Book Marketing 102

First, a quick status report. I should have the MS back from Dave for his final critique within two weeks. He said it's looking good so far, so I have my fingers crossed that he won't see the need for any large changes. I've uploaded a draft copy to Amazon this weekend to make it available for pre-order at the end of April. If I can publish it before that date, of course, I will!

And this time I remembered that you have to explicitly link the book to your author page in author central or it won't show up. So I went to the 'Books' tab on my Author Central page and clicked "Add a book", entered my ISBN, clicked Go, and said "Yep, that's my book!".

Okay, so now, let's proceed to the main topic of this article — what I've recently learned about marketing, in particular about free and discount book promotions, and Thunderclap.

Reviews are important

So today I'm writing about some new stuff I've learned about marketing for the self-published author. My approach is still not to advertise in the formal sense, but to rely on word of mouth. That said, being noticed or discovered remains the first key hurdle for an almost unknown author such as myself. I think my books are good, though they're certainly not to everyone's taste.

The right reader

Which is a worthwhile point to make: if you somehow convince someone to read your book when it's not the kind of book they'd want to read, you're very likely to get a negative review. My own experience is that most reviews are about how much the reader liked the book, not about how good the book is (setting personal taste aside, since that's hard to do). Which is fair enough… but a one star review is still a one-star review.

So if you push your book to someone who won't like it, you've made a marketing mistake. You're more likely to get negative word of mouth spreading, than positive. So any time spent making it easier for people to know whether your book is one they might like, or hate, is time well spent.

Dishonest reviews

Some people buy reviews, frankly. There are teams of people in India and elsewhere who offer this service. I feel very strongly that this is a terrible, terrible thing, and I congratulate every author who resists the temptation, and every publisher (like Amazon) that works hard to uncover fake reviews and counter them. Dishonest reviews undermine the whole industry, because self-publishing relies so heavily on honest reviews.

But I recently discovered there is yet another kind of fake review. On Amazon, there are "top reviewers", who achieve that "rank" by reviewing lots of products. For some people, this is a booster to their self-esteem, so they spend a lot of time doing reviews for the purpose of becoming a top reviewer. I'm sure a lot of the top reviewers, probably most of them, are genuine, and write great reviews after buying and trying the product. But there is I believe a small percentage who review for the sake of getting the rank, and just pump out plausible-looking reviews as fast as they can. For books, they may not even purchase them, just "Look Inside" or even just read the book description, and then write a review based on what they can guess from that. These people can probably be detected by the number of books they "read" and review per day.

Amazon could probably stamp that out by only counting reviews for certified purchases when counting points to award reviewers with "Top reviewer" status.

The Power of Free

Some very interesting articles by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, have been very helpful to me. I read this one first, and found it packed full of interesting information: New Smashwords research.

In summary, free books seem to be the best way for an unknown author to get discovered by readers. If you write well, and the right people try your book, then that means the small percentage of readers who write a review will translate to a decent number of reviews; which is what you need. The pricing "sweet spot" for a book is either $2.99 or $3.99 — i.e. the author earns the most in total by pricing their books at that figure. Another key point was that a free book in a series has a massive benefit in promoting sales of the whole series. Also, books that start off with a pre-order earn more money than those that only become available to order on publication date, and longer books sell better than short books.

Maybe the gist is best covered in this article by him: The power of free — how to sell more e-books

He has followed it up with annual updates, based on the sales data that Smashwords sees in the previous year. He's doing a great service to indie authors by doing this analysis, and it benefits Smashwords (and other publishers) only indirectly. If more readers discover indie authors they'll enjoy, we all win.

Here are a couple of them — they're well worth reading: Smashwords Ebook Survey 2015 and 2016 survey — how to publish and sell ebooks.

My own experience

... confirms that pricing. I put a lot of hours into Wild Thing. It's hard to say exactly, given it's weird history of mitosis, but it's probably safe to say that WT (Vol 1, as published) took about 4,000 hours to produce (plus the hours that Dave spent on his critiques, and Mirella put into her cover design). So I set the price originally, I think, at $4.99.

Thanks to advice and help from Lama Jabr of Xana Publishing and Marketing, I ran a free giveway in July, around the time of the series launch event at Gleebooks, and sales spiked up a bit. Later, in November 2016, I joined a bunch of other Indie authors in Nicole R. Locker's (Nicole R. Locker's blog) and discounted Wild Thing (and Harsh Lessons?) for her (Big Book Sale), now long over.

