Let's have a #fantasy scavenger hunt in July.
With our new themed month strategy starting next month, I've been thinking of ways to incorporate that into the promotions side of the site. Not all promotions for the month will be about the theme, but I do want to focus on the theme as much as possible.
With that in mind, I would like to do a month long scavenger hunt with a fantasy theme. At each stop, readers will pick up something that they will need at the end of the month for a chance at a gift card prize. The exact details haven't been hammered out and probably won't be until I have a greater idea of how many authors would like to participate.
There will be an entry fee, but like everything I do on this site, I'll keep things cheap. For $10 you'll get a blog post during the hunt, and $5 of that will go into the gift card prize fund. So, if we can get at least 5 authors, that would be a $25 prize, enough incentive to get interested parties to the site.
Right now I don't know if this will be a multi-blog event. My initial plans will probably only include stops on this site. However, I would be happy to entertain stops on the authors' blogs. To make things easier, the blog posts don't have to be in order or happen on a certain day. At the end of the month, probably the last week of the month, a list of blog posts will be published, a piece of information needed from each post.
How easy or hard it will be to find the info will be based upon how big the grand prize is. I won't make people work super hard for a low cash prize, but if the prize is large enough, I'll make people squint and scratch their head for the info.
Unless an author wants to offer something particular, the post will be a simple promo post with a synopsis, large book cover, and a few positive review quotes (an excerpt if there are no review quotes). Because the entry fee is so cheap (hopefully to attract more authors), there will be no long-term marketing for these posts, which normally consists of tweets weeks and even months after the post has gone live. I'm behind on those anyway, so doing this event may even help me catch up.
The $10 entry fee is subject to go up if this turns out to be a popular idea, so if you're interested, I would purchase it now. In a few days or weeks, it could go up.
Now I want to focus on Fantasy books, but if someone wants to be included in the fantasy hunt, I won't outright deny them. Your money is as good as anyone else's. However, should I have enough actual fantasy books to use, I do reserve the right to hold your book until a more appropriate month. In that case, I'll give you an extra promo post because of the inconvenience. And because I have just informed you of the preceding, I won't do a refund.
