Putting Out Your Marketing Brand #2 Hosting an Online Event

One of my favorite things to do is help out other authors.  When someone has a book that is coming out, and wants to market it...it's also an opportunity to plug your own work.  One of these ways is the Book Release.  With Facebook being a huge marketing opportunity, the book release can be held all over the world.  Your author you are trying to promote, sets up a book release event, and sends out an invite.  The people invited can also share the event.  It helps to have other authors, as they are in the same boat.  And by helping others, they too can help you.

Usually when there is a release, they block out time periods for other authors to step in and host.  The author who is being released, can introduce you, give your bio info, and your author website/facebook page, Twitter page, that sort of thing....any thing you want to put out as advertising.  Then when you take over (after thanking the host for having you), you can have games that will have a giveaway, or ask questions of the main author.  You can either give something of yours away, but usually the main author can add something in as a giveaway.  Some examples are:

• ebooks of the main author (or a combination of yours and theirs).
• bookmarks that are signed.
• keychains, postcards, gift cards.

Whatever you give out, remember postage is different between the US and around the world.  You may want to give away ebooks to those around the world, or even in the US which is a cheaper alternative.  

Always be polite, use good grammar and writing.  After all you are putting yourself out there too, and professionalism is key!

Blog Tours:

Blog tours are great fun, I've been in a couple, and they are a great way to spread the word.  They are also great fun.  There is a good variety of things you can do with a blog tour, and you can set it up to have different people do different things.  You would need to set up a calendar and schedule people in on different days.  If you are asked to join one, try to take a slot that is something you can work on without too much trouble.  You can also put up your post and schedule it for later.  

Some examples of what you can do to participate:

• Put up a snippet from that persons story, maybe a chapter.  That can be one person doing this.
• Have a character interview (where your character is interviewed).
• Author Interview is also another crowd pleaser, we get closer to our author idols that way.  They can be fun and engaging, without being dull.
• Character sketch, maybe a drawing of your character, and their statistics.
• Cover reveal.  And maybe a blurb about how the cover came about.  

The blog tour can also be linked up to the release event (building up to event), and help drum up interest.  You can also put your own links in your blog post.  

Thunderclap:

This is a rather new platform for me, and one that I haven't seen much in the way of return...though as I'm relatively new to this,  I'm not one to make a judgement call on this.  I've been in numerous ones, and basically the author sets  up the Thunderclap to go out when a certain number of people has signed up to allow thunderclap to send out a notification when that number has been reached.  If you don't reach that number, they just don't send it.  I'm not sure of the low end of the numbers you can set it at, but 100 is most common I think.

That's all for now...on our next episode of "Putting Out Your Marketing Brand."  I'll go over different places for our work to be sold.  Goodreads, B&N, Amazon, CreateSpace.  

Also the release date for the Alzheimers anthology "The Longest Night Watch" will be soon.  I am proud to be part of this anthology (Volume 2), and have been blessed to be with such great writerly company.  More on that as we draw ever closer to the magic hour.  :) 

Here is the presale link :)

https://www.amazon.com/Longest-Night-Watch-Alzheimers-Association-ebook/dp/B01LXWB3BX/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1475554009&sr=8-2&keywords=The+Longest+Night+Watch

Thank you all for your support. :)