Marketing a pre-order #WriterWednesday #AuthorMarketing #AmWriting

I do a marketing push each month. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed my ‘normal’ marketing strategy – signing a temporarily reduced-price book up for several well-known newsletter services – isn’t working as well lately. So, I’m on the hunt for new marketing strategies. I decided to start with my current pre-order and try something ‘different’. To be perfectly honest, I stole this idea from a BookBub blog. The author, a bestseller no less, gave away previous books in her series to readers who purchased a pre-order of her new release. I thought – wow! This is a great idea. Why hadn’t I thought of this when I was writing a series?

Great idea but how do I actually go about implementing this strategy? There are two issues: (1) gathering emails from readers who have pre-ordered the book, and (2) providing the book to readers. There is a third issue – ensuring readers have actually pre-ordered the book – which I didn’t worry about too much. The book I’m giving away is usually priced at 99 cents and isn’t one of my big sellers (but I’m giving this book away as it’s also historical fiction). *Blushes*

In the blog I read, the author used a google form and sent it to her newsletter subscribers. I jumped on google forms and spent an embarrassing amount of time playing around with the forms before I gave up. There must be an easier way to do this! While researching another completely unrelated marketing idea, I stumbled upon Survey Monkey. Hey, look! They have forms, too. Wufoo forms to be exact. Oooh… and there are lots of shiny options.

I spent about thirty minutes playing around with the options before coming up with a form I liked. It’s super simple. Honestly, it would have taken me a lot less time had I spent any time at all thinking about how I wanted the form to look before I started hitting buttons and adding fields. Anyway, this is what I came up with:

Once a person fills in the form, Wufoo will send me her email address. Now comes my second problem – how do I send readers my eBook? I’ve tried directly sending readers a mobi or epub file via email. Don’t bother. Average readers can’t figure out how to deal with the file. The other option I’ve used is sending a Smashwords gift. The problem with this is that I have to pay for the eBook each time I gift it. Eek! That can get expensive. So, I decided to give BookFunnel a try.

BookFunnel, unlike Wufoo forms, isn’t free. There are three options: First-Time Author for $20 a year, Mid-List Author for $100 a year, or Bestseller for $250 a year. I don’t know about you, but I find those spreads quite large. Since I’ve never used BookFunnel before I went for the first option for $20 a year. The problem with the cheapy plan is security. When you ask BookFunnel how to ensure your book doesn’t land in the wrong pages, the answer is to set a download limit on your link and to remind readers not to share the link. C’est tout. I decided to go for it anyway and created this landing page.

Now, I’m all set (I think). Time to market my marketing idea. You can copy the link for the form, embed the form, and share on Facebook, Twitter, and email. I’ve already embed the form on my website page for my new novel, Searching for Gertrude. Next, I’ll get a newsletter sent out with the form. After that, I’ll blast it all over social media. I’ll let you know how it goes.