Author promotion

Offering a free item with a book's purchase and coupling that with a time-table to create a sense of urgency as David Meerman Scott does here is a good book-marketing idea and needn't be done at the book's launch.

Any excuse (a Wall Street Journal review, for instance) could prompt such an offer.

Scott's set this up to raise his book's Amazon.com rating for one day—a strategy book marketing gurus seem to have taken on as conventional wisdom—but no one has explained to me what this might do for the book in the long term.

We "owned" Amazon for 3 days in a row by having the #1 selling book out of all of Amazon's titles. This brought us a lot of attention.

But, we have seen other of our titles dip below the 200 mark and we pretty often have a title in the top 25 writing books and we haven't witnessed any media stampedes to cover these books because of it.

All authors who want to sell more of their books can profit from using ideas from those like Scott who are great self-promoters. The big thing in promoting a book is to do many things over a long period of time. If the marketing gods smile on you, eventually you'll reach the tipping point and the book will take on a life of its own.

—Steve Mettee