I noticed that only people in the US and Germany bought copies: I think it shows that not having any reviews is a big barrier; as is having just one 1-star. (In Australia, I still have just two reviews, each one line long: one is 5-star, one is 1-star — so, that provides almost no information to help a reader decide!)

I also signed up Wild Thing to feature on Thurs Sept 29th 2016 at ebooksoda.com in a free promotion. I do think this had a knock-on effect, because October, and then November, were my two best months of sales since publication. I think Lama Jabr's tweets about the promotion helped a lot, too.

Because I stuffed up my organisation of my free promotion days (although I did learn about the time zone issues related to Amazon's free and discount deal promotions), in the end I just manually dropped the price of Wild Thing to US$0.99, planning to return it its normal price after a week or two. But I was in no great rush — largely because of Mark Coker's articles, but partly because I was working flat out on Shadow Hunt.

The Power of Bargain

And I noticed a strange thing as the months slipped by, after September.

My Amazon cheques had grown significantly. I had a little poke about in the Amazon author's dashboard, and looked at the sales graphs every month. I started noticing that the sales from Kindle Unlimited pages-read seemed to be about double what it was from accumulated ebook sales in Kindle Direct.

I also noticed that as months passed without me blogging or tweeting much, sales dropped off. So it does look like Facebook, blog, and twitter etc. seem to generate a little interest. I don't see I could have done much different, though, given my determination to publish Shadow Hunt "early in 2017". The main delay was that I underestimated how close it was to being ready, so working out what to do regarding Dave's suggestions, took about three times longer than I'd anticipated, which meant I missed my deadline with him. (He's currently fitting me in part-time as his schedule permits.)

I think that a lot of people who "buy" free books, stash them away to read "later". Maybe much later! I also think you tend to value something you paid for, a little higher than something you "buy" for free. So I feel that $0.99 is generally a good choice for a bargain. Yet Mark Coker says a free book for the first in a series gives you the best return. So I may re-think that.

Anyway, whether your book is free or not, there still remains the problem of people just discovering it exists.

SIA and Another Free/discount Book Giveaway

This is probably a good point to mention that I'm joining in another big free book promotion from March 31 to April 2^nd (US PDT). It's being organised by the good people at Support for Indie Authors (not the talented Aussie singer/songwriter, Sia!) of Goodreads).

Joining in the discussion there, I learned several valuable new things related to marketing.

One was the existence of sites that promote free books. They mentioned FreeBooks.com and askdavid.com — free books are accepted and they'll tweet about them. (But see the Appendix at the end of this article that gives some surprisingly-long lists of free and low cost free book promotion sites.)

But to help get news out about the event, so people might discover these books while they're being discounted, one of the group's helpful members, C.B. also registered for a Thunderclap promotion. I'd never heard of Thunderclap!

Thunderclap

Thunderclap is a service that sits above and uses social media. Think of it as a stadium full of people (or perhaps a flash mob) who agree to clap or call out a message, once only, all together at a specific time. They run both a free and a paid service, I think. You nominate the target number of people (either 100 or 250 people) you hope will join the event, and its date and time. If enough people "join" the specific Thunderclap event so you reach your target, the single message is sent, at that time.

When you join the specific thunderclap event, you need to choose to share the message with any or all of Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. There is a button you can click for each of these, and Thunderclap then presents you with a preview of the message that will be sent.(*) You can personalise that as you wish. You can share the link to the Thunderclap event in the hope that others will join it, too. By clicking through, you authorise Thunderclap to send that message on your behalf. They look at your contacts list, but only to calculate the "reach" (how many people your message will be seen by), to calculate how many people overall will see the message.

What happens at that time, is that Thunderclap then sends the message from your social media account(s), for you. (It's like you stay up and awake, with finger pressed on the necessary Share button with the message prepared, and click the button at the scheduled time.)

Now, one point to note is that the point of the Thunderclap is to co-ordinate and send the message at the same time. Yet some people only get as far as the Preview message but then don't proceed; and many of them misunderstand, and copy and paste that preview to share the message (prematurely).

(*) For that reason, if your message contains a link to a web page that gives the details of the event (which it should!), the preview message contains a shortened URL that instead points to the Thunderclap promotion page for the event, instead. That shortened URL is replaced by a shortened URL that points to the real event when the message is finally sent.

I contacted Thunderclap directly to ask them to clarify that, and other people who had used Thunderclap reassured me on some of the other points which I've explained above. I must say that the Thunderclap people were super responsive and receptive to feedback, and didn't seem to mind explaining things.

