My Marketing Plan

It's very simple and it involves a lot of begging.

I'm not good at advertising. This is a fact. But I do have other strengths that I can play up. I do this all the time when I go to sell things (like apartments) and it's worked pretty well for me so far.

I'm blunt and honest. Those are my strengths. How can I make those work for me?

Well, I already have Ruin up, I've got readers. Some comment but many don't. If my google web stats are right, I have about 40 subscribers (and 30 followers, but these all cross over plus this only counts google subs). I get about 70 page visits on Fridays when I'm supposed to update whether I update or not (we can knock that down to around 50 page visits just to kick out those people who probably stop back to check comments).

And that is all word of mouth really. I only post on VSS, so I haven't really tried very hard to get word out.


So my first plan is to finish the current story on Ruin. (We're so close-- I think.) Then admit that I'd like to make a book version and open up a discussion for it. Find out how many would actually be willing to go for that and support me. (For those who don't comment, I'd be willing to put a poll on the side.)

How that goes will determine a lot of things. It's sort of scary, but like I said, honestly and bluntness is my strength.

The next part is when I finish. Smashwords allows you to generate coupons. So once the book is complete and priced, I'd generate a coupon to make it free and post it on the blog because the readers are king.

Here is the part where I'd beg. Beg for them to pass word on, pass on the coupon (you can set how long the coupon will work so if you want it free for the first month, you can do that), and write reviews.

That's the main part to my plan really. Otherwise, I've started my site, got a separate twitter, started my Smashwords account. I'm a little embarrassed about it at the moment because I haven't put much thought into any of those, I just wanted to have them so I can start thinking about them and learning how to use Wordpress. I've gathered some helpful links and have a couple of blogs that I read and comment at using that info.

It's sort of awkward because I was thinking about how I hide behind my user name. I really do. So now I'm supposed to put my name out there and meet new people. And that's what I'm most uncomfortable about-- learning to stand behind my own name. That's why it's just my first two initials at the moment. I just honestly couldn't use my first full name.

So that's what I've got at the moment. I'm still in the process of experimenting and reminding myself that this is all an experiment.