Marketing Fails

In case anyone didn't know my new book: SHOWGIRLS AND ALIENS is free this week on Amazon. It is already #94 for free adventure ebook in Kindle store.



One thing that writers hate is Marketing, I'll share some Marketing tactics that didn't work for me.

SOCKPUPPETS:

I can see why this doesn't work. I grabbed a Sock and made a puppet out of it. I started talking to it about my book. I'm getting all excited telling the sock about my book when he interrupts me and tells me socks don't read.

I told him socks don't talk either.

He asked me how I was hearing him if he can't talk.

I didn't have a response, so I said he was an insane piece of cotton that was born in a sweatshop.

We got in a yelling match over who was more evil, the product of a sweatshop or the consumer who buys the product.

Finally my wife came in and broke up the argument. She put the sock in the sock drawer as time-out and made me write on my next novel as my time out.

LESSON LEARNED: If you are going to talk to a Sockpuppet about your book, make sure you find a friendly one.

ANNOYING E-MAIL CAMPAINS:

I thought about emailing everyone I know saying, “Buy my book”. As a former marketing guy I know the importance of testing these things first. So the first email I sent was to myself. I proudly hit send and went back to look at the copy of what I had written. Then I got an email interrupting me. It was from Darrell B. Nelson asking me to buy his latest book.

Annoyed at being interrupted I emailed him back saying to stop Spamming me.

Looking at the results of my first test, I found 100% of the people I sent emails to asked me to stop with the spam.

SENDING OUT A SALES FORCE:

I gathered my evil minions and told them to tell everyone about my book. I was just about to set them loose to spread the word, when I remembered that I should try a role playing exercise. I pretended to be the customer and listened to their pitch.

“Meow.”

Okay that's good, but doesn't really get to the heart of the matter. Let's try again:

“Purrrrr.”

Still not mentioning the product enough, but it was really cute.

Then they started needing ear rubs and petting. Before I knew it the afternoon was gone.

Looking at the numbers, sending out evil minions didn't really help with sales.

Those are some of the Marketing Ideas I tried, your results may vary.

By Darrell B. Nelson author of I KILLED THE MAN THAT WASN'T THERE