Long Tail Writing

Social proof is a complicated matter, regardless of the product you are trying to sell. However, social proof is one of the top factors shoppers take into consideration. After all, most shopping done is not repeat business, but rather first time. This means that we need to not only verify the function of what we are buying, we need to ferret out all the potential problems. It’s only in the completion of that shopping pre-work that we find success. The question then becomes, how can we help assure readers that our book is free of potential problems? The best answer to that is in getting book reviewers to weigh in. How do we get book reviewers to discuss our particular product? We do this through providing advanced reader copies (ARC’s) and setting up a review timeframe. All of that information is good, but where do we start as authors? We are, by typical definitions, self-deprecating creatures who fear and feast on feedback. We loathe to seek reviews out, but they are so cruc...

These two services provide similar functions, but often to different levels of success. I’ve spent the last year and half marketing the same books on both services. The idea was to build my mailing list as much as possible. In addition, I wanted to have a mailing list that interacted with my work as much as possible. After all, it doesn’t make any sense to build a list of freebie seekers if they never intend to buy books or work with your offers. Let’s break this service competition into three rounds: type of users, value for money, and speed of list growth. Please remember: Your mileage may vary! Some books are wild successes and others wild failures. Round 1: Type of Users As mentioned in the introductory paragraph, having a person’s email address doesn’t mean much if it’s a burner email. If they don’t intend to regularly check their email, open your specific offer, and take you up on those offers… what is the point of having a mailing ...