Marketing Co-op Ventures

July 26, 2021 / Business of Writing, Promo Tips / 10 COMMENTS


Co-workers in an office.

by Hank Quense, @hanque99

Book marketing is hard.  This is especially true if you book was published by an indie press house or if you self-published it.  In these instances all marketing responsibilities react on you and you alone.

This article discusses a way to change that last statement.

One solution to combating the loneliness of your marketing efforts is to organize an author marketing co-operative venture.  Getting like-minded authors to share the marketing load can greatly increase everyone’s  reach as each of you join forces to promote each others books.

Once the group comes together, there are a number of joint activities that can be shared to effectively promote the books.

Social media posts:

One easy way to promote each other is to link up on social media sites.  Whenever a member of the group writes a post about a new article, event, or a new book review, each member likes the post and shares it or retweets it.  Liking it is nice, but sharing greatly expands the number of people who will see the post.  However, the posting member must make the post “public.” If the post is private, it can’t be shared.

Caution must be used to ensure that personal posts aren’t shared.  Too much personal sharing may be views as spam by the contacts.  Only “professional” material should be candidates for sharing/retweeting.

Author Interviews:

Members can interview each other and post the interviews as blog posts (to be shared or retweeted by other members).  Both members involved in the interview can get together via email or a chat app to develop a series of questions to be used during the interview.

Video interviews:

This type of interview can be interactive if it’s held during a zoom meeting that the public is invited to attend.  This has the added advantage of allowing the pubic to ask questions which greatly increases the interest in the meeting. The participants should work together to develop the interview questions, the video agenda and then promote the meeting.

If the interview is recorded, the video can be posted on websites and promoted using the social media sites.

Author discussions:

In this activity, a few members get together to discuss a topic of mutual interest.  The interview can be text based and published as a blog post or it can be a recorded as a live video meeting.

Book launch street team:

The group can act as street team for books the group launches.  This can include a number of activities such as: beta readers, book reviews, social media promotions and other book launch activities.

Group YouTube channel:

If the members produce a few videos that are of interest to others, it may be beneficial to start a video channel on YouTube or Vimeo.  If one member initiates the channel on YouTube, other members can upload videos to the channel. This means the channel’s owner doesn’t have to do all the work.  If each member writes blog posts promote the videos on the channel, the number of views will increase.  The channel’s URL can also be added to the members email sig file, further promoting the videos.

Group website:

If the co-op is to be effective there should be a common web place to host relevant material and to serve as a clearing house for comments and discussions. For this type of activity I prefer Infinity as the website to share.  Infinity is similar to Trello in many ways it has additional features I like and use.

Book reviews:

Naturally, the members will review each others’ books, to at least rate them.

 

Let’s look at this concept graphically:

 

 

Conclusions:

To me, it seems that an author co-op can be quite beneficial to all members and can greatly increase the marketing reach of each.  The creativity of the group is the only limiting factor on what activities the group actually works on.

However, the caveat to all this is that the members have to share the work load.  If member X isn’t willing to help out with the promotional activities while expecting the others to promote member X’s books, it can lead to anger and the disbanding of the co-op.

 

Writer @hanque99 on Promo Co-Ops: Click To Tweet

 

Hank Quense’s website Writers & Authors Resource Center provides material relating to fiction writing, self-publishing and book marketing.

Photo credit: jcorrius on Visualhunt

  1. Thanks for sharing these ideas. There’s a lot to be said for working together like that, especially for authors who are new to promo, or who don’t have much in the way of time or money. Collaboration can really work well. It reminds me of a few Facebook pages I’ve seen that are administered by groups of authors. It’s an effective way to get the word out.

    1. In theory, this is great concept. In practice, not so much. Dealing with author egos can be a major stumbling block.

  2. The IWSG anthology authors share a website. Once the new anthology is announced, the authors take over from the last group. Better than reinventing the wheel every year with a new site.

  3. Hi Elizabeth
    This sounds like a fantastic idea. Have you got any pointers as to how the group of authors might come together? There are of course Cozy Mystery groups on the social medias but they might not be the best place to start recruiting fellow marketeers. Also, would you imagine that these would cross international boundries? I am, of course, UK based but a lot of people are in the US and other countries.

    All the best
    Audrey

    1. Hi Audrey!

      I think I would start by joining Facebook promo-related groups like 20BooksTo50K and seeing what marketing co-ops already exist. Another idea is to find similar cozy writers on Amazon and use their publicly-provided contact information to recruit to a group (I’ve been part of short-term projects that way, when contacted directly). There are also frequently group blogs out there…not so much for cozies, though. I joined one once for Southern Writers and gained some easy exposure that way. I *definitely* think an international group would work these days with no issues.

      Best of luck!

      Elizabeth

      1. I agree. With the internet, location becomes almost irrelevant. The biggest issue is time zones. A large difference, like 12 hours, can slow things down but that is the only drawback.

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