#BookPromotion: A #booktrailer and Story Cartel
But as regular readers of my blog know, one of my characters called me out for my lack of book promotion expertise. (Shut up, it’s a writer’s thing.) And since us writers are called on more and more to promote our work we are forced to step up our game, regardless the snarky comments the imaginary people in our heads make.
I did two things this weekend. The first it I bought a token on Story Cartel and arranged for them to download my entire novella. Now, this is cash money, folks, something I don’t part with lightly. But it a platform created by The Write Practice’s Jeff Goins and Joe Bunting so I thought I’d give it a try.
What Story Cartel does is give writer’s a platform to promote their books through free downloads and in exchange the people who read your book will post a review on Amazon, with the disclaimer that they received a copy in exchange for an honest review.
One token is (at this writing) $25. If you want to be featured in their weekly mailing list, then that’s four tokens. I did not purchase the four tokens for this. A hundred bucks is still a hundred bucks. Am I shooting myself in the foot for being so cheap? Well, here’s the thing. I already have a few reviews on Amazon for the book, and I’m testing the promotional waters for the next one. We shall my pretties, we shall see. I have an evil a marketing plan.
The next thing I did was make a book trailer video. I bought the right to use the foundation video from Fotolia and used a still from the book cover and laid down tracks, cut and pasted, pasted and cut, put in the transitions, titles and the public domain music track, (yes, there are such things) to produce my little piece ‘de art. And for as much of a headache as iMovie is to use, you can make a decent video if you are patient and obsessive, two qualities I possess in spades.
Once made (after learning a few hard lessons about movie making) I posted it on YouTube, putting in the appropriate tags. As of this morning it got 23 views which pleased me. This is a new channel made specifically for my writing, and the first video. But what is cool about YouTube is that they have sharing buttons for all the major social media platforms. I shared that video all over the place, except Instagram. (Don’t get me started on Instagram. But I’ll be writing about that sometime soon.) I posted it everywhere I had a social media account, even Reddit. Surprisingly Reddit has a sub reddit for “cinematic” book trailer videos. Who knew?
So those were the major book promotions things I did this weekend. What about you?
Get a free download of Forced Labor at Story Cartel follow this link: Forced Labor ~ Book 1-Arekan’s War
And here is the book trailer video:
Photo published under a Creative Commons License issued by Flickr user Luc Van Braekel