Fooled you! You seriously thought I’d written my last Kindle Scout update yesterday…when my dashboard said 0 days left. Well, I woke this morning to a nice surprise: My Kindle Scout Dashboard confirmed my suspicions that a programmer designed the system (obviously) and made sure to point out that counting does, in fact, start with 0. So today I officially have zero days left.
My last day.
Le sigh.
Now what am I going to do with all of this free time?
That’s funny. I chuckled…chortled even.
For the next few days I’m going to wring my hands, pull out my hair, and wonder what verdict the Kindle Scout powers-that-be are going to hand down to Suicide Station.
Yay? or Nay?
At this point, only the Shadow knows.
Moving Forward
One of the benefits of this campaign (something I’ve been extolling for a while now), is that it truly taught me how to be efficient and effective with my marketing. So now that the campaign is over (or will be in about twelve hours), my plan is to start focusing those same kinds of efforts on my previously published books. What I have found invaluable is the idea of not only getting my books in the eyes of the public, but doing so with regularity…get the public really, really familiar with them. To that end, I have a plan. I’ll be focusing on a different subset of my books for a given period, posting and tweeting about them regularly. I firmly believe that “one shot” promotion is no longer effective. Do to the nature of Twitter and Facebook, you cannot rely on a single post or tweet to get the word out. You have to do it with two things in mind:
- Regularity
- Variety
What I did with my Suicide Station campaign was create about 30 images that can be used at any given time. I would schedule tweets throughout the day/night (on the hour) using a different image and a different tag line/phrasing for the post/tweet. This helped to evolve the “promotion” into a “campaign”. And so I plan on launching “campaigns” for all of my books…a few at a time.
This is a plan I highly recommend other authors use…especially those who are serious about making money with their work. Will it guarantee success? No. Nothing will. But like I always say in my acting classes:
Commitment will not guarantee success, but a lack of commitment will guarantee failure.
Numbers
Drum roll please (as this will be the last day I show you the numbers)…
We did it. That 500 hour mark did not elude us. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I clearly could not have done this without all the marvelous support I received from long-time fans, new fans, and prospective fans. You guys are amazing and I cannot thank you enough.
I hope, throughout this campaign, you’ve enjoyed my ramblings and maybe even learned a thing or two (about me, about my work, or about marketing your work). It has been an absolute pleasure.
And now…if everyone will cross their fingers for me, I have to wait for Amazon to hand down a verdict.