Many authors do blog tours, book giveaways, Facebook launch parties and the like to promote their books. I’m looking for fresh, new concepts (or new twists on old concepts) that will propel book sales and online attention. Would love to hear any innovative ideas you’re willing to share.

It may not be innovative but it was successful.  A client of mine, planned on writing a book.  He wanted to build a list that he could market his book to before it was published – a pre-sold audience.

I advised him to write an eBook based on the premise of the book with a few tips and tricks and a glimpse into what the book was about.  He provided me with the ebook, I designed a professional looking cover for it and his web designer set it up on his website so people had to opt-in to get it.  His list went from 300 to 1000 in 2 months.  I advised him to write a blog about it with a link to the opt-in page, add a link to the eBook into his signature liine on all his outgoing emails, ask guest bloggers (connections he had already made when I signed him up on a few blogger sites) to write a review because he offered exerpts of his book to them for free with a copy of the finished book (when published)  and they wrote raving reviews with a link to his opt-in form and we posted his eBook on Content Sites like Scribed (where it could be downloaded for free and no opt-in was involved but still provided exposure to his upcoming Book on Amazon).  And, with his email opt-in list he marketed to them for a few months before his book was published this month.  He was very pleased with the results.

No problems – love to share success stories, especially mine.  Social “proof” that a strategy is the best way to start a campaign, new product launch, event annoucement, etc.  Spending the time on the strategy is paramount to success.

@joanmuschampfagnani – Love your idea for the webcast book club. I’m going to give that some thought.

@dcoville001- I hadn’t considered using an eBook to promote a print book. What a great way to build a mailing list!

Keep those ideas coming, folks.

@joanmuschampfagnani I love eBooks, as well. I check Amazon weekly and download a couple of their freebies-of-the-week to the Kindle app on my laptop. Not that I’ve gotten around to reading them — I spend all day working on my computer and it’s hard to think of reading anything for pleasure on it… and I haven’t yet invested in an e-reader.

On author websites, I’ll always read the free sample chapter. In fact, for the last blog tour I ran on behalf of an author client, I included the embed code for the sample chapter and many bloggers ran it on their blogs, which was great publicity for the author.

What marketing related book did you download, Joan? I want it! (Heading to Amazon now…)

@joanmuschampfagnani Thanks for the link. Just downloaded the book. I read in the late evenings to decompress, too. But I read printed books with paper pages I can turn. Call me old-fashioned!