Welcome back to my journey through book marketing. THE OBVIOUS GAME is coming up on its one-year birthday, which prompted me to show it a bit of financial love as it blazes onto a backlist and I dive into my second group of beta readers' suggestions for THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES.

I've learned a lot this year. THE OBVIOUS GAME was a different marketing game than SLEEP IS FOR THE WEAK because the publishing landscape has changed so much from 2008 to 2013.

If only I had a bunch more money. I know now where I would spend it -- marketing to librarians and booksellers and consumers. I would absolutely make sure I had ARCs six months before the book came out to get a better chance at reviews in industry publications, because (I of course did not know this) many will only accept a book for review at a set amount of time before it is published. THE OBVIOUS GAME went to publication so quickly that I didn't even have a contract that soon before my pub date, let alone an ARC. Which meant I missed out on that chance. It exists one time for each book, and one time only. 

As it stands, I don't have a bunch of money. My efforts initially were focused on getting reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Anything I do now is focused on getting THE OBVIOUS GAME in front of the consumer, particularly the warm-lead, YA-e-reading consumer. (There are several reasons for this, but the two most important are 1) more services exist to promote ebooks for a reasonable amount of money and 2) I make a much higher percentage from ebooks than I do from print books due to margin issues.)

In case you're curious, here are the screenshots from my BookGorilla campaign over the holiday and my Riffle Select campaign that is going on right this minute (in other words, the book is $1.99 again today). Both campaigns involved me negotiating with my publisher to drop the price of THE OBVIOUS GAME ebook to $1.99 from $4.99 for about a two-day period of time to make sure it was that price when the email went out from either service. Both services were fine to work with. Big Five publishers had books on there next to mine. BookGorilla had a Joyce Carol Oates title the day my campaign went out, and today's Riffle Select had THE OBVIOUS GAME right next to John Green's THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. (yay)

Here's what the BookGorilla one looked like:

And here's what Riffle Select looked like:

Finally, I've had a Goodreads ad that I change up every once in a while since January 2013. I ran seven giveaways on Goodreads in 2013, one roughly every two months. You can only run them the year before your publication date and the year of your publication date. When I could, I tied my Goodreads ad to a giveaway. The giveaways were great for getting people to put THE OBVIOUS GAME on their to-read lists on Goodreads. I have no idea if they read it or if they bought it or if they asked their librarian for it -- but I know they at least showed interest in it, which is good. Now that the giveaways are done, my ad looks like this.

Feel free to ask questions. There really isn't enough information out there, in my opinion.