How to promote my website/app to independent authors? where are they? how to talk to them?

[Mary]

I work for a marketing agency and we are promoting a very innovative application that allows independent writers (especially for kids books) to publish their work as ebooks for free on the major platforms.

How to promote this? What can I do? I do not really know much about the industry.

What do you think? Social Media?

[Sadie]

Wow, that is such a leading question!

kboards.com

Find someone at the Warrior Forum with an excellent reputation for running reputable, successful WSOs (Warrior Special Offers). This is harder than it sounds because there are a lot of charlatans at the WarriorForum.com. However, I stand by the WF for producing some of the best internet-marketing-related products in existence.

Good luck!

[499]

I'd avoid some of the pitfalls of social media.

The average consumer is fairly savvy to the ham-handed attempts to use social situations to push product. If they're stupid or gullible enough to fall for social media marketing, they aren't going to be bright enough to write a book worth publishing, so unless your plan is to fleece the idiots...

I'd suggest producing useful content for potential novice authors and basically being the only advertising on your website. You give away helpful advice for free and then offer your product afterwards. This model is pretty successful on the net these days. People trust a company which has given them product for free.

I'll point out that if you're an actual marketing agency, rather than someone who is just looking for sheep to shear, you should already have the people on hand to produce such a website. I'm going to question your credentials as while you claim to be am experienced marketing company, you seem to have no idea how to market your own company. Which makes me expect you're not so much a marketing company, as someone who has an idea for a market to exploit.

Your use of the term "application" would also seem to show some ignorance with the already established world of cost-free vanity publishing. So what exactly are you offering that isn't available from the several ways to self-publish, with established websites, which provide easy access to anyone with a digital reader? It isn't as if you can compete with Amazon.

So which game are you running? Are you the "marketing firm" which while publishing for free, offers additional services for a low, low fee? The ones which promise endless hits from social media,yet have no success stories? Or are you the guys who offer publishing, but retain rights to the product, effectively hoping to snag some beginning writer who will go on to greater things? If this is the model, I suggest going with the nominal payment-literary magazine model, as the best way to get such product is to make a few modest payments. Or is this just the stock viral marketing campaign for an obscure marketing firm, which fakes avatars, with very specific answers to their questions? cough cough cough

[S.K.]

I think any author who signs up for your app is a fool. You clearly have no idea how to offer the writer anything she can't already get for free without you. What possible advantages would the author get if she does this? From your question, I see only negatives--no idea about the publishing industry, no plans on marketing, and no doubt the rights would be tied up while the book just sits there, available but not selling because your marketing agency doesn't know what it's doing.