Marketing and Promotion...

[Gary Compton]

Very pleased to announce that Sam Primeau (The Dusty Zebra) has been appointed head of Tickety Boo Press' marketing department as well as continuing her involvement with the editorial team.

She has already started collating reviewers, suitable blogs and all manner of innovative ideas to help promote TBP books.

Can we use this thread for ideas, suggestions to help her succeed at this.

She has her own TBP email now which is sam.primeau(at)ticketyboopress(dot)co(dot)uk

Sam also will be running/editing the Spectral Boo Zine. More details soon.

Many thanks.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Yay! Congrats!

Ideas off the top of my head apart from eg Amazon, Twitter and conventions sort of things

1. A newsletter. An author I was talking with recently said she found this useful. Offer an incentive to sign up - a free short, or ebook or something - and don't send it out so often people are sick of it (once a quarter, she reckoned, worked well). Include news from your authors, including links to shorts, novels coming out, events etc.

2. An events page? If you have enough happening. But it needs to be updated or it counterfires.

3. Twitter blog tours/panels. up the Tickety boo twitter account, and let an individual author take it over for a night. Offer some freebies to eg the best question, most interesting comment. Em might be a good person to ask about this sort of thing - Dreamspinner did stuff like this.

4. Blog exchanges - guest blogs. See if we can get a network going.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Twitter & blogs for sure. Good work.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Huzzah!

Good suggestions from Springs.

One of the reasons I gave Sir Edric a series name was because Amazon e-mails people when a subsequent entry in a series arrives (if they've bought one in that series already). Raising awareness of stuff people are likely to be into (fantasy, sci-fi, grimdark across genres etc) could be very useful. Not sure if this'd work precisely, but a basic calendar with colour-coded future releases, and the option to be notified when a certain type of book comes out may be an idea.

Seasonal events/promotions could work too. So, on 1 December you could tweet a message, and those who retweet get entered into a prize draw for Christmas presents (a batch of TBP's latest books). Likewise for romance at Valentine's, and that sort of thing.

 

[mgilmour]

First of all....congratulations are in order for Sam Primieau
Gary, here's a few suggestions....

Currently the author community is like a group of little islands scattered across the ocean. Each of us has managed to gather some readers together but very few authors have a LOT of readers. The challenge is how to pull the corporate readership together for everyone's benefit. Because of my background in business and the Internet, my first attempt at this is SFFAuthors.com (just launched the other day).

1. The goal is to use RSS feeds (which every blog has) so that they are automatically picked-up and broadcast to a community of readers. If an author doesn't have a blog then there is a platform for them to freely use.
2. Any micro-posts are automatically broadcast out to twitter and facebook.....this is to reduce an author's time communicating with their readers.
3. Readers can subscribe to the entire site and to individual authors.
4. There is a social networking side that allows authors and readers to share everything from photos, videos and events and every author can have their own profile.

For example, right now Jo is on the site and she has a profile at SFFAuthors.com/jozebedee. Every time she blogs the site automatically picks it up and publishes it to the readers. I'm just bedding down the last few things on the technology side before broadcasting a promotion about it.

As an industry of authors and publishers I believe that we need to pull together for the sake of all of our readers rather than setup, yet another island. This needs to be independent of Amazon and the other big sales channels but also augment it. There needs to be a central place where readers can go and really interact with the authors that created the worlds they've just read about. It many ways it needs to be a two way communication.

As a reader I don't want to have to remember to go to each of my favourite authors sites....I want to know that there is just one place to find out that they are going to be signing books in my town next week.

I'm very happy to make SFFAuthors freely available to everyone and I'm very open to suggestions. I just wanted to get the ball rolling down the hill. Maybe this is something that the community could own....who knows.....

 

[Juliana]

I don't really have anything to add, just wanted to say congrats TDZ!!!

Looking forward to lots of marketing shenanigans with stripes on.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Congratulations, Sam! I know you will do an excellent job.

 

[ralphkern]

Well done Sam

 

[Susan Boulton]

Congrats Sam.

 

[chopper]

Currently the author community is like a group of little islands scattered across the ocean.

Archipelagos of enthusiasm, perhaps?

it's a good idea, and in many ways i'd like nothing more than one unified community. that said, the journey of discovery is part of the fun for me, and the communities i've discovered all have their own distinct identities too. it may be hard work to visit each archipelago in turn to promote and interact (both are as important as each other, after all), but it's more difficult to make yourself heard when everybody else is shouting at the same time (maybe a bad analogy, but how the heck does anybody ever find anything on smashwords?).

back on track: local events and conventions. Jo has already proved this in spades. authors in the real world ftw. networking is not my favourite thing either, but good word travels.

Spacewitch - independent sales platform set up by Del Lakin-Smith for independent presses. have a look and see what you think.

may have more soon.

 

[ratsy]

Congrats Dusty!!!

Not sure if anyone said this, but another thing you can do is join groups on FB. Horror Writers, SF writers, Space Opera, and many more. If you take part in conversations, the groups can get to know you a bit, so when you throw links to books and reviews, its less of a spam to them.