Five Cross-Promotion Tools for Authors

By Iola Goulton

Over the last two weeks I’ve looked at Five Ways to Build Your Email List, and Five Tools for Managing Online Giveaways. This week I’m looking at cross-promotions, and introducing three popular ways to participate in multi-author giveaways:

• BookHub
• InstaFreebie
• Ryan Zee Author Marketing

BookHub

BookHub is run by Ken and Paula Sheridan (writing as Paula Wynne).

The purpose of a BookHub promotion is to add new subscribers to your newsletter email list.

Authors sign up and pay from GBP 25 to join a genre-specific group promotion. Each author also donates one ebook to be used as a prize, and are required to share the promotion with their email lists, and across social media. BookHub provides each author with a unique tracking link to confirm each author has emailed their list.

BookHub promotes the contest, chooses and notifies the winner/s, then collates all the email addresses acquired during the promotion and passes them onto the eligible participating authors. Only participating authors who shared the promotion with their email list are eligible to receive the list.

Eligible participating authors receive the email addresses of all entrants. 

This could be an issue: it’s possible some entrants will only be interested in a few of the books, so they are likely to unsubscribe from other newsletters.

However, authors who have participated in BookHub promotions don’t report this as being an issue. One way authors can work out who is truly interested in their list is to offer entrants a gift (e.g. sample chapters or a novella), then only add those entrants who download the gift.

Click here to find out more.

Reader Magnet

BookHub also offers a reader magnet (aka lead magnet or opt-in bribe) promotion for GBP 15. This has the same conditions regarding promotion as the cross promotions discussed above, but it’s not clear whether the promotions are genre specific.

In both cases, your book must be listed on BookHub.

Newsletter Swap

Note that giveaways aren’t the only kind of cross-promotion. In her book Book Promotion for Authors, Paula Wynne also talks about newsletter swaps. A newsletters swap isn’t authors exchanging email lists—that violates anti-spam laws.

Instead, a newsletter swap is when two authors agree to each promote the other’s book in a newsletter. 

This is usually a book that’s on sale rather than a free book, so this is about driving sales, not newsletter sign-ups. Authors usually want to swap with other authors in the same genre, with a similar-sized email list. I would also suggest that a newsletter swap is effectively you endorsing the other author, so you need to be sure his/her writing is of a standard and content you’d be comfortable endorsing.

InstaFreebie

Instafreebie is a platform which allows authors to give away copies of their books. 

I’ve recently participated in a group promotion on Instafreebie that added 350+ subscribers to my list. Other group members added over 1,000 (they had more generic books than my “hyper-niche” title).

With the free plan, you can give away free copies of your book to reviewers, fans, or anyone who asks. You can limit the number of copies you give away, or choose not to. Instafreebie will email each reader a personalised ePub, mobi or pdf file, and you can also choose to have this DRM protected.

With a paid plan, you can also require that people claiming your free book are also added to your email list. 

Paid plans start at USD 20 per month, although there is a 30-day free trial, and they do have an referral plan that offers credit for paid plans. Click here to check out Instafreebie (yes, that is my referral link.)

InstaFreebie suggest their platform can be used to provide prizes to giveaway winners, send review copies to bloggers or your street team, send advance copies librarians and other influencers, or run special promotions (e.g. a pre-release giveaway, or a downloadable sample).

Note that InstaFreebie don’t provide readers with any support in loading books onto their ereaders. If you’re part of a large group promotion, you might find yourself spending a lot of time giving your readers instructions on how to sideload or email the book file to their device.

Instafreebie also don’t organise cross-promotions—they are merely the tool. I found the cross promotion I participated in via a closed Facebook group.

Ryan Zee Author Marketing

Ryan Zee utilises an online tool to run multi-author giveaways (the tool looks a lot like KingSumo, which I discussed last week). He runs two or three genre-specific giveaways each week at www.booksweeps.com in which readers sign up to author newsletters in exchange for a chance to win.

There are two winners to each giveaway: first prize is a Kindle Fire with all the ebooks in the promotion. Second place is all the ebooks. Authors pay from USD 60 to participate, provide two ebooks as prizes, and advertise the giveaway to their current newsletter list, and on social media.

Ryan provides the graphics and links, social media and newsletter templates, and a spreadsheet of newsletter signups at the conclusion of the contest. I suspect this promotion will net fewer email addresses than a BookHub promotion, but the advantage is that all the entrants have elected to subscribe specifically to your newsletter. It’s probably still worth offering some form of free download, and deleting those emails which aren’t interested.

If you’d like to see a contest in action ...

There is a Ryan Zee Contemporary Inspirational Romance giveaway starting on 27 February (US time, so that means tomorrow). Ryan is currently taking signups for a Historical Inspirational Romance giveaway, running from 10 to 17 April. You can sign up here, and you can find out more about Ryan Zee promotions here.

Those are the major cross promotion tools I’m aware of. Are there any others you've heard of?

Have you taken part in any multi-author cross-promotions to build your email list? What was your experience? Would you recommend it to others?

