What the Heck is Cross-Promotion?

Bear with me. Remember that I’m a newly published author, so every day I learn something. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve learned about cross-promotion. I’m involved in one right now.

Here’s my plug—if you like Science Fiction and/or Fantasy, PLEASE check out THESE FANTASTIC AUTHORS & NOVELS (click here) . 70+ of us have teamed up and have our books all priced at only 99 cents for the next 5 days. Here’s a fantastic graphic for the event. (Ha. Ha. I made it. See my novel cover strategically placed?) My “to read” list has grown exponentially!

So, what is cross promotion?

It’s just like it sounds. Each participant promotes each other to whoever’ll listen to us, with hopes someone will listen. I mean, you are all sick of me talking about my novel by now, so why not hear about some other ones? It’s kinda nice–giving me new content for this blog.

How do you find a group to cross-promote with?

I’ve been involved in two events so far and have one scheduled. The first two I found on KBoards. (If you self-publish and haven’t discovered that website yet, I highly recommend you join that community. There is information on EVERYTHING relating to self-publishing and writing too.) I have another promotion coming up in February that I found through this blog. I’ll fill you in more on that one as it comes nearer.)

What do you do during a cross promotion?

Like I mentioned, you tell as many people as possible about the event. Most authors send it out in their newsletter. Since my mailing list is nearly non-existent, I need to rely on Facebook, Twitter, and this blog. (So thank you, dear reader. You simply reading this makes my day.)

• Facebook: I’m going to post a few of the graphics for the event on my author page and then share it on my personal page (making sure to set it as ‘public’) with a note to “please share” to get the word out. Those little words, “please share” get a lot of interest. I’m careful not to overuse them though, never using them for my own individual promotion. Then there’s a whole world out there of Facebook Groups which I’m still learning about.
• Twitter: I don’t know. I think twitter is a little useless, but as I work on honing my mailing list this year, I’m committed to figuring out how it works. Right now, I’m going to make a few different tweets and send them out at random during the five days. Interesting: A tweet’s lifespan is only 18 minutes. That’s all the screen time you get. I may try the retweet tag (#RT) and see what happens.
• Blog: Well, here we go, you’re reading it. I can’t just say “buy this” and “check this out”, I always strive for half-way decent content. I’m also going to post a blog about making the graphic for the promotion later this week. I learned a lot doing that.  Another method may be guest blogging and blog tours, which I haven’t quite figured out yet either.

Please tell me about your cross promotion experiences. Other ideas?