Marketing-- 'From Here to There'

Whatever you do in life, you are involved with marketing if you expect to get money for it. Sometimes you are marketing yourself, sometimes a product, sometimes something someone else made. The exchange of labor for money or some object of value is about marketing. Most of the time people forget that as a regular job can seem as though it's not involved with that-- right up until the company downsizes, and you realize if you can't convince them you are contributing something of value, you are done for.

Now I knew when I got into eBooks that it would involve marketing them myself. There is no publishing house behind me to do it. I did not come in through an organization like Smashwords which has a marketing arm that can help with many aspects of getting the books out because they have been paid to do it. Many such companies have motivation as they receive a percentage of whatever the book gets.

So this has been a learning experience to say the least (although we run into marketing problems with our beef and lamb too). I'm still in the process of learning more ways to reach possible readers with these books-- some seem to work for me and some not so much.

One thing my publisher (Farm Boss) and I opted to do is put one of my books into what Amazon calls Prime which means someone can rent them for free with it being possible to rent one book a month for a yearly fee which also enables the user to access streaming of DVDs.

I did this not because I thought my books would particularly attract renters that way. I pretty well figured those renters would opt for more expensive books than mine, but it enabled some other promotional features-- the main one being free days which don't involve being in Prime or paying any money. In short, $0.00 purchase for the reader. So we finally figured out how to use that feature (we being him), and I wanted readers here to know ahead of time in case they'd like to try out one of my books (which I consider to be a hybrid between romance, suspense, pop fiction, with sometimes a western or metaphysical topic) without any cost to themselves.

If you don't have an eReader, you can still read any of the Kindles by adding a free app to your computer and reading it there. Anyway on January 26-27, 2012, From Here to There will be available free by going to the link below. Always be sure when you do that with any special offer that the price is correct before you push click for purchase.

From Here to There

More about this contemporary story, set in the west, is on blogs- Rain Trueax and From Here to There.

If you have been curious about what it's like to read a book this way, have wondered what I mean about my indie (what they call books not coming through a publisher) romances that are but aren't just romances, you can give it a try for free on Thursday or Friday.