Ebook Promotions

Continuing my series of book promotion ideas leading up to the launch of my new novel, If Love is a Lie, Finding and Losing Love Online, here’s today’s topic: Book Quote Teasers.

So I’d recently started noticing another author I admire posting on her Facebook page little images with quotes from her novels on them. I liked the idea. Facebook is visual. Let’s face it, you can write out in text form all you like, but what really gets read are posts with pictures. But how many times can you post and re-post you book cover without it getting old … This goes for Pinterest as well.

So her quote images were nice … but the images were a little boring. I had a feeling I could spice that up a little and decided to take a whack at creating my own. I have to say that to do this effectively, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you think about this while you are editing your book.

Why??? You ask???

Well, I’ll tell you why, because it’s a heck of a lot easier to highlight those quotes when you’re deep in the editing process than it is to try to find them after you’re already done. Sure, you can probably think of a few good ones off the top of your head, but the little gems will be harder to find.

Thankfully, I was still editing when I came up with this idea. I kept a little list of them and started fiddling with the best ones I had and searching for good high quality images to pair them with.

THIS IS KEY … The image really needs to match the quote in some way.

Don’t be too literal and don’t be too generic.

I’m not a big fan of showing faces on these images. I like to leave faces to the reader’s imagination.

For my books, the best quotes are usually things like:

A character’s first physical description.
A first kiss.
A point of great conflict.
A point of great revelation.

But always something where I feel I surpassed myself in my descriptive language, where in a handful of sentences, I conveyed a great emotion or impression.

Keep it short!

If your quote is too long, you have to have a small size font and you want it to be a quick easy to read quote, where the book title and author’s name are clearly visible. You want whoever reads it to say “WOW. I want to read the rest of that book!” Based solely on those few sentences.

So, have you tried this? Where do you post them besides Facebook and Pinterest?

-Jennifer

If Love is a Lie, a novel by Jennifer Geoghan

Today, I’m starting a countdown series of posts leading up to my book launch next week. In celebration of this launch, I’m going to be posting on my blog along with my daily countdown. These posts will countdown the different ways I’m promoting my book to generate excitement and sales.

Today’s Topic: www.Pinterest.com

I’ll admit I can be a little slow on the social media uptake at times. I’d like to say it’s a generational thing, but really I’m just anti-social (in the best sense of the word, of course) So when I heard people talking about using Pinterest.com to promote your book, I was … confused to say the least. Ever the optimist, I decided to embrace Pinterest and see what happened. Yes, I created a board called “Jennifer Geoghan Novels” and started to pin things to it related to my series, The Purity of Blood novels.

I pinned pictures from the various places the books take place in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, etc. I figured if you were already reading the books, it would be nice to see the places I mentioned in the books. Still … nice as that is, I still wasn’t getting how that was supposed to promote the books to new readers

And then light dawned in the forest ….

Or in the case, I got an email from Pinterest.

In that email, it said that something I’d pinned to my board had been repined to someone else’s board. Humm… That’s when it occurred to me that if I created my OWN pin, one where I could write the caption to the image and not just re-pin something someone else had pinned, that this might be were the promotion aspect came in.

Embracing this idea, I started adding lots of pins, photos in this case, pictures I’d taken of the various places in the books, as well as other images like quotes and the covers of the books.

I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say I posted a photo of the Old Lighthouse Museum where much of my third novel takes place. I’d post the photo with the caption “The Old Lighthouse Museum, Stonington, CT (As mentioned in The Blood that Binds, The Purity of Blood Volume II by Jennifer Geoghan now available on Amazon)” And yes, some of those photos have already been repined and sent out into the great cyber world, hopefully to bring me riches in the form of royalties and the knowledge that I have made the world a better place through the majesty of the written word.

ALSO: once you upload an image, you can click on the “pencil” to edit it. Open it up and you can insert a URL to link the image to a webpage. In my case, I linked the image to the book’s page on Amazon.

I’d love to get your feedback on Pinterest. Have you had success/failure with it? Any ideas to work the site better for promotion? Let’s hear from you!

-Jennifer