#STPStwittered: The Results Post

I finished my July Saving the Planet & Stuff summer reading push a couple of days into August. But I did finish it.

You will recall, of course, that the July marketing month involved a series of quote images from the book. They cover the entire story without giving away the entire story. The Kindle edition, all that's available now, has been marked down from $2.99 to $1.99 since July 1. I did a post here at OC on Saving the Planet's Vermont setting, as well as one on the Norwegian textbook that includes a STPS excerpt and the recycling crafts described in the book.

What Did This Book Marketing Get You, Gail?

Well, here is what I hoped to gain from this effort:

• Sell a few books.
• Get a couple of decent Goodreads or Amazon reviews.
• Collect a few new Twitter followers
• Gain experience running a new marketing strategy. 

Here is what happened:

•  I sold 1 eBook. Hurray! Really. Hurray!
• No new Goodreads or Amazon reviews, decent or otherwise.  
• Whatever new Twitter followers I got last month were due to my own trolling. People were not beating a path to my door because they were so impressed with my quote images.
• Computer Guy and I did gain experience using Twitter quote images as part of a marketing campaign.

 

What Questions Does This Book Marketing Experience Raise?

Notice I didn't ask "What have I learned?" That's because I've learned nothing. Absolutely nothing. I just have questions I didn't have before.

1. Is this quote image thing just a poor marketing tool? It is free and pretty easy, after all, and "You get what you pay for" is a much more accurate cliche than "The best things in life are free."
2.  Are older books like Saving the Planet & Stuff impossible to market?
3.  Is Saving the Planet & Stuff impossible to market? 
4. I've been experimenting with different types of marketing over a long period of time for what is now a self-published book. Is this pointless? Are self-published books just like traditionally published books? The only opportunity for sales is during the big opening, like movies?

It's All Good

 

This afternoon, a family member and I were discussing how we'd used part of our summers on activities that weren't very productive when we could have been doing other things that might have been more so. (He did better than I did last month.) But all experience has value. What we did will be good for us somehow, sometime.