I've been thinking about self-promotion and marketing, trying to figure out what works best. What I've come up with is that, whatever it is, it's time-consuming.
There's the Twitter thing. I haven't built up the number of followers on Twitter that I'd like, but honestly, I don't think it's difficult to do, just time consuming. I know of someone who, in addition to random Twittery things (My dog looks so cute in her Easter outfit) just posts random motivational sayings directly out of a book of random motivational sayings - and has over 1000 followers - but she posts a few times a day. I hardly ever remember to even go to Twitter... but if I did, if I posted every single day, even just random bits of stuff, I might be able to get a bit of a following, and then I could post things to promote myself... could work.
Also, the repeatedly-googling-my-book-title-thing. At one time, Aigai-- autocompleted into Aigaion Girl because I spent a lot of time repeatedly googling my book title. Now, even if you type in all of Aigaion the software comes up before my book - because I just don't have the time to type my book title into a Google search bar 200 times a day. But it would be nice. I could definitely do with my book being at the top of the results page.
Reviews would be great. A lot of reviews. But I'm still not sure how to get them. A huge part of me is tempted to mail random copies of my book to completely random people - just pick names out of a phone book or something like that - because people who blog are likely to post something about it anyway. "I got this random book in the mail today, WTF?" would probably generate a fair bit of googling, if nothing else... but then that's kind of creepy, isn't it? Just mailing things to random people.
Also, contests. I think contests that are free to enter do well. They're certainly my favourite kind.
I'm mostly just thinking out loud and I really should get back to work. This is my last night at my day(night) job, and I want to make sure everything is done properly.
