Marketing Anyone?

Does any of it make any sense to you?

Join FaceBook and share all your details with family and friends.  Make new friends.  So I joined, I connected with old friends and family.  I made friends with total strangers.  The number of my friends continues to go up eventho at times FB does have issues with me 'friending' strangers.

Connect with business friends and others with similar interests; join LinkedIn.  I joined.  Yes, I connected with associates and total strangers who enjoy the same things I do.  A little awkward, but I joined some conversations and made more connections.  Cool.

Tweet your life in 140 characters or less.  It seemed strange but I've learned how to really pack in a lot of info within the limitation established by Twitter.  And making friends there is a lot easier than on FaceBook and LinkedIn.  I was a tad hesitant at first but after just a few days I was tweeting my heart away with other like-minded people and watching my friend count jump into the thousands.

Pinning can be fun.  I wasn't sure about Pinterest but like other social software, a little experimenting and I was connecting with other people who were pinning interesting things.  You could find me uploading pictures to share or listing books I wanted to hustle.

Read anything good? Well, over at GoodReads, I got to share what I was reading and what I hoped to read with others.  Making friends there was a little slower but I connected with some total strangers there, too.  And I've been sharing my reading with them.

Smashwords is a great place to list and hawk your books because you can offer practically every possible ebook format for your story or novel.  Uh-huh.

Wattpad connects readers with writers. [SIGH]  Right.  That one was a little harder for me until just recently.  It seemed the only people I was connecting with there were young (late teen to early 30s) and really wanting me to read/edit/vote for their stuff.  Through a lucky connection, I finally got people to start reading my stuff.

And there is Tumbr.  Joined and haven't figured that one out yet.

What does all of the above have in common? Learning to make connections in an attempt to market book(s) and become a popular author... ok, let's just say market books.

I read John Locke's book on how he sold a million books on Amazon.  I studied that book and re-read many chapters and sections to make sure I gleaned the most out of it.  I even made notes so I would have the info in front of me.

The first eight paragraphs of this blog was part of his suggestion and also the suggestion of two other authors who had marketing books out that I also read.  Join the social media and hype your book.  Connect with as many people as you can and hype, hype, hype.  Ok, not 24/7 but do it so your name is out there in front of their eyes.  Make four tweets; 3 tweets about other stuff, one tweet about you and your book.  On FB make two or three entries then one about your book.  On Wattpad and Smashwords, give away short stories of your character to involve and suck in readers. 

Have a sale, lower the price of your book --  give your book away

Uh-huh.

I dropped the price of my book by $3 -- to $.99.  I've sold one copy.
I gave my book away for one day -- I gave away NINE copies.

I used ALL of the above marketing strategies.

The result?  Those who have read the book -- they enjoyed it; they like it.

So, my question is -- why is my marketing failing me?  My friend gave away her book and people downloaded over 400 copies.  On FB I noticed one of my friends had his book for free for the month and it had been downloaded over 8K times by the 4th day -- 1200+ times on the day of the entry and it was only 10AM.  Somebody on Twitter thanked everyone for making her book #3 on Kindle when she gave it away for free temporarily.

NINE copies.  Yup.  I gave away nine copies in one day.  I tweeted 5 or 6 times it was free; I made 3 entries on FB about it.  Nine copies.

So, why am I complaining?  I need some feedback on NEW marketing strategies.  I would like to see my book sitting in the top 100 (even #100) Kindle books.  Actually, I think I'd be thrilled to find it in the top 1000.

I am open to suggestions.  Blast away...

Until next I ramble on...