3 Types of Book Promo Posts Plus 2 Add Ons
The Basic Promo
The basic book promotion post, which comes with all of our advertising packages, contains a synopsis and a few quotes from positive reviews. Basically, it's an introduction and limited exposure for your book to our readers. I try to pick a blog post title which will attract attention (which I try to do for all my posts to varying degrees of success.)
For example, check out the promo post for The Homicide Chronicle by Ralph Shamas.
The Excerpt Post
The next type of promotion post is the excerpt. If I don't get an excerpt from the author, I can take one from Amazon, probably the first page or two of the book. Obviously I can't over emphasize the value of potential fans sampling an author's work, but there's another tactic that benefits from the excerpt.
We can run more than one for the author, which not only increases exposure but has the potential to hook readers, especially if I link to the previous excerpts (or at least have a list of excerpt links in the first excerpt post).
To see an example of a simple excerpt post (without links to other excerpts), check out an excerpt from Since Tomorrow by Morgan Nyberg.
The Interview Post
For those authors which are interested in a variety of posts on this site, the interview post is another consideration. I've read about how a lot of people don't pay attention to author interviews, saying they are boring. So, my suggestion is to come up with creative ways to de-borify an interview.
One thing we could do is treat an interview sort of like a guest post with the author only answering one or two questions but at an increased length, such as the way Doug Lucas did it in this post.
You also may notice how I didn't title the post as "An Interview with author Doug Lucas." I don't think those types of titles attract enough attention. I used the first question as the title of the post since I thought it would attract more attention from other writers (and maybe even a few readers).
Another type of interview post which I think is more effective than the standard fare is the character interview, which also lends itself to a book promotion. The questions are asked of a character from the book, which gives potential fans a chance to get to know one or more of the characters from the book being promoted.
For a very most excellent example of the character interview, check out this post, which was syndicated from Diantha-Jones.com.
The Giveaway
With all the free books that are available for the frugal readers among us, the giveaway post (or series of posts) may not be as effective as they once were. However, using a giveaway to attract attention can't go wrong, especially if the giveaway is attached to another type of post, such as an excerpt or an interview.
A lot of blogs use a manual system with the comments to have people enter the giveaway. Personally I don't like this method, mostly because I have a hard enough time keeping track of things as it is. My preferred method is Rafflecopter, which has the added benefit of visually showing how many people have entered (total entries), not to mention that it gives us a variety of ways to further promote the author and/or book.
One note about giveaways: they are a simple add-on. I will not give a book extra attention because a giveaway is attached. I haven't figured out a way to get a whole bunch of people to enter a giveaway, so to increase the effectiveness of my promotion, I will focus my attention on what I know how to do. I've tried to publicize a giveaway in the past, and I just spun my wheels because very few people entered.
Book Trailer
Do you have a video trailer for your book? When you purchase an advertising package, I'll have you fill out a form. One of the questions is about a book trailer. The most likely spot for a trailer is with a promo post, but it could fit with another type of post. It just depends.
Here's my email: msl_007@live.com
If there's a type of post I'm missing or something you think would be a good add on, please let me know. I'm always interested in improving our service.
