A Novel Promotion - Silver Phoenix By: Joe Alfano Posted on: 6/3/2009

Another Twitter special has come to visit at Geek Like Me!  Quit your groaning out there.  Even though I appreciate a good zombie horde simulation, this really is the future of novel promotion.  Unless you are writing about a school full of wizards or sparkly frakkin’ vampires, your best form of promotion is self promotion – and that is where social networking is king!

In this instance, I was given some advice from an author to not limit myself in what I read.  Everything can help you to advance as a writer.  As such, I have been checking out some authors and titles that are outside of my normal genre.  One of them is Cindy Pon, a Young Adult author writing fantasy novels.  Granted this is more revisiting a genre I have not read in a long time as opposed to trying a new one, but baby steps… baby steps…

In addition to having an interesting looking novel out and some pretty astonishing paintings displayed on her site, she is a pretty active voice in Twitter.  Although the look of her books was a draw, the passion with which she has been promoting them tells me that she really cares about being read.  That will always entice me to read them.  Whether it is by offering a contest for original framed art works (like Cindy Pon is), or betting to video yourself doing the Macarena if you get to a certain number of reviews on Amazon, any form of putting yourself out there means you care about your writing in my mind.

The link above (about the contest) will take you to where you can find the rules for the contest.  For those of you too lazy to check it out, I will offer you some insight.  Lead by example and all of that, right?

One thing you can do is link the cover art for Silver Phoenix to your blog, linking back to the contest page.  Did you see what I just did there?  Sneaky, innit?

The other is another YouTube option.  I have noticed there are a lot of authors that are doing trailers to their books.  It is a lot like the trailer to a movie, except at the end of it, you are driven to go get their book instead.  One of the downsides of this?  You see a trailer for a book by Guillermo Del Torro and you get confused.  But not so confusing, you can always link to the YouTube Video Trailer for Silver Phoenix for more chances to win.

No matter what, you should at least check out that trailer.  I personally think it is a good example of powerful promotion of a story – especially for the target audience for the book.  Anything to show the Twilight zombies a proper female role model.

The one that I may not be able to follow through on is picking up a copy of the book, reading it and doing a review of it.  I know that it might not make sense considering I started out talking about picking this book up, but keep in mind what my “to read” list already looks like.  Now consider the June 8^th deadline on these options.  I would have to drop everything and just read this book.  I will read and review it – and it has already been added to the “to read” list – but not until after the deadline.

Keep an eye out for it if you want my honest opinion on it before picking it up.

If you are interested in finding out what a lot of authors, actors and filmmakers are up to, feel free to join Twitter and check it out.  Zombie Joe is already on there, and I am following a lot of the Urban Fantasy people and folks from The Guild.  Of course if you go into checking out who is following me, you may get some of the spambots that I haven’t blocked yet.  I mean honestly, a life coach and a coffee app for the iPhone started following me today!