Title: 
Getting Word of Mouth Started: New Book PR Method

Word Count:
504

Summary:
We wanted feedback and a greater audience before publishing the print version of our new book. We gambled on a ‘public and peer review’ to help improve the quality of our book, and at the same time get out word of mouth. Did it work?


Keywords:
Publishing, PR, publicity, sampling, marketing, book sales, advertising, bookstores


Article Body:
Authors and business people often go to extremes to publicize their book or product launch. Sometimes, the most successful method can appear in front of them. Take for example, book publicity. It is the one of the toughest cases to crack. Each year, at least 50,000 authors are published in the United States. Tens of thousands of authors publish electronic books. Most fail to get noticed. Very few achieve any of their goals as authors – to build up readership. 

Here’s a way to get the word out and polish off your book before it hits the stores: sampling. Major corporations utilize focus groups, pollsters and other marketing experts to build up their brand name. This is similar to planting seeds to get a garden or orchard to grow. The more seeds you plant, the better your chances to grow vegetables or apple trees. As an author, you can use sampling or “seeding,” to build up awareness of your book. During the publishing process, we discovered a clever way to attract readers, and at the same time, we can upgrade our book.

Having been through the publishing process for many decades, we experimented with what every author secretly fears: a peer review. But, we did it with a twist. Instead of waiting until the book is published to read the reviews, we posted the book on our website to accept all criticism in advance. We called this a “Public and Peer Review” of our book, entitled “Investing in the Great Uranium Bull Market: A Practical Investor’s Guide to Uranium Stocks.”

Before posting the first eight chapters of the electronic version of this book, we notified subscribers, several days earlier, that the book would be available on June 18th at 11:59 P.M for Open Review. In the email notification, we included a reminder to “tell a friend” about the book’s pre-publication. 

By the time this book was ready to be electronically published, our large number of subscribers had jumped by nearly 10 percent! In less than one week, we had gained more new subscribers than we had in the previous few months. Our Alexa rating, for the week had also jumped ahead of nearly 1 million other websites. The one-week draw from the email notification had also increased the 3-month average by 267 percent!

This marketing opportunity provided us with greater readership. It might now offer us a broader range of opinions, helping us improve the book. Hopefully, there will be those annoying copy editor types, who will help point out grammar, spelling and punctuation errors. Previous tests, similar to this, have also drawn experts from the industry we have written about. This adds more texture to our research, and ultimately creates a better product for our readers.

Stay tuned for our next publicity surprise, after we review the success of our public and peer review. The key is to plan out a series of teasers to keep drawing visitors to your website and intelligently persuade them that your book is something they absolutely have to read.