The Dirty Locked Away History of the Democrat Party was a title I put hundreds of hours of sweat and research into. Although I sold a few hundred copies as a self-published book, years ago, with a different title and slightly different content, I decided I would re-launch it to really tap its potential. That´s when I decided to get a publicist. It proved a good decision.
Bill McIntosh of Ocasomedia is unlike other PR types I know. Although he has a US phone number, he actually lives in Peru so he charges a pittance compared to many other public relations firms in the US. I have heard of PR people scalping clients to the tune of $5-$6000 for a month and giving little back in return. Bill charged a lot less and did a PR campaign to thousands of media contacts which resulted in a nice bunch of interviews and we reached hundreds of thousands of potential readers thanks to the help of Laurence O´Brien of Books Go Social. Bill also created a Book Review service to get some early reviews-a key task and even took care of publishing the book on Amazon itself and did the promo write up!
My book was pretty shamelessly political and so, not surprisingly, we conducted a campaign that was just as shameless. Bill created funny, tongue in cheek memes for heavy use on FaceBook, Google Groups and Twitter and email lists. To the media we sent PR pieces that were slightly off the wall (see below lest you think otherwise). We figured, why be boring? So we decided we would stand out. Our launch coincided serendipitously with the 75th anniversary of the famous V for Victory campaign that Churchill made famous so we made use of it in our first press release. When Trump went to Mexico-so did our meme; when President George HW Bush endorsed Clinton we created a meme to go along and when Clinton´s running mate interrupted Trump´s 70 times we had fun with that too-see attached.
We also followed Laurence O´Bryan´s excellent advice to bring the price down to .99 for a while and, thanks to this suggestion and the interviews that Bill set up, we sold a lot of copies and started to go up in our Amazon ranking dramatically. Let me say that some authors have an unfortunate zero sum game outlook on this issue and think they have to recoup their investment so a price cut is out of the question. If you are only selling a few books per month then stop kidding yourself, swallow your pride if that is what is holding you back and listen to Laurence O´Bryan and drop your pricing. You are investing real money in creating your author brand so don’t be cheap.
The results prove what I say. See attached screen shot when our book bested Dreams From My Father by President Barack Obama and even reached #12 on Amazon in its category of Political Biographies Notable People/Kindle. We also beat two titles by Hillary Clinton-Hard Choices & Living History with her in a huge media campaign to win the White House with all the expected publicity windfall to benefit her book sales.
Let me tell you something else. Lest you think you simply must spend thousands on
everything from a website, book trailer, editorial services, pagination software, promo campaign, book launch and for an artistic book cover you are completely wrong. We did this on a shoe string and with aesthetic standards and methods that a thousand priggish authors would have rolled their eyes over and refused to consider for an instant.
If you´re going to promote a book at all-promote it right and get some help in the process from qualified pros who can help you and have some fun in the process.
Good luck!
Coach Kevin Collins
P.S. You can get your copy here!