I also asked why they only supported Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. They said they had reached out to the other social media companies, but at present those other companies did not provide the necessary facilities for Thunderclap to integrate with them. They pointed out that you can share the preview message by any social media you use, manually, if you want to encourage others to join the Thunderclap itself. And I found a Google+ group that seems to be trying to integrate: the Google+ Thunderclap community.

I should probably share the link to this specific Thunderclap for the book promo event, eh? Here it is: VM's siafbb Spring book attack

Appendix — sites that promote free/discount books

Dave's notes about promotion/review sites:

1. BookBub (the holy grail -- no point in even applying at the moment but just putting it in there ... unless you have at least 200 Amazon reviews you have got zero chance of being accepted and even then it's not easy)

2. BookSends (One of the more expensive ones but generally good results)

3. EReader News Today $35

4. Buck Books — around $9 (fiction; non-fiction $29)

5. Free Kindle Books and Tips (around $25, and other requirements)

6. Digital Book Today

The following sites were collected and shared by members of the Support for Indie Authors Group on Goodreads. Many people contributed; notably Dylan Callens,

Martin Wilsey, Marie Silk, Christina McMullen, I've collected them together here, with some comments, and 've removed dead links. Please note that any errors will be due to mistakes I've made; to check the original source of the material see this resources discussion: "Best advertising sites"

There was one comment that ineffective sites were the Fussy Librarian, Many Books, and FKBT (Free Kindle Books and Tips).

This is a mixture of free and sites that charge a fee (but most are free):

www.addictedtoebooks.com
www.authormarketingclub.com
www.bargainebookhunter.com
www.bestebookreaderlovers.com
www.bookdealhunter.com
www.bookfreebies.com
www.bookgoodies.com
www.bookpraiser.com
ebookdealofday.com/author-submit/
www.ebooklister.net/submit.php
www.ebooksfreedaily.com
www.ebookshabit.com/for-authors
www.ereadergirl.com
www.flurriesofwords.blogspot.co.uk
www.freebookclub.org
www.freebookdude.com
www.freebooksdaily.com
www.freebookshub.com/authors
www.freebooksy.com
www.freediscountedbooks.com
www.free-kindle-books.deha-solutions....
www.igniteyourbook.com
www.iloveebooks.com
www.indieauthornews.com
www.indiebooklounge.com
www.indiebookoftheday.com/authors
www.justkindlebooks.com/submit-your-book
www.kornerkonnection.com
www.moreforlessonline.com
www.onehundredfreebooks.com/author-fr...
www.peoplereads.com
www.pixelofink.com
www.pixelscroll.com/feature-your-product
www.slashedreads.com
www.theereadercafe.com/authors
www.thekindlebookreview.com
www.worldliterarycafe.com — off-line at time of checking: may be dead

And more (Marie's additions with duplicate links removed):

Ask David: http://askdavid.com Free for free book promos only or $15 for 6-month membership, send out tweets on free promo day
Sweet Free Books: http://sweetfreebooks.com $7
Addicted to ebooks (see the link, above) — *can only submit the day of your promo, Free
Kindle Book Promos: Free, at least 48 hours notice
Freebooks.com: http://www.freebooks.com Free
Content Mo: http://contentmo.com free tweet and on website for free books
My Book Cave https://mybookcave.com/submission-guidelines free to list but must meet strict requirements for content

Marie also noted in Aug 2016 that these sites were the ones she had been accepted for and estimated were most effective (from most effective to least) for her one day free book promotion:

1. Freebooksy $85
2. Robin Reads $45
3. Bookzio $19
4. Bookscream $5
5. Ebook Hounds $10
6. Book Raid FREE
7. Free99books FREE
8. Digital Book Today FREE (48 hours notice and 18+ reviews or $15 fee)

And here are a bunch more links, from the same source:

