My experience with The Christmas Tree Treasure Hunt set my mind whirling about marketing. What a brilliant concept! Starting the story off in the blogs stirred up all kinds of buzz! But there was so much more to this idea!
Communication
If you’re not familiar with our book, let me tell you how it came about. (Yep, that’s my name at the bottom!) This story started as a brain-child of one of the authors and the Write Integrity Press editor, Tracy Ruckman. They connected 8 authors who publish with WIP and then set up a contest to choose the chapter of one other writer to fill out nine destination chapters.
So the buzz of the story started before the writing because of that little contest. There’s no way of knowing how many people learned about the book because of the notices about the contest. If nothing else, those who entered the contest would likely be interested enough to grab a copy.
Collaboration
Not just one author, but many. All of them focusing on a single goal in order to give benefit to the entirety. Though this type of situation won’t work for most novels which have single authors, connecting with other authors of like genres, or even others who publish during the same season can be beneficial.
Serialization
General blog hops can be a lot of fun, but didn’t Mark Twain and Charles Dickens both start out with serials? And to spread them amid popular blogs just spikes the enthusiasm which is contagious, let me tell you. It worked great for our story because we could post single short sections (half-chapters) on each blog. By the way, here is my first post, chapter 5 of The Christmas Tree Treasure Hunt.
Serialization won’t work as easily for published work, but a partial serial can really draw readers. Especially if you connect the episodes to some other, non-reading, activity or commodity.
Celebration
To kick off the promotion of The Christmas Tree Treasure Hunt, the publisher set up a party at virtualcelebration.com. The editor and the authors started out setting up personal pages with pictures, articles, questions, and recipes. Readers were invited to join in and they did, setting up their own pages and visiting those of the authors. One of them one a huge packages of books and gift cards and all of them got to chat back and forth with some of the authors of the book. Cool idea!
Your turn: Have I forgotten any “tions?” What would you add? Come back next week for a follow-up.
Marji Laine 