By Bruce Jones
On Friday I virtually attended a very interesting web based event run by Bryan Cohen of Build-Creative-Writing-Ideas.com. Bryan ran an event on his website and on Facebook for 15 authors that wrote books on how to write and market your writing. What Brian did was connect with about 30 authors and ended up with a list of 15. He then put all 15 author’s books together on a page on his site, wrote a short blurb and set up a connection for each to their sales page on Amazon.com. Each author also dropped the price of their book to $.99 for the event. He called the event March to a Bestseller, A One Day Sale On Books for Authors,
Next he set up a Facebook event that ran for the entire day. The goal of the event was that you could meet and post questions to the authors or reply to questions being posted. You could connect with the authors and participants. It was kind of like a mini conference but held on line. Each author also spent several hours on Facebook answering questions. You can see the Facebook event page here, March to a Bestseller, A One Day Sale On Books for Authors. I found out about this event from one of the participants, writer Steve Scott of SteveScottSite.com who I follow. Each author also sent out email notices to their followers about the event and what time they would be on-line. Looking at the FB page, 2,719 people were also invited, which I am assuming is from Facebook, with 647 people going to the event. Bryan featured each book during the day and also had questions for the authors that he had ready to spark discussions.
One of the questions I asked Bryan was if he had noted the Amazon sales rank of each book before starting and then after to see if it resulted in increased sales and rank. A number of the authors responded on Facebook and commented that their ranking and sales were jumping. This was a very cool event to watch and really opens up a great way to build awareness and community along with sales using a FaceBook Event and you website. From what he said it took him about 3 weeks to connect with each author and set everything up. It also gives you a strong message about the importance of building your email list and connections both with your followers and with other people in your community. The power of numbers. From an outsiders point of view I think this was a great success. It held my attention during the day. I bought a book and signed up on several of the authors websites. I think this kind of thing could be easily duplicated in any industry or group.
Followup for the FaceBook Book Event
Here is a follow up post by Bryan on the result of the Facebook book event, a great success by all accounts.
• 640 attendees
• 360-616 clicks on each book, over 6,000 clicks total (wow)
• 1,200 unique visits to his site
You can read all the details at Build-creative-writing-ideas.com
