One by-product of writing that I have come to enjoy, however, is the marketing side of things. It is fun to see which activities find new readers. Some of the tools available to Indie authors these days are the obvious ones, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads.com, Amazon.com and so on. The not so obvious ones are book trailers on Youtube, Vimeo, Wimp and others, as well as radio/TV interviews, blog interviews and my favorite, “Word of mouth.”

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with book trailers. As I’ve mentioned over the years, I find most book trailers to be terribly boring and repetitive. So many of them remind me of condom advertising: wind blowing across some tall grass, soft music, a voice-over about the book, more wind blowing and then the cover of the book. Either that, or it is the action/thriller variation, where there are out-of-this-world battle scenes, sword fights, massive explosions and so on. Very few of these trailers really tell the reader what to expect. The viewer isn’t certain about what the product is.

Recently, I had the good fortune to give a presentation at our local author’s club on the topic of book trailers. It was a fun night and you can read about it on my writer’s blog, if you wish: Preaching to the choir. If you do go there, check out the link to the worksheet for the presentation, it has a variety of interesting book trailers.

I’ve found that my readers are “information” driven, especially the amateur radio readers. Many of my regular readers are familiar with my video about rubbing sticks to build a fire. Many Three Hundred Zeroes readers found the book through that video. It currently has about 105k views and keeps climbing. I cannot afford a research study to see exactly how many readers found the book through it, but I have had a number tell me so.

The latest, 15 minute, video was aimed specifically at my ham radio readers: Ham Radio Hiking Gear.  I suspect it would bore a non-ham to death, but it is geared to a specific reader, and the results have been amazing. This chart shows how many visitors this blog has had in the last 30 days:

I posted the video around the 5th of the month. Over the next few weeks, I Tweeted about it and commented about it on a few blogs. The increase in traffic and new readers has been amazing. Prior to the video, this blog was seeing about 165 visitors a day. That peak at the end is 951 visits! Visits translate into new readers. This was all from a very targeted video to ham radio operators. They’re certainly an active and interested bunch of people. Thank you all!

Of course, without a doubt, the best advertising an author can have is “word-of-mouth.” In 1995, when I read Bill Bryson’s, A Walk In The Woods. I enjoyed it so much I convinced at least three other people to get a copy and purchased several copies myself, as gifts. That book has now sold millions of copies. Satisfied customers will do that.

The message here is, as an author, one needs to pay close attention to who the readers are and to give them what their looking for: interesting material to read. Build it, and the WILL come.