Circe: The Beginning is the first short story that I’ve done a lot of “marketing” for before the big launch day. And so far, it’s panning out to be my most successful launch day (although I’ll come back and report on it after it is released on May 3rd). The best part of all this, is that I’ve spent less than ten dollars.
So how did I do it?
- There are several websites where you can potentially advertise your book for free.
- I promoted Circe: The Beginning with all the sites that allowed .99 stories.
- I promoted The Sea Goddess on the same week my other story is launching (at all the sites that require a free story).
- In this way, I’m hoping some of the people who pick up one story will pick up the others.
- Here are some of the sites I used:
- (Although I have no idea which sites will actually promote my work, I’ve only heard back from one of them, as of now.)I also reached out to a few book reviewers. Two of them have agreed to do editorial reviews for both “To Kill a Wizard” and Circe: The Beginning.
- The most amazing thing about this is that all I did was ask. If you haven’t reached out to a book reviewer, but you want to, go for it! You can’t lose anything by trying.
- Going on some social media groups, as well as, asking my blog followers, I was able to hand out a large number of free copies of Circe: The Beginning.
- They have all agreed to leave reviews on May 3rd when the story comes out, although I’ll shoot them an email as a reminder.
- And the best part of this, most of them have reached out to me to say how much they love the story! It is absolutely wonderful to have people who know very little about me have such positive feedback.
- And here’s where I spent a tiny bit of money, I used Amazon’s new giveaway. It allows authors to give away free Kindle copies of their books.
- I’ll report anything I learn about this process later. Right now, I essentially have this little link: https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/1cbf2786a11b4fca?ref_=pe_1771210_134854370#ln-en
- People click on it and see if they win.
- Unlike Goodreads, I have no clue how to discover how many people, if any, have entered the contest.
- The last thing I’ll do is shoot an email to my newsletter followers (click here to receive my newsletters).
Next Tuesday, my latest short story comes out. I don’t know how many downloads I’ll have, or whether anyone will actually leave reviews, but I feel really excited to see how all of this pans out.