Word of mouth – the most useful marketing tool

 

That powerful tool

Word of Mouth (WOM) is indeed a really powerful marketing tool. Of course you have to have a great product. Then you show it to a few people. They tell their friends and hopefully these friends will buy too. And they will tell their friend and so on it goes. Leaving a review on Amazon or Good reads is one way of doing this.

 

But a more direct approach is even more powerful. That can only happen if you have a great product.

What we actually do

What we tend to do, however, is shout on social media, pay for ads, or send out details to lists. The latter is always the most effective and those lists are based partly on word of mouth.  

 

How do we build lists

An easy example of how this works is your Author Central page on Amazon. If people like a book you’re written, they can opt to follow you as an author. Amazon will then email them every time you have new book out. You don’t need to.

 

There are various mailing list facilitators around: e.g. Mail Chimp, Mailer Lite These will help you to manage the lists of people you want to email.

 

But these lists are made up of your “word of mouth” community.

 

Friends , family, fans, followers and readers

Friends and family are a good place to start. They’ll probably want to support you but you may find that after the first book their interest wanes. Don’t push it. You still want them to be your friends.

 

Some of your friends and family will become your fans. They may like your work. How can you capitalize on this? You can hope they press the Amazon follow button. You can invite them on to your email list. Give them an incentive. Maybe a free book or an extract from a work in progress.

 

Find your tribe

For every book launch and for every review request campaign make a list of fifty people who might be interested in the book, regardless of whether they are already on your mailing list. Send them a personal invitation to attend the launch or review the book before you send to your list, announce the book on social media or pay for an ad.

People are more likely to respond to a personal approach.

Who are the people?

• Ones who have an interest in the themes and topics in the book
• Writing friends
• Other people who write similar woks
• People who’ve helped you with the book
• Friends and family you’ve not approached before
• Friends and family you’ve not approached for a while
• Local businesses and media who may be interested

Some examples

I’ve used this successfully in the last couple of weeks to get some nice reviews.  I’ve approached :  

• Individual members of my National Women’s Register group
• A friend who is interested in the area I’m wiring about

 

Members of my creative wring group have attended several events I’ve organised.      

 

Finally

Make sur you have a way of capturing the interest of your fans by inviting them on to your mailing list.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay  

  

              

  

 

 

I’m so excited to be featured in The Best of CafeLit 10! This wonderful anthology will be coming out soon and my story about my grandfather as a Far East Prisoner of War is included.

On the editing side I’m enjoying working with an author on her short story collection and have just finished Edit 1. Then yesterday I gained a loving connection of normality with fellow writers with the Grand Bard of Exeter, Kimwei, who ran a workshop with Jackie Juno. My poetry is also flowing which I’m putting my words to pictures in videos on my YouTube channel.

Now off to complete some artwork...

And here’s some cross stitch in progress.

Transformations

 

see in our online store 

How we came to publish this one

This is the culmination of three years’ work. This volume contains the winning entries of the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Waterloo Festival Writing Competition. Each year the winning entries were published as an e-book. We have now put all of these entries into one paperback volume.      

The title

This pulls together the titles of the other three volumes which were:

2018 To be …. To become

2019 Transforming Being

2020 Transforming Communities   

Some notes about the process

The stories in this book were all edited as they were prepared for the individual volumes. They were given three final proof reads: by the authors themselves and by an independent proof-reader who had not been involved in previous edits. We also pass all of our book though a technical proof-read. The latter, computer-aided, looks for things lie extra spaces, repeated words and inconsistencies in punctuation and spelling.    

The cover

As we often do, we based our cover on a picture we found on pixabay. These are both copyright free and free to use. We do a search on the title or something similar. Naturally this time the word we searched on was, as you might expect,  “transformations”.  

Some notes about style

There many interpretations of the theme for each of the titles. We tended to choose stories that were clever with the theme. Many of the contributions are quite literary in style.    

Who we think the reader is

These stories are for the reader who likes to be challenged to think.

   

Finances

This book has some way to go to cover all of its costs but it continues to sell steadily. Our monthly statement gives a slightly false impression, however. It was edited and designed in-house. In other words the partners did the work for no fee or wage but take a share of the net sales revenue as it arrives. It has in fact covered its upfront costs.           

 

What else

We have published a record number of books in the last twelve months. We are pleased to have this within our collection. Because of the several lockdowns more books have been produced generally and more people have read books.

 

Review copies

It’s always great if you can buy the book and give us a review. Just click on the link  to be taken to our on-line bookshop. If you would like to review and you are strapped for cash, just get in touch for a free PDF or mobi-file.