An Advertising Checklist

Whew, I've got so much going on with my book this week. It's a veritable checklist of ways to advertise your work, so, let us begin. (I also saw Star Trek: Into Darkness over the weekend. It was awesome.)

1. One of my friends runs the popular Air-Raid podcast  and he graced me with a shout-out this week. I encourage you all to check out his show and give it a listen. If you're a fan of music, he usually is interviewing up and coming bands. This week he talks to the band Stornoway from the UK. Great stuff. You can find him on iTunes and Stitcher or you can listen on www.kiroradio.com/airraid or even on his own webpage www.air-raid.net .

2. I have two free days coming up for Kindle Select this weekend. Which means my book will be free to download on Kindle, Saturday, May 25th and Sunday, May 26th. I've had some pretty good results with Kindle Select in the past and I hope this weekend will be no exception. It'll also be the first time I've had two free days in a row.

3. I've made no secret that I blame at least some of my success as a writer so far on Joe Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing. The amount of insight to be gained from his blog on the business of being an author is just insane. In addition to that, down the right side of his blog, he lists ads for the people he uses for formatting, cover art, designers, and even book promoters. For my free days this weekend, I decided to give his promoters www.ebookbooster.com a try. It's not a free service, but for what they charge, they send out the information for your promotions all across the internet. Whether or not it works, we'll just have to see. In the meantime, I've received confirmation emails from over a dozen different websites to promote my free days on Kindle Select this weekend. So, fingers crossed.

4. Also going on this weekend is Crypticon Seattle. A horror convention in my local area that I plan on attending. I've ordered an extra hundred book cards to hand out as I walk around, and hopefully I'll get to partake in a few of the panels and things that are going on. I am definitely planning on getting a picture taken with Elvira. If you don't have any other plans for Memorial Day weekend, I'd suggest popping in to take a look around.

5. A little deeper into the week I'm planning on hitting the social media. Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, are all going to see me post several times in several places about my free days on Kindle Select. All this is in addition to this blog post, which gets posted on each of those places plus my author page on Amazon. So if you didn't know about the promotion before you probably do now.

6. I have an interview I did for a fellow blogger, which should be going up sometime on Thursday. Hop on over and give it a read. http://judygoodwin.wordpress.com/

7. My book is also in the running for AmpersandH's Summer Reading List contest. Its already attracted some attention, but I'm a ways from making it to the finish line the way things are going. As I write this, I need about double the votes I currently have, but I'm nowhere near the bottom either and there's still two weeks before the final whistle is blown. If you want, feel free to pop in and give my book, The Unknown Neighbor a thumbs-up.

Whew. All that going on in one week. Outside of trying to get on a radio station or daytime talk show or something, I couldn't think of anything else I can do to get myself out there. The only other thing I can do is ask if you've read my book (and hopefully you liked it.) Drop onto Amazon and give your two cents. Ratings and reviews do their part to help push or restrict sales and the majority of people who have made themselves heard on Amazon seem to be on the team which found the story much too slow for their tastes.

That's it for today though. Check back next week, (or later this week, I may get bored and do another post) for something a bit more than my laundry list. And, GO SEE STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS!! Seriously. I just saw it Sunday and I want to go again.

~ Shaun