge.
2) We're also using interactive Google Maps to track our tour. This is not quite as high-tech as it sounds, but go to http://www.resrandi.com to see what I mean. I'm only showing the next 3 tour stops, but under that is a link that says “Click for complete list and contact information.” Click on that and you'll be taken to a Google map showing each tour stop.
I suggest you click on the link View Larger Map under the small map. Then you'll be presented with a familiar Google map. Click on any of the flags (either in the sidebar or on the map) and you'll get complete information about that event, including who to contact if you'd like to attend.
We've still got work to do as our e-mail links are not clickable, and we want to insert photos from the events as we work our way across the country.
The way to create this was simply to sign into a Google Account, click on Maps and then click on My Maps. It allows you to create a new map. Once completed, Google Maps will generate the code you need to cut and paste into your own website to make sure the map on your website tracks the changes you make to your Google account.
John Kremer's free Q&A call-in day
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My next free Q&A call-in day is Tuesday, June 10th, featuring two times to call: once at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, Noon Pacific time, and a second call at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, 5:00 p.m. Pacific time.Phone number to dial for both calls: 218-486-3696
Use conference ID for both calls: 2092800#Afternoon Q&A call. You can log-in to listen via the web:
http://www.InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=3004059Afternoon Q&A call. You can log-in to listen via the web:
http://www.InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=3004248Quotable Books
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Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.
— George MacDonald, fantasy writer
More great quotes at http://www.quotablebooks.com
Index: http://www.bookmarket.com/tipsindex.htm
Copyright © 2008 by John Kremer
Email: JohnKremer@bookmarket.com
Open Horizons, P O Box 2887, Taos NM 87571