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I'd like to start a new forum where people can talk about what's working for you right now in marketing your book.

I think this will help other authors to prioritize their activities if they can find out what's working for other people. This would be especially valuable to new authors.

I've share the hottest tool that I'm using right now. And that's Twitter. As you will note on the main page of this Book Marketing Network website, both my http://www.bookmarket.com website and this network have been rising in Alexa ranks (and visits) because of my use of Twitter.

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John,

Thanks for the details! Please give us a link to your YouTube Video. You just might hook a few of us!

So there's there's a delicate balancing act between "What key search terms can I realistically target?" and "What's an eye-catching title?" Seventeen years ago, I wanted to title my book on church music and contemporary styles "The Redemption of Rock." I thought it was catchy and controversial. Tyndale House overruled me and entitled it "The Contemporary Christian Music Debate." Now I'm glad the latter won out. When someone searches "Contemporary Christian Music" on Amazon, my book comes up #1 or #2. And it still sells regularly. If they'd gone with the former title, I'd have probably come up #10,000 on a search that included searches for "rock" stars and geological texts.

J. Steve Miller
President, Legacy Educational Resources
Author of Enjoy Your Money! How to Make It, Save It, Invest It and Give It
"The money book for people who hate money books."
http://wisdomcreekpress.com/press_kits.html
The link to the trailer is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2DEAFCD0-Y

Actually, I play bass in a praise raise band and the title "The Redemption of Rock" really talks to me, but I can certainly see why the publisher's title is much easier to locate, but the new title sounds strident to me. It must be a debate in classical thinkers minds, but to the average Joe, the message delivered in a rock motif is very satisfying. I frankly dropped out of church activities years ago because it was boring and I couldn't see the point, but I've played in this rock band on Saturday nights now for ten years. That's gotta make the preacher happy.

John Wolf
Author of Fantastic Tales
JohnWolfBooks.com
That's a great trailer, John! I can see why it would result in sales.

Concerning spiritual truths delivered through a rock medium, it's not nearly so controversial now, but when I wrote the book almost 20 years ago it was a different story. But it's a very interesting debate on several levels. To me, the history of Christian music is the most fascinating aspect of it all. Like John Newton not being able to use "Amazing Grace" in the morning service because it sounded so secular at the time. Or the controversy over the first organ coming to America. On the one hand, it's hilarious; on the other hand, very insightful about human nature and how we develop such strong opinions.

Concerning the title, the phrase "contemporary Christian music" has changed meaning in many circles. To many, it's a style to itself that doesn't include today's harder rock styles. When I wrote the book, the word "contemporary" encompassed any style, from soul to hard rock - anything that was, well, contemporary.

Your band sounds fun!
I remember a time when contemporary meant a single acoustic guitar and voice singing a folk song with religious overtones. It was considered radical and very offensive to do this in Sunday morning service and only was done on Saturdays or evenings during a pot-luck dinner.

I was writing music for our church orchestra (small group) for a while for Sunday morning and ran into the forces of all holy good that excepted the music as long as it had a religious title, nothing contraversial, and I did that. I wasn't trying to be outside the box. What happened is the Bach index was going down and the more vocal members of the church decided that the music wasn't churchy enough, it just has to be "real" classics, no new stuff, we want our baby-back ribs. I thought that was remarkable.

What eventually happened was the orchestra was retired and a young fellow came in that introduced contemporary music for choir and instruments. It was very exciting and people loved it - then he added a bass guitar. The voices rose up like zombies from a fresh gravesite. "That sounds like a cocktail lounge!" Once again, not religious enough.

So where are we now? We are back to a small choir singing hymns, no instruments, but we have a rock band on Saturday nights and everyone has their space and all is in equillibrium with the universe.

I should have written a book.
John,

Going with the theme of this forum, I suppose that "what's worked for me" is writing on topics that I'm passionate about. As a young person, I saw the need to follow God, but I also loved the harder rock of my time (70's). At the time, it was Led Zeppelin, The Stones, etc.

So when I heard Christians playing music in those styles (coming out of the Jesus movement), it was very motivating to me. They were speaking in my musical language.

So when I went into youth ministry, I got all this flack for "introducing their kids to the devil's music." I decided that it was important enough to take those issues seriously. I was passionate enough about the subject that I felt that something needed to be seriously researched and written, whether anybody would publish it or not. (This was in the 1980's, before print on demand.) If nobody published it, I'd just run off copies and give to people.

Well, it was published by Tyndale House and has been translated and published in Dutch, German, Spanish, Romanian and Russian. So sometimes when we see a controversy or need on a local level, and we're passionate about it, we might assume that it's important to a lot of other people as well.

It worked for me!
One way you can have your cake and eat it, too, is to use the main title: The Redemption of Rock, with the subtitle: The Contemporary Christian Music Debate. My bet is that your book would still show up in the top ten under Contemporary Christian Music - because Amazon does use the subtitle in searches as well.
John,

Good point - we've got both a title and subtitle to use when positioning for key words/phrases.
Saw this in the Southern Review of Books: a new twist on the book tour.