About Iola Goulton

I am a freelance editor specialising in Christian fiction. Visit my website at www.christianediting.co.nz to download a comprehensive list of publishers of Christian fiction. 

I also write contemporary Christian romance with a Kiwi twist—find out more atwww.iolagoulton.com.

You can also find me on:
Facebook (Author)
Facebook (Editing)
Instagram
Pinterest
Twitter

Five Ways to Build Your Author Email List (and One Way Not To)

By Iola Goulton

Over the last year, Australasian Christian Writers has had several posts on author platform and marketing. We’ve had posts on the importance of building your author brand and platform. We’ve had high-level how-to lists on building your author brand and website, or building your author platform.

And we’ve posted on the importance of having a website (a must-have), a blog (a maybe), and an email list.

But is an email list a must-have or a maybe?

I think it’s a must-have, as I explained in Do Authors Need an Email List? And all the book marketing experts I follow agree. Chris Syme says:

And that leads to the subject of today’s post: How does an author build their list?

First, Don't Do This:

Don't add people you know to a list on Word or Excel or Gmail or Hotmail, then email them. 

I’ve received these emails. I even saw it recommended in a marketing book a few years ago, that authors “add people you know to your opt-in list”. Yes, this author was ahead of the times in actually having a newsletter list, but did she not understand the meaning of the words “opt in”?

Adding people to your list without their permission is against the law.

You can only email people who have given you permission to email them (which is where Seth Godin’s phrase ‘permission marketing’ comes from). And you must give people the option to unsubscribe.

As I’ve said before, the best way to ensure your email list complies with relevant laws is to use one of the major email list providers, such as Aweber Email Marketing, MadMimi, MailChimp or MailerLite.

Instead:

1. Email and Ask

Email friends you think would be interested in joining your newsletter list, and ask if they’ll sign up. You don’t have to rely on email. You could also send a text message or Facebook DM, Tweet them … even talk to them. The point is that you’re asking for permission.

And they can sign up though the link you provide (which you’ll get from your mailing list provider), or you can add them directly into your mailing list. But only with their permission.

2. Ask at Events

Ask for newsletter sign-ups if you’re speaking at an event, such as a writer’s conference or retreat, or a book launch. The less technical among us have a physical sign-up sheet, then add people to the list manually. A more technical person could have a QR code on a bookmark, or a PC/tablet so people can enter their own data.

3. Ask Online

Use a plugin such as Bloom or SumoMe to prompt website visitors to sign up for your email list. Pin a post on Twitter. Add a sign up button to your Facebook page. Include a link to your signup form in the bio you use for guest posts.

Friends, family and colleagues may well agree to sign up for your newsletter just because you asked them. But strangers are unlikely to give you their email address unless there’s something in it for them.

That ‘something’ is a giveaway of some kind—my subscriptions did increase when I started offering new subscribers a gift (I offer a list of Christian publishers for my Christian Editing Services list, and a list of my favourite Christian authors for my Author list).

4. Host a Giveaway

A lot of blogs host giveaways, but most are of the ‘leave a comment to be in the draw to win’ variety. That isn’t helpful for collecting email addresses—no one wants to leave their real email address in a blog comment. But authors can use tools such as Rafflecopter or KingSumo to run giveaways where they collect email addresses in exchange for an entry.

But I’ve found having a giveaway isn’t enough. It has to be promoted. And that’s where my final suggestion comes in:

5. Join a Cross-Promotion

A cross-promotion is where you join forces with other authors to host a giveaway. There is generally some cost involved in this, as setting up and hosting the giveaway takes time, effort, and technical know-how. But the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, as it means it’s not just you promoting your giveaway—all the other authors involved will be promoting it as well, which means you’ll get in front of a lot more people.

Today is the last day of my first-ever cross-promotion, joining 17 other authors in an Instafreebie promotion of non-fiction books for writers.

I’m thrilled with the results. 

I started the promotion with 142 people on my Christian Editing Services list, and I’d doubled that within the first two days of the promotion. And that’s with my hyper-niche title. A couple of authors, whose books had broader appeal, added over 1,000 people to their lists.

At the time of writing, 355 people had downloaded my free ebook, and I’d added 325 to my newsletter list. Some people downloaded the book and immediately unsubscribed. That’s okay—I’m on MailChimp’s paid plan, which means I pay more to have more subscribers. I don’t want to be paying for people who don’t want to hear from me.

Click here if you’d like to sign up to my newsletter list. Or click here to see the 18 books in the cross-promotion. But be quick: it finishes today (well, it actually finishes at midnight Sunday, But I’m not sure in what time zone).

I’ll be back next week to talk more about giveaways and cross promotions.

Meanwhile, do you have an email list? What mailing list provider do you use? What’s the most successful way you’ve found of building your email list?

About Iola Goulton

I am a freelance editor specialising in Christian fiction. Visit my website at www.christianediting.co.nz to download a comprehensive list of publishers of Christian fiction. 

I also write contemporary Christian romance with a Kiwi twist—find out more atwww.iolagoulton.com.

You can also find me on:
Facebook (Author)
Facebook (Editing)
Instagram
Pinterest
Twitter