traceysinclairconsulting

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Tag Archives: reviews

Dark Dates hits the radio

Just a short post this week, due to the Bank Holiday. I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Zoe Cunningham for local radio station Zone One, about writing and Dark Dates; I even got to pick some of my favourite songs! It can be hard for a writer to put themselves out there to do promotion like this – we’re so used to hiding away behind our desks, but this was a great experience, Zoe was lovely, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Should you want to listen, you can do so here (though this may be a time sensitive link).

On the review front, I got a lovely review over at Night Owl Reviews, so I am still steadily building a presence. Is it working? Time will tell…

Promoting your ebook – going multimedia

It’s  been another  busy week on the promotional side, and I feel I’m really starting to rack up the PR – I followed up a great review at My Tower of Books with a guest post on the eternal appeal of bad boys, which was a post tailored to fit the fun, youthful feel of the site. This came about since the blogger Jackie had been so kind about Dark Dates I thought I’d take a punt on suggesting a guest post – and she agreed! Which shows that promoting your book doesn’t have to be a one shot thing; many bloggers will be more than happy to do a follow up item.

Again, building on established relationships bore fruit: I followed up a guest post and review at Open Book Society with an author Q&A – this is particularly interesting because the reviewer wasn’t that taken with my book, but it shows that you can still get perfectly decent coverage even if one person doesn’t go for your product: obviously the site recognises that it takes all sorts and aims to give information to its readers rather than being prescriptive about content. Most bloggers are really nice and keen to engage – so it’s worth bearing in mind that a bad review isn’t the end of the world!

Another guest post – and this time a very nice review – over at LovLivLifeReviews, and topped off with a great review from a lovely blogger, Natasja, over at Natasja’s Book Blog.

But probably the most exciting thing so far it my first venture into multimedia, with an online trailer for the book. But as I can take no credit whatsoever for this, I’ll let cover designer Caroline Goldsmith explain…

Tracey and I talk about books a lot. And recently our discussions have all been about “Dark Dates” and how best to market it. Marketing self-published books is a maze that all authors need to navigate. Having worked in the publishing industry for more than a decade, I know that there is no magic key to success when it comes to book promotion. What I do know is that the more ways there are to find out about a book, the more chance there is of someone picking up on it.

As the first book has garnered a haul of good reviews, and part two in the series is due for publication later this year, I thought now was the ideal time to launch a book trailer. The London landscapes in the video are all made from photographs I took from the top of my old building on the river.

So what do you think? Are book trailers the future, or just a fun addition to a marketing plan? Watch this space…

Promoting my ebook: review round up and why self-promotion is hard work

One of the things I have been blogging about recently is the sometimes arduous task of promoting my novel, Dark Dates. As I made the choice to self-publish (having been traditionally published before, albeit by a small press) I knew it would involve a lot of work, but I have been surprised by just how much it involves: researching marketing opportunities, contacting bloggers, writing guest posts and doing author interviews – at times it has felt like a job in itself!

Still, I am starting to see some results, and hopefully this will lead to increased sales. Below are some examples of what I’ve been doing and the results…

Review: Fangs for Fantasy – was delighted to get a 5 out of 5 review at this site, which provided me with my favourite quote so far – ‘Tracey Sinclair has turned me into a fan poodle’. I’m not entirely sure what it means, but I’ll take it. This is also a great example of how these reviews cross-sell for you – based on this review, the book got recommended as an interesting read over at Coffee, Cookies and Chili Peppers.

Guest post: Rebeka Harrington – author and blogger Rebeka Harrington is very active on the cross-promotion front, and does an enormous amount of work promoting her Vampires Released series. I connected with her via Goodreads and we arranged to do guest posts on one another’s blogs (you can read mine here). I’d really recommend this, because it means that your guest is not only helping promote your book on their site, but they are invested in promoting your blog, too. I’ve already seen an increase in hits and Twitter followers off the back of several guest posts.

Guest Post: Interview: A Book A Day – another cross-promotional opportunity, this time with author and blogger Tonya Cannariato, who reviews and writes for this site. We did author Q&As for one another: bringing new guests to my site (it was clear a lot of fans checked her interview out from the comments) while the interview she hosted for me got an awful lot of retweets.

Reading Lark After Dark: Another interview, this time for the more ‘grown up’ arm of Reading Lark.

Metamodo: Guest post – an example of blogs wanting not just straightforward interviews, but fun content that their readers will enjoy even if they aren’t interested in your book. These can be tough to come up with – it can be a struggle to find topics! – but bloggers like them because they are very little work on their side (as I’ve said before, most bloggers are non-professional and are fitting their activities around full-time jobs), and because they are quirkier than straightforward Q&As. In keeping with the slightly saucy nature of the site, I did a post about my favourite fictional love triangles…

Nocturnal Reviews: Guest post – this was quite similar to the above, but the blogger likes ‘top tens’ so my post was on the top ten places to take a vampire on a first date – yup, really! It sounds silly but was actually great fun, and it was also my first ‘giveaway’: I’d been wary of these because I find Amazon a bit confusing when it comes to organising freebies, but as most bloggers seem happy to offer PDFs or .mobi files as prizes, I am likely to do more in future…

As you can imagine, this has been quite time-consuming – especially when you take into account that I repost links to all of these on my own blog, Body of a Geek Goddess, and I am still reviewing at Byte The Book and Exeunt, writing for Unleash The Fanboy (who did a nice story on my book here) and Strictly Writing. And I am, of course, currently working on the sequel to Dark Dates as well as juggling all the other balls in my freelancing career. So never let anyone tell you that self-publishing is easy… but is it worth it? Watch this space…

Dark Dates by … me.
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