Including, ahem, mine.
I haven’t gone in for the contest route so far, and that’s not exactly what this is, but throwing my hat into the ring was easy (and free), so I thought why not? The host is a new book club site called Noveltunity, which is affiliated with the BookDaily.com site. It’s currently in its Beta phase, meaning that for the time being you can sign up for free and enjoy the privileges of club membership, including three free eBook downloads per month.
Another perk is that as a club member you can vote on which three books should be selected for the following month out of a total of nine that the site hosts have selected from a far larger sampling. This month, one of the nine in the running will be mine (the announcement is here).
What’s different about Noveltunity is that it’s dedicated exclusively to exposing new/undiscovered writers and to readers that would like to find them. Besides voting for their books, you can also engage in meetings with authors, take on-line classes on book marketing, and more. Further details can be found at the About page and at this FAQ. It takes all of a few seconds to sign up, so why not give it a shot? If you do, there’s one book that I would particularly recommend (oh, the hell with it, really appreciate) your voting for. It’s called The Alexandria Project and, coincidentally, it happens to have my name on the cover.
How much of a bump do I expect to get if my book is picked? That’s hard to say. There are over 3,500 members signed up for the Beta test so far, so if my book does get chosen to become one of a month’s free downloads, that would result in a lot of initial exposure. Unfortunately, as any author that has run a free promotion at Amazon knows, a huge number of free downloads often never get read, and a book that hasn’t been read isn’t going to result in a review, a Tweet or a verbal recommendation. Or sell.
But if the number of downloads is high enough, a certain small percentage of readers do get around to reading a book. So like most marketing, the success of this type of promotion, regardless of the quality of your book, is largely a matter of volume: do you get enough downloads flowing into the mouth of the funnel to result in a sufficient number of reviews and recommendations coming out of the small end to get some momentum going.
Every self-published book needs a breakout moment, regardless of the promotional methods involved. For the lucky few, being a featured selection can provide that moment. For most, though, a featuring slot has to be just one of an ongoing number of opportunities that a self-published author needs to continue to create through the exercise of ingenuity and the expenditure of ongoing effort.
So how helpful is it to be featured at Noveltunity? Hopefully I’ll get the chance to find out. If I do, I’ll report back here in detail on the results.
Meantime, ahem, here’s that link again.
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