Promoting Your Book

Marketing books is a very strange thing.

Today I received a message from a company that wants to help me promote one of my books. This company promises an awful lot and thats even before they know anything about my book!

You see, this company mentioned me and my book by name. That sounds like they really understand me. I felt they had a lot to offer at that point. Funny thing. This is not true at all.

My book Jxta: Java P2P Programming is old, as in 1992 or 8 years old, is well, old! That is very old for a technology book. That aside, it is no Catcher In The Rye. You need to promote a lot to get such a book onto the New York Times best seller list.

Book Whirl is the company. The fellow that sent me the request to promote my book was the very observant Ace Caldwell. Old Ace offered to promote my book to ten million people! Wow!

Really, I'd rather not. If you can imagine, psychopaths are in the world, you get a bucketful when you push thing to ten million people. Do they filter the list first? Do you have to pass a test? Better yet, can they read technical manuals?

The real problem here is value. How much does twenty million eyes cost (assuming no pirates or victims of eye poking Larry, Curly, Moe or in a pinch, Shemp accidents). I asked and the retail price is about $3,000. Of course there are discounts, special deals, etc. Is this a great deal? Well, it would have been if the guy had looked at the publication date :o)

I took a 'whirl' around their site. Not too bad. I don't think they attracting the big name authors. At least I never heard of them before. That is good and bad. I can't imagine Steven King is a client, yet they have not done well enough that Steven King is their client or any other author seems like an up and coming Steven King. Chicken and egg, but no chicken and lots of eggs so far.

I might use their product. You never know. I have several new books and this could be worth the investment.

The message for marketing though is what occurred. They send an email that mentioned my book. My first thought was that they knew me and that is huge toward making a sale. The mistake is that they didn't really know me and I noticed. That's bad. Just sophisticated targeted spam. I was lured in, but they didn't keep my attention. I did look at it long enough that it might be a resource, but not really a potential customer because that book is not worth selling because the information has expired.

The lesson? You have the data, use it! Knowing the customer and showing you know the customer will make the sale. If they had started with mentioning the age of the printing, I'd be ready to jump on this for the next book. It is all how you manage the customer and your information.