My Book Cave FREE
Book Raid https://bookraid.com/ Free
Armadillo Ebooks http://www.armadilloebooks.com/ Free
Book of the Day www.bookoftheday.org Free, *note* your book must be listed on their site in advance of your promotion.
Book Scream www.bookscream.com $5* fee is optional and guarantees a top placement in newsletter. Otherwise, free
Reading Deals www.readingdeals.com Free *has paid guarantee*
Choosy Book Worm www.choosybookworm.com Free*has paid guarantee*
Book Hearts (a choosy bookworm site) http://bookhearts.com free but has paid option and currently has no review requirement
Awesome Gang www.awesomegang.com Free*has paid guarantee*
Fussy Librarian www.thefussylibrarian.com $20 (prices vary by genre)
Free 99 Books www.free99books.com Free
Free and Discounted Books (see the link, above) — $8
Discount Book Man www.discountbookman.com Free
OHFB www.ohfb.com *no longer free promo options start at $75*
Ebooks Habit (see the link, above) — Free (and *has paid guarantee option*)
Book Bongo www.bookbongo.com Free
Genre Pulse www.genrepulse.com $16
Online Book Club http://onlinebookclub.org/ $150
Ebook Soda www.ebooksoda.com $15 *$5 off coupons available from various review sites*
Book Goodies (see the link, above) — $10
My Book Place www.mybookplace.net *updated link* Free
Free Books Hub (see the link, above) — $10
Book Lover's Heaven www.bookloversheaven.com Free
Ebook Hounds www.ebookhounds.com $10
Bookzio www.bookzio.com Free *has paid guarantee* also has a reciprocal link discount ***encourages short works***
Book Gorilla www.bookgorilla.com $150

Enjoy!

Emily Craven's brilliant idea for indie-published authors

I recently connected with Barbara Strickland and had a look around, and a read of, her blog Amorina Rose and the world of writing. There's useful stuff there, and I recommend the site; one link for example lead me to Emily Craven's e-Book Revolution blog, which again has lots and lots of useful information for Indie and self-publishers.

One item for example, happened just as I was discovering the world of book tubers, and found me in an especially receptive frame of mind. So, with that little intro, here is me explaining Emily's brilliant idea, from my point of view:

And just to highlight what people say about video, after I uploaded that to Youtube and shared it to Facebook and so on, I got more comments on the video at Facebook than I've received to any of the drier blog articles here. Which in my mind reinforces the idea that video is more engaging. It reinforced something which Lama Jabr of Xana Publishing & Marketing pointed out in one of her workshops: that Amazon make it easy for authors to include some videos on their Amazon author page.

I think video and text serve very different ends, though there can be a large overlap in the middle (depending on the content, naturally), and each has their pros and cons, but certainly for many kinds of communication, video is far more engaging.

Oh, I should probably add a tip, courtesy of film maker and copywriter Tim Lea (who I met at Book Expo Australia 2015): Google (the Youtube part) and Facebook are very much at war for mindshare in the video space (see his blog: "The Bloody Battle between Facebook and YouTube Part 2"). I think he had figures showing that more video was watched on Facebook than Youtube this year (though he observed that the picture is more complicated than that).

Anyway, Tim Lea's tip, if you want to maximise your brownie points with Facebook and Youtube, is to upload your video directly to each, independently. Don't just upload to Youtube and then link to it from FB: FB won't reward you for doing that. That was just one tip in an interesting talk he presented on some commercial opportunities for writers, related to video. He points out that if the video has dialogue, then it's probably going to benefit from having a writer involved! He shared his presentation with me, and I've made it available here:

(Incidentally, I found how to embed the PDF from here: How to Embed a PDF or Other Document Files in Blogger post. If you see advice where the html code ends with "view?usp=sharing", replace that by "preview" if you want it to work!)

Book Publicity and Marketing

(Updated on 2015/10/20 following Book Expo Australia 2015. See Book Expo Aust Update)

First off, I should clarify that I am not claiming to understand book publicity and marketing; but I had the pleasure of attending a six hour course on the topic on Sat 18th July, held by the Australian Society of Authors. The presenter was Debbie McInnes of DMCPRMedia. I should add that it's been a while between articles as I've been hard at work on editing my book in preparation for thEditors.com's feedback, including doing some detailed analysis of how I use POV throughout my book.

Incidentally, here is a link to the information about today's event: Understanding Book Publicity and Marketing in the 21st Century

Debbie clearly knew her stuff and had a wealth of experience. I think there were 18 attendees, and as usual in these get-togethers with other authors and budding authors, I found them all to be interesting and engaging people. It really seems like authors are basically nice people! Also, the range of books underway was enormous, and many sounded very interesting and deserving of success. So Debbie had a really broad scope to try to cover, with probably every attendee wanting a different mix of things from the course. Her approach was to speak from her experience, to show us what needs to be done, and what works, and the broad range of things you need to think about and plan. In essence she provided a smorgasbord of knowledge, from which each person could choose the pieces relevant for them. It would be stupid, arrogant, and morally wrong for me to try to reproduce or summarise everything she went through, especially since I will not have fully understood all the implications of everything she said. But what I will do is share what I learned for my own specific situation: self-publishing in the sci-fi/fantasy genre.

