Hey all…
On paper, I’ve been doing all the things authors are supposed to do to market themselves and their works online. I have my Facebook pages (personal and Author). I am very active on Facebook and have a great network of author and reader friends. I talk about myself more often than I post about my works, showing suitable writer modesty.
I have a Twitter account that I also post to regularly.
I have an Amazon Author page, a Goodreads Author page, and an ARe Author page.
I have my own writerly blog, with regular, unique content – a weekly Author Spotlight, serial fiction post, and writing column (you’re there now), along with other good content. The blog has a beautiful, prominently featured “buy my stuff” page, with author comments and nice links to everything.
I have done Facebook ads, massive blog tours, big review tours, and online podcasts.
I have been to Rainbow Con, NijiCon, the DSP Retreat. I am planning to visit YaoiCon and GRL too.
And yet, I am not a massively successful author, sales-wise. Not even really a moderately successful one. I know. It takes time. I have to get some novel-length works out there, and just keep writing until I have a decent backlist. But maybe I need to try something new.
So yesterday, I did. Or rather, we did.
Aren’t we all biker-geek-sheik? I dragged my husband Mark along with me, and we took a tour of Sacramento on bike:
That’s about a 12 mile round trip, hitting just about every coffee shop in East Sacramento, Midtown and Downtown. I took along my handy box of River City cards:
…and plastered them on bulletin boards and across tables all across town. On the way, I did some live videos on Facebook, including this one where I stop at one of the main sites from the story, the location of Ragazzi restaurant:
https://www.facebook.com/jscottcoatsworth/videos/10154385051772180/
The whole time, friends followed our journey, commenting on the videos and posts, and I as able to interact with them as we went. :)It was a lot of sun, great exercise, and gave me a list of places I can stop by regularly, whenever I am near one of them, to refresh my stack of promo cards.
Will this bring more eyeballs to the story? It’s frankly too soon to tell. And there were a few things I would have done differently in retrospect, including more promotional lead-up time before the tour, and maybe reaching out to some of these places to involve them in it. And yet, it was amazing to get out there and do something physical to promote my own work directly to the public.
So what are some things you have done to promote your own work that are totally out of the box?