If I see one more person (myself included) tweet a link to a book with a note that says, “please buy my book!” I’m going to lose my shit.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the frustration, and I’ve been there. When I’m struggling to promote a new book, sometimes it feels like the only thing I can do is keep tweeting! Once I let a new book out into the world there is a feeling of helplessness that sets in, and it can make me do all sorts of stupid things.
Going into the release of my latest novel, Disgusting, Beautiful, Immoral, I decided to figure out a new plan. Anything was better than what I was doing and doing nothing wasn’t an option. The first idea I came up with was pretty simple: I set up a new blog based on the book, and started publishing one chapter a week, posting them each Friday. It will take 34 weeks, but once it’s done, the entire book will be free online for anyone to read.
Of course, I put a link to buy the whole thing at the end of each post, and I’m hoping that people enjoy the chapters enough they’ll want to buy it now rather than waiting until December 2014 to find out how it ends. But if they have the patience to wait every week for a new chapter, then god bless them. They’ve fucking earned that free book.
The second thing I’m doing is leaving copies of the book hidden in different bars around NYC. It gives me a reason to tweet, a reason to Instagram and blog, and at the end of the day it’s fun. I have no idea if anyone who follows me will want to run off and find one, but I’m going to keep leaving them everywhere and see what happens. Who knows? I suspect I’ll start hiding them better and leaving more ambiguous clues, but we’ll see.
Have these things worked? It’s way too early to tell. Are they better than begging people to buy my book every ten minutes, purely out of frustration and a lack of other good options? Yes they are.
I have two other ideas (one related and one not) that I’m going to explore. If I actually manage to pull them off, I’ll let you know.
As for these? We’ll just have to wait and see.