For those of you who didn't win, the paperback version is now available on Amazon. And since they don't offer paperback pre-orders yet, it is shipping now. If you want to know why it's out so early, you can read the full story on how that happened. Also, let me say that the process to get the eBook and Paperback linked together (which you absolutely want to do) was easy and painless. I emailed Amazon through my author central account and they had the whole thing taken care of in less than 24 hours without any issues. So far, I've been super impressed with the author experience there.
This past week, I was feeling a little bit in a void. The blog tour is coming up and everything is pretty much locked and loaded. I'll have more work to do right before the tour when I send out reminder emails and all of that, but really I just have some guest posts to write and interview questions to answer. I'm also in an in between place, because I have several marketing efforts that I can't do until I have my books in and they have hit the extended distribution on Create Space. I haven't yet figured out how to tell when that happens so I'm in limbo at the moment.
The whole waiting makes me feel anxious so I decided to put that energy to some good creative uses. I made some of the items that are going in the blog tour giveaway. I'll have to do a post on that because I'm super excited, but you have to wait until I can take some pictures.
I also worked on my pull quote images and got them all done. So I thought I'd share my thought process and how I did these.
First, I decided to save time and pick my quotes while I was proofing the final print copy. As I went, if there was a good quote I put a little sticky note on the page. Once I was finished proofing, I went back and made a huge list of all the quotes I loved when I was reading the book. The initial list was 33 quotes, which is way too many for me. Even if there was enough time to space out that many quotes, I didn't want to dedicate that much time to making them. Remember, a good marketing strategy is recognizing where best to use your time.
Once I had my list, I eliminated the ones I didn't love or that weren't as good outside of their context. I figured out how many I could realistically make and distribute before the release and then decided on my final choices. I ended up with 16.
I used Morgue files to find most of my images, though one is a heavily edited picture from my wedding. To make the quote images I used a combination of Gimp, Pixlr and Photoscape. It just depending on how much I needed to edit the image to make it work for me. All of these are free to download and really easy to use.
I've been posting the images on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule on Tumblr which also auto posts to Twitter. I also share them on my Facebook fan page and about once a week I post one to my Facebook personal account. Remember that the people you are friends with on Facebook did not sign up to be marketed to (really this is a good tip for any social media platform). I added a Rite of Rejection page to my Pintrest account, but I'm not really promoting this. I did it because it's easy and I already had an account. Sometimes, it's a good idea to target the low hanging fruit if it doesn't take any extra time. You never know when a reader will find you in an unusual way.
Here's what I've put in each image.
1. A CC usage picture. This is so important. Do Not Steal Work. You can't google an image and swipe it off the internet. That picture belongs to someone. There are plenty of sites out there with great CC pictures so you should have no problem finding what you are looking for.
2. A good quote using a clear contrasting color that can be easily read against the background. I also used the same font for all of the images to create a consistent look.
3. Hashtag. I am seriously using my hashtag of the book title (#RiteOfRejection) for everything. I want everyone to see this and think "Oh, yeah, I've heard of that".
4. A link. You can't embed a link into the image unless you are posting to a website or blog. So instead I include a purchase link in the comments or description depending on where I'm posting. A good quote doesn't do you any good if people don't know where to find the book. I've been alternating between my Amazon page and the author page of my blog that has all the buy links. Use what you think is best here.
Here are a few examples of pull quotes I've been sharing.
This has gotten long so I'll sign off for the day. I'd love to see examples your pull quote images. Feel free to share a link in the comments! :)
This is a great post - thanks again, I've learned so must following you through this process
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear it!
DeleteI'm really enjoying this series of posts on your marketing efforts.
ReplyDeleteOne minor clarification on CC images: there are different CC licenses, and some only allow non-commercial use. For what you're doing, it's important to make sure it's licensed for commercial use (or contact the owner and ask for permission).
That's a great point. It's important to read the info to see if you need to provide attribution, can use it for commercial and if it's okay to alter the image. :)
Delete