Promoting a book through events

I ran a lot of tests this year, and it quickly became abundantly clear that, outside of advertising, it’s nearly impossible to promote a book without some sort of event surrounding it.

If you don’t have an event combined with a promotion, then a book will be the same price forever, and except in the initial launch, it’s nearly impossible to build interest.

So, the #1 thing I always tell people when launching a promotion is to combine it with an event, or, if you don’t want to create an event, you can focus on advertising which can work whether you are running a special on your book or not.

Events could be:

• putting a story in a limited time anthology with other authors.
• doing a promotion with other authors on Bundlerabbit, Groupees, or some other type of group promotion website.
• running a time-based crowdfunding event like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Inkshares, or something else, where you can offer additional perks, and other things that you couldn’t any other time. Note, this can ONLY be done at launch, and honestly, pre-launch, where you can get your most ardent fans a book several months before you launch on Amazon.
• price pulsing where you are dropping the price of a book for a very limited time.

Once you figure out the “event”, then you can figure out the rest of the promotion. There are so many ways to support an event. Here are some of them, but it’s not an exhaustive list.

• Doing cross-promotions with other authors to promote the event
• Running ads to support the event.
• Collecting freebies for buyers in the event from your author friends.
• Doing a book tour to support the event.
• Setting up Facebook group takeovers to promote the event

All of those things can support the event, but without the event and having some type of time-based constraint to drive people to act, it’s almost impossible to get anybody to do anything.

You can run constant ads if you want, which will work, but they will still work better when associated with some sort of event.