Author Co-ops
Introduction:
Book marketing is hard. This is especially true if the book was published by an indie press house or if you self-published it. In these instances all marketing responsibilities rest on the author alone.
This article discusses a way to change that last statement.
One solution to combating the solitary nature of the marketing efforts is to organize an author marketing co-operative venture. Getting like-minded authors to share the marketing load can greatly increase everyone’s reach as each of you join forces to promote each others books.
Once the group comes together, there are a number of joint activities that can be shared to effectively promote the books.
Social media posts:
One easy way to promote each other is to link up on social media sites. Whenever a member of the group writes a post about a new article, event, or a new book review, each member likes the post and shares it or retweets it. Liking it is nice, but sharing greatly expands the number of people who will see the post. However, the posting member must make the post “public.” If the post is private, it can’t be shared.
Caution must be used to ensure that personal posts aren’t shared. Too much personal sharing may be views as spam by the contacts. Only “professional” material should be candidates for sharing/retweeting.
Author Interviews:
Members can interview each other and post the interviews as blog posts (to be shared or retweeted by other members). Both members involved in the interview can get together via email or a chat app to develop a series of questions to be used during the interview.
Video interviews:
This type of interview can be interactive if it’s held during a zoom meeting that the public is invited to attend. This has the added advantage of allowing the pubic to ask questions which greatly increases the interest in the meeting. The participants should work together to develop the interview questions, the video agenda and then promote the meeting.
If the interview is recorded, the video can be posted on websites and promoted using the social media sites.
Author discussions:
In this activity, a few members get together to discuss a topic of mutual interest. The interview can be text based and published as a blog post or it can be a recorded as a live video meeting.
Book launch street team:
The group can act as street team for books the group launches. This can include a number of activities such as: beta readers, book reviews, social media promotions and other book launch activities.
Group Youtube channel:
If the members produce a few videos that are of interest to others, it may be beneficial to start a video channel on Youtube or Vimeo. If one member initiates the channel on YouTube, other members can upload videos to the channel. This means the channel’s owner doesn’t have to do all the work. If each member writes blog posts promote the videos on the channel, the number of views will increase. The channel’s URL can also be added to the members email sig file, further promoting the videos.
Group website:
If the co-op is to be effective there should be a common web place to host relevant material and to serve as a clearing house for comments and discussions. For this type of activity I prefer Melanote as the website to share.
Book reviews:
Naturally, the members will review each others books, to at least rate them.
Conclusions:
To me, it seems that an author co-op can be quite beneficial to all members and can greatly increase the marketing reach of each. The caveat to all this is that the members have to share the work load. If member X isn’t willing to help out with the promotional activities while expecting the others to promote member X’s books, it can lead to anger and the disbanding of the co-op.