Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Welcome to the Blog-A-thon and Meet Donaya Hammond

Today, I'm pleased to welcome several of my friends and co-authors to Dishin' It Out. We're going to blog about promotion; what works, what doesn't, what might. Feel free to share your comments, suggestions, questions, and from those commenting, one lucky winner will win a free download of Tender Return, my latest historical romance release.

My first guest is Donaya Hammond, and here's what she has to share about promotions:

Since I am eighteen years old and promoting a novel I first drafted at age thirteen, it made sense to me that my main promotion strategy would be through Facebook. Check out the "Donaya Haymond" fan page. It has a link to my independent website, which I constructed myself free of charge, but Facebook has the most convenient platform for posting news and interacting with fans.

I took out a Facebook ad targeting high school American girls (that was the broadest demographic I could afford) and have so far spent about $32, which I am paying for with my summer job. I set a maximum bid per click, $0.38, and every time someone clicks on the ad I pay up to that amount. My maximum budget per day is $2. Since taking out the ad, my number of fans has gone up to 49, with two or three being added daily, out of an average six clicks. The first 16 people are friends or family members. I don't know any of the rest.

This strategy would work for any author savvy with Facebook and with a small amount of money to invest in it. Another method cost me nothing but time; however, other authors are less likely to be able to do it. For the past six years I have been a regular poster of both original fiction and fanfiction on the websites Fanfiction.net and Fictionpress.com. Halloween Romance was first posted at Fictionpress. The sites allow people to name their favorite authors and stories, along with requesting that the site alert them to new posts on certain stories or by certain authors. This data is available to the authors themselves. The site also has a messaging service. So I tracked down all my fans, kept a list to prevent overlap, and messaged them all about my new book and the Facebook fan page one by one. There were just under 200.

Hope this helps.


Available now at Eternal Press.

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