They say only 50% percent of advertising works, but they don’t know which 50% – a nifty little phrase, but it doesn’t help when it comes to getting your book out there. You’ve got to have some ingenuity when it comes to people buying your e-book. Here are five methods I may (or may not be using) in the pursuit for higher sales figures:
1. Guerrilla Marketing
This isn’t as illegal as it sounds. This involves placing information about your book in more strategic and personal ways. A little post-it note inside a returned library book, a sticker on the lamp-post, a hashtag scrawled on the tops of the METRO newspaper as they’re grabbed on the Tube. I occasionally see other people have left their mark in such a way, and it always intrigues me.
2. Speaker’s Corner
Reserved for religious zealots and political windbags, this free-for-all corner in Hyde Park seems a perfect if unusual spot to do an impromptu memoir reading.
3. Talking to Strangers
The weirdo on the bus who ends up chewing your ear off (literally sometimes) is a British staple. But are these dispossessed individuals really advertising gimmicks in disguise? (No). There is an element of the artisan in this process, if the human talking about the book is dressed up in-character, perhaps giving away free samples of the book, it can catch the eye of the street-walkers.
4. POP-UP STALL
This can be little more than glorified busking. All you need is a wallpaper-pasting table and some cardboard for a make-shift sign, and all you need is wait around in the high-street as people avoid to make eye-contact with you. This choice seems a little odd, as how do you sell electronic information at a market?
5. VEGAS LIKE RALLY
A good book requires an audience to be heated up into a frenzy. Pitch a tent and pop in a few chairs and speak from a podium like your Billy Graham, they’ll be wanting absolution via your printed wordage for the afternoon is out.
How effective any of these are is anyone’s guess… I’ll let you know how I get on when I’ve tried them all.
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