Book Promotion: Five Daily Tasks

These are the confessions of a book promotion junkie. What follows is a detailed account of Quantu Amaru’s addiction and how he feeds it. Qwantu Amaru says:

Hello world. My name is Qwantu Amaru and I am a book promotion junkie.

This is only my second blog confession since becoming a published author…not because I have had nothing to say, but because being a published author and an indie published author at that means that I am hustling…HARD!

I had the benefit of having done much of the pre-launch marketing work for 4 previous published novels, but the authors of those books never told me how “all-consuming” book promotion can be. At first I tried to organize myself with 5 daily tasks I would do to promote my book. I quickly realized I was leaving important things off my list so I came up with 5 other tasks and decided I would alternate between the two lists. Here are the tasks, naked and open for you to see:

Daily 5 Tasks:

• Connect with 5 potential interviewers
• Contact 5 potential reviewers
• 2 Posts on FB fan page
• 2 Tweets on Twitter
• Comment on 2 Blogs/FB Group posts/Page of interest
• Outreach to 1 Bookclub

Alternate Daily 5:

• Outreach to 1 Media Outlet
• Evaluate 1 Book Award or Contest for Entry
• Outreach to 1 BlogTalkradio host
• Develop 1 New Book Promo Idea
• Friend top reviewers on Shelfari and Library Thing
• Add Book to 5 Goodreads bookshelves

Pretty organized, right? And you would figure that I could blow through these lists in easily an hour or less and get back to my day, right? Wrong!

Authors beware of the time-sucking traps that are Facebook and Twitter. Early on I found that I could not pull myself from the gravitational pull of these moons. I would post and wait. Post, and check for mentions. Post, and respond. All. Damn. Day. (even now as I compose this confession, I have checked FB 3 times and twitter 4).

It was very hard to post and move on to other more important activities, like finding early reviewers, which is much more time consuming but ultimately more rewarding. Reviews, author friends, are the lifeblood of a newbie author. Newbie author, for your information, is defined as any author with less than 5 published books or less than 25,000 books sold. Reviews are how our beloved readers find the proverbial golden needles in the haystacks of dreck and drivel being published on a daily basis. Yes, I am aware of the Amazon reviews controversy, but people know the difference between planted reviews and real ones. I hope.

Anyway, just as the mantra of our esteemed president should have been Economy, Economy, Economy for the first (at least) two years of his presidency, my mantra (and yours) should be Reviews, Reviews, Reviews for the first 90 days post publishing. You see, as an indie author, unless you build advanced review time into your production cycle (and let’s face it, few of us do), you will launch with a goose-egg in the review column on Amazon.com. And believe me, Amazon is keeping score, as are the 90% of e-book readers flocking there in droves each day. Reviews are one of the key drivers of the mystical Amazon ranking algorithm that you must master in order to be found by prospective readers. This algorithm is a function of price point, reviews, customer tags, likes, and listmania. Price is the overall driver which is why so many .99 cent books get into the top 50 of many genre’s without a ton of reviews. But were that same .99 cent book to have over 50 reviews it would stick in the top 10.

So my current addiction is finding and connecting with prospective reviewers. I have given away thousands of copies of One Blood in this effort, and will continue to do so until I see One Blood top 100 reviews on Amazon.

Thankfully, the 23 I have received on Amazon make me very happy as well as the phenomenal review One Blood received from the Kirkus Book Review and the superb blurb and endorsement award-winning bestselling author Brandon Massey supplied me with by saying that, “ONE BLOOD is a richly detailed, intricately woven tale rendered in lush, evocative prose. This memorable debut heralds Qwantu Amaru as a talent well worth watching.” ~ Brandon Massey, award-winning author of DARK CORNER and COVENANT!

With that in mind, if you are interested in feeding my review addiction, e-mail me at qwantuamaru@gmail.com and we can work something out!

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Qwantu Amaru is the author of One Blood, available wherever books and ebooks are sold. Check out his website at http://www.qwantuamaru.com/index.html