A new place to promote your self-published book: That Part Where

 

Looking for a new way to promote your book? Yeah, me too. That’s why I was glad I ran into That Part Where, the brainchild of the good people behind Monkey Paw Creative.

Intriguing concept

Here’s how it works: You select a scene from your book that gives potential readers a glimpse at what’s behind the cover. And it’s not the opening scene, because anyone can get their hands on that via the Look Inside feature at Amazon et al. Instead, this scene is something that nails the book down and provokes the reader (with any luck) to buy. It’s “that part where…” Get it?

You get to set up the scene with a brief intro, you get your cover reproduced, and you get the book description included to boot. Then the good people behind That Part Where (i.e., the good people behind Monkey Paw Creative) will post your scene on their website, then create an ad that you can use on all your social media outlets and that they’ll put into their Google Adwords campaign for 30 days.

Oh, and it only costs $10.

As they put it

We believe that sharing an intriguing sample with readers is one of the most effective ways to make them fall in love with your story. We also believe that when you promote your story on a site like this its effect should last more than one day. Consistent sales do more to raise rankings than spikes. That’s why we encourage you to share the ad and that’s why we promote your ad within our own online campaign.

Bitchy paragraph

The only problem is, online promotion doesn’t seem to translate into sales. Or not many, anyway. (Or, not in my early experience, anyway.) Readers appear to look at it as a form of junk mail, like virtual billboards, something to be filtered out. God knows I’ve been trying a bunch of different things, shy of buying ad space or a hiring a skywriter, and the effect on sales has been nil. The blog and my one-on-one needling have been the only real movers of the book.

That said, you really can’t go wrong for ten bucks.

What The Hell

Like the name of this blog says. I’m going to give it a shot. Maybe a few eyeballs will pay $2.99 for Yesterday Road and I’ll make back the $10 the service will cost me. That’s the test of a good ad campaign, right? Do you make back your investment and gain new readers? Yay.

Incidentally, if you’ve read Yesterday Road already, which scene do you think would be a good teaser for That Part Where?

(And thank you to the few generous souls who have purchased the book in its first month!)