[MPTPGV]

Jack Canfield, writer of the Chicken Soup For The Soul books and The Success Principles, recently released a course on writing and publishing and promoting your book called The Bestseller Blueprint.  In it, he says, you should do 5 things a day to promote your book.  I've come up with a list of five things that can be done (not everything daily).  And hopefully it will help me get to a fulltime salary.

1. Write every day! (For me, since I'm taking the year off to do it, it's write 5,000 to 20,000 words a day)
2. Hire a virtual assistant at 3 to 5 dollars an hour to contact people on Amazon and giveaway copies of my book for review.
3. Write a press releases and pay fiverr members to distribute it for me.
4. Contact blogs in the niches of the books I'm writing.
5. Manage Promotions and Giveaways To Get Maximum Exposure of My Books.

Knowing everyone has different time restraints I'm wondering if anyone has some creative means of marketing their book.

 

[Rusty Bigfoot]

Well, I'm wondering how/where you can find a virtual assistant for that price.

My five things are write, write, write, write, and write, but I know there are other things I could be doing. When I don't write, I get discouraged, so I have to keep on writing...but I believe some marketing would be helpful, I just never do it.

 

[Amanda Brice]

2. Hire a virtual assistant at 3 to 5 dollars an hour to contact people on Amazon and giveaway copies of my book for review.

Huh? All the virtual assistants I've seen are in the $30-$50/hr range.

 

[MPTPGV]

Outsource to Brickwork, Odesk, there are plenty of very qualified and very cheap virtual assistants you can get in India and China.  Outsourcing is the way to keep up in this busy new world and it's not expensive at all.  All my covers were 5 dollars. Also check out elance.  I've hired Virtual assitance for a lot of things, including research for college reports, and even party planning, the most I've paid is 6 dollars an hour.  Not to mention the work I'm talking about is hiring them to search Amazon in my niche and solicit reviews with free copies from people that have contact information on Amazon.  So all you really need is data entry and research skills, which in India and china are quite easy to find.

Did anyone read The 4 Hour Workweek

 

[MPTPGV]

Though right now I've only got three weight loss books.  I've been building up six books in a series each covering a different niche in self-improvement that there are a lot of blogs that I can contact for reviews or guest posting or something.  Those were just five things to do in a single day not something I plan to do every day.  Other things I will be doing:

Keeping my Blogs--three of them--updated With Blog Posts Weekly
Writing a weekly newsletter to my email list while building my email list
Keeping Facebook and Twitter Updated weekly
Testing New Covers and Pricing
Write Articles

I like your list too. 

 

[MPTPGV]

Yeah, according to Jack Canfield, and he was doing this in the 1970's without any of the mass media we now have today, if you do 5 things a day to promote your book at the end of the year, people will have heard about you.

There's nothing better however than producing what I call Quality Quantity.  Pretty much, if you come up with a short story idea and you write it out, polish it up and publish it.  Our writing is one of the biggest pieces of marketing that we'll have, just as James Patterson, Nora Roberts, and other Uber-Seller authors have used mass production to sell millions, so to is it necessary for us to do it today to have visibility on the internet.

P.S.
Chrystalla love your Rex series! 

 

[WynneChanning]

I'd add to your list:
- Keeping a presence on Goodreads, pitching your titles to relevant book clubs etc.
- If you're posting an image on Facebook, why not post to GooglePlus, Pinterest, etc. too!
- Engage other authors. The relationships you build are invaluable in this lonely journey.
- If you're looking to give away a large number of books to reviewers, try LibraryThing. (I offered 100 ecopies of my book for review and I think about half of those people actually reviewed it.)
- Make a $5 book trailer with Fiverr, establish a Youtube presence/channel.

Other tools that I've found helpful:
Use Hootsuite to manage, schedule your posts on Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, etc.
Use Triberr to connect with other bloggers, reach a larger audience and help other authors/writers promote their work.
Create a Google Alert to crawl the web for discussion threads in your genre, or mentions of your book.
Set up a keyword search of your name/book with Hootsuite so you can thank people for Twitter mentions or join the chat.
Use Rafflecopter to manage your contests and giveaways.

Mediagig on Fiverr made my book trailer in less than a week. I highly recommend him. (I did a few add ons and it cost me $15.)

 

[sweetcrabhoney18]

Easyoutsource.com <<< $2 to $5 an hour VA. Plus they all are great at English. I have NEVER paid $30 an hour for a VA. The most I pay is $50 a week for 10 to 20 hours of work.

For me it's all about content syndication. Publish articles within my niche blog (s).. then once those articles are within google I take each and place them on the top 10 article directories and doc sharing sites. I haven't done this for my fiction books yes because it's very specific but for my non fictions it's a must. 

My VAs do daily tasks like twitter and facebook goodies so that I can focus on writing and managing my companies. They also do pinterest and stumbleupon.

Guest blogging is important as well. Fiverr is a huge help.  Soon I'll be adding my email newsletter to the max but still I don't have enough non fiction or fiction books to do that currently.