Marketing books: what works and what doesn’t

In a recent piece in the Sunday New York Times Book Review called "The D.I.Y. Book Tour," Stephen Elliott discussed the do-it-yourself tour he did for his new book, The Adderall Diaries, which took him to 33 cities - with all events held at fans' homes. Rather than doing a conventional book tour, he wrote in the article, "I decided to try something I hoped would be less lonely. Before my book came out, I had set up a lending library allowing anyone to receive a free review copy on the condition they forward it within a week to the next reader, at their own expense… I asked if people wanted to hold an event in their homes. They had to promise 20 attendees. I would sleep on their couch.

My publisher would pay for some of the airfare, and I would fund the rest by selling the books myself." While some readings were disappointing, "All together, I sold about 1,100 books (not counting copies of my older books, which I was also selling) at 73 events. Seven hundred of those were books I purchased wholesale, a few hundred more were sold by local booksellers invited to the readings."
People's brilliance never ceases to amaze me. But it must have been quite expensive for him with all that travel yes?
Lisa,

A couple of reflections on Elliot's tour:

1) He already had a significant fan base. I'm not there yet. I wouldn't have a fan in Nashville who could gather at least 20 fans to come to my event. Wouldn't work for me, but I see how it worked for him.

2) If 30 of those 73 events required airfare at $250 each (after the publisher pitched in some), that would cost him $7500. If he cleared $10 on each sale, he made 1,100 x 10 = $11,000. Subtract the air fares and he came out ahead by $3,500.

Of course, these are just random guesses, but I'd think that even if you just broke even, the future sales you'd generate by the word of mouth would make it worth it.

Perhaps the application for "the rest of us," - those who don't yet have big fan bases - is that meeting in a home can be an attractive alternative to meeting in a bookstore. Even if I just do one signing in my hometown, it might be better to do it in the home of a friend rather than a bookstore.

I suppose it's kind of like "Mary Kay Parties" or "Tupperware Parties." (Face-saving note: I'm a guy and have never been to a Tupperware party. Had I been to one, I wouldn't admit it. It's a guy thing.) But the concept is that if a friend invites friends to their house, they're more likely to come, bring a covered dish, and everybody has more fun.

And as someone said in a later post, it can get really weird in a bookstore when people walk in, see a lonely author standing there, and don't want to make eye contact because they really didn't come to buy her book and it's just plain awkward. At the home event, everybody enjoys talking to each other, they're all there at the same time, and it takes away the awkward factor.
Hi Lisa & Steve,

I still believe word of mouth and being seen is the biggest step. You may not sell one book at a signing but the networking can be amazing. I had a woman call me yesterday and shocked me. She is the leader of a woman's ministry called MOM'S out of Bridgewater, MA.

She had bought my first book, A Healing Heart; A Spiritual Renewal, at a signing I did at the Bridgewater Schools Holiday Craft Show last December with four other authors. She loved my book and invited me to be a guest speaker at their once a year banquet in Bridgewater. They started with ten woman and now have seventy. She invited me to bring my books to sell.

I do two talks: one on my spiritual change when I had left the church, went on a ten day pilgrimage to Medjugorje in Bosnia and my return to the Church from the many miracles that had happened to me. The second is "The Effects of Alcoholism on the Whole Family." It's about losing my husband (1985) and my daughter (2006) from this horrible, worldwide disease.

She is already booking me for next year to talk on alcoholism. I was informed that many of the women belong to other organizations and may want to book me. My second memoir Someone Stop This Merry-Go-Round; An Alcoholic Family in Crisis had been published June 19, 2009 with Infinity.

This is the benefit of getting out and being seen. It's a plus when someone takes your business cards, saves it and actually calls.

It's a slow growth, but my sequel Please, God, Not Two; This Killer Called Alcoholism is due out in June or July 2010. It's the continuation of our lives after Richie's death and my daughter's struggle to combat the disease. She lost it in 2006 after three alcoholic rehabs.

Once it's published, I'm going to try to put as much time into finding locations to talk. I come home with between $400-$600 a night. A lot better than 1-5 books at a signing for $18.95 or $100.

I've been writing since the middle 90's and it's time to try to get back the money invested in self-publishing.

I love to read everyone's experiences. Wanted to share this.
I like Twitter. It's been giving me some good publicity, but so has Facebook-- believe it or not. I think any of the Social Networks will work for you just as long as you are willing to spend some time there and get to know the people. I have noticed that my readers are people that I've had some kind of connection with-- be that from a personal email, a social network, or even an interaction via my blog. I'm not a big name, I have a few hundred followers, but these followers are constant because they are people that friend me on more than one social site.

I think that's important to look at too, if you have a friend on more than one site, they are your friend for a reason and that reason is they like you. If they only wanted to befriend you because they wanted you to buy their book or marketing thing-a-ma-jig, they wouldn't friend on a ton of sites-- you know?

Once you determine these friends that follow you around the net, and you get to know them, you will know who your market is and what your readers like. My readers tend to like my articles and books that discuss topics of a health nature. They also like some of my fiction. Now I know where to focus.

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