Hi,
The previous post was about my problems finishing the novella that I plan to use as a giveaway to start building an audience for my upcoming thriller, The Jagged Man. After I published If a Butterfly, I spent (wasted?) most of 2022 implementing a very time-consuming (but moderately successful) e-mail advertising campaign for both books in the series. I had just started a mailing list, and I was trying to expand it so I could use it to market my books.
To get my list started for Butterfly, I used a reader magnet (a giveaway to entice readers to buy books when they are published). Butterfly’s reader magnet was a 50-page companion book to the series. Giving it away didn’t grow my list very much, so I decided to do some targeted email marketing of my own.
If a Butterfly has a large cast of characters, so I thought I would try to appeal to people who were like one or more of the characters in the books. One character, for example, is an astronaut, another one is a radio deejay, another is an actress, etc. I couldn’t think of large groups that had widespread clubs or organizations of people in those professions that I could email. One of the characters is a quilter, though, and I knew (because Minay is a quilter) that many of them meet regularly with other quilters through informal organizations called quilt guilds.
I started with Texas. I Googled “quilt guilds in Texas,” and came up with several sites that provided links to over 150 Texas quilt guilds. The first thing I did was create a Word file of the links to all of those quilt guilds. Then I visited each guild’s site and got the email addresses for a few of the quilters listed on their site (president, vice-president, publicity chair – people like that).
Rather than going back and forth between my email and the lists, I created a template for a basic email letting the recipients know about the plot and theme of the books and provided links where they could order them. That first template included an image like the one above, and information about the quilter in the books originally being a Texas quilter (she moved to Amish country). I closed each email by saying I just wanted to let them know about the books in case any of them were interested, and that I hoped they would make an announcement at a guild meeting, or give the members a link to the If a Butterfly website.
I spent several days sending the emails to all the Texas guilds, and then I started working alphabetically through the other states’ lists. It took me a few months just to compile all 50 lists, and another several months to send all the emails. I also personalized most of the templates to fit that state or city (by cloning the original template and editing a new one). After those were sent (halfway through the year), I did the same thing for Canada and then did one more for the UK (one of the characters is a British grad student, so those templates emphasized both her and the quilter). That campaign used up another couple of months of time and effort. Was it worth it? It *did* sell some books, but not enough to warrant the time and energy expended. Lesson learned.
For Jagged Man, I will probably do one or two book blog tours, giving away ebook versions of Flood and Fire in exchange for joining my mailing list. Those tours will happen a few weeks before Jagged Man is available. A book blog tour consists of online announcements on several book bloggers’ websites (all at the same time) about an upcoming book. The other thing I haven’t done before, but probably will this time, is online advertising. I haven’t decided how to do it, or how much to spend, but I need to make some decisions about that soon.
The next post will be about trying to work on an older computer and a new one at the same time.
See you then.
Michael
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