I should further clarify that by self-publishing I don't mean engaging a publishing company and working with them to publish your book: I mean do-it-all-yourself, or at least, take responsibility for it all yourself. For example, I think if you can find a good professional editor to work on your otherwise-finalised MS, that makes excellent sense to do. It also became clear to me during the seminar today that engaging a book cover design expert is probably well worth the money, as perhaps the biggest first step to achieve after you've written your book is to come up with a cover that will make a reader interested enough to at least look at your book to consider reading it.

A lot of what Debbie covered was not relevant to me: most of the people in the media spotlight who interview authors, on TV or radio, do not interview self-published authors. Certainly not a 1st novel! Likewise for most of the marketing channels that are used in the traditional publishing industry; Debbie listed some key publicity drivers:
  1. Newspapers and magazines
  2. ABC (i.e. the national broadcaster) and commercial radio
  3. Free to air and pay TV
  4. Online and social media opportunities
  5. Events (like a book launch, or talks, or signings, …)
  6. Flyers, posters
  7. Web sites
  8. Word of mouth

Now, for a self-publisher, I think the only relevant ones are 7, 4, and 8. Though with sufficient time and energy, you could try 6 and 5, and try (good luck!) for 1, 2, or 3. But in all these cases which involve the media or other parties, you need to keep firmly in mind that there needs to be something in it for them: some reason why showing your book, or talking about your book, is useful and valuable to them. So if you're going to pitch your book to any of these groups, that's how you should be thinking about what to offer them and how to approach them.

Easy to put your foot in it. Debbie also made it clear that publicists and marketers who work in this book publishing space understand who's who in the industry, what's likely to interest them, and what's the right and wrong way to approach them. They know all that because of their deep experience in doing it, so if you try to approach them yourself, you'll need to research very heavily to make an even halfway decent approach. These people are all busy, with many demands on their time, and I imagine that it's taken decades to evolve their current efficient ways of getting the right information to the right people: so if you don't do it the way they expect, you're likely to do it in a way that makes their job harder, not easy. Which will annoy them.

To try to keep this brief, I think I'll just pick out the key things I learned which I expect to prove valuable for someone in my situation.

The publishing process consists of these parts:

• Editing
• Design of the book (including cover, back cover, spine, inside flaps, etc.)
• Distribution
• Publicity

And all those four things need to work, well, for your book to have much chance of success. That, of course, is on top of having written the very best book you can.

Publicity is usually planned right from the outset, because traditional publishers have to produce their books on time, and the scheduling of all the work involved is not simple. So you can't just wing it. In this one respect, the self-publisher has a much easier job: you control everything, and if you need to take more time and re-plan things, then you can, within reason. If you commit to deadlines for some third party, for example if you've organised to give a talk or to launch your book at your local library, then obviously if you can't meet the deadline that's going to be a big problem, and often would mean you've lost that chance, probably forever. So even for the self-publisher, planning your publicity campaign is something you need to put some very careful thought into.

What message does your cover send? Think about your cover in terms of the message it conveys. People want to know what they'll be getting. And if the cover doesn't look professional, the book won't be looked at by professional reviewers (e.g. for the book review section in a newspaper or magazine). For my book, Debbie pointed out I should include a tagline at least to indicate what the book's about. (She thought my cover looked like it had been produced by an amateur – which is absolutely correct – but for all that, it might be okay for a self-published ebook.) This of course includes the title, which is a critical element in the cover.

Marketing is a mix of the product itself, publicity, position (I think this means, relating your book to other similar ones, e.g. identifying the genre or sub-genres), and placement (distribution to bookstores).

Timing matters for publicity: there are busy times of the year when many publishers will be promoting books: for the Christmas period (so, for months before and soon after), and around major writer events and festivals. Try to avoid launching and promoting your book during those times: for a self-publisher, quieter periods will work better for you.

Book press-release. As part of the homework/preparation for the course, each person had to produce a 50-word bio and a press release for our book. This was a completely new concept to me, but although no large newspaper would be interested in the 1st novel of a self-published author, there's a slim chance that a local newspaper might be (since it promotes the idea that people in the local area include authors), so you might be able to pitch it in a way that would make it a useful small news snippet for them. It also occurred to me that if you were to send your book to anyone, then including the “press release” to explain what it is, is probably a good idea.

I did a quick Google search to find out what a book press release was, and found these links useful: How to write a press-release mini tutorial, Book press-release template (I just read the web page, I didn't request the template), and Write a better press release – 50 ways to reach your readers #14, and pulled together the tag-line and blurb I'd previously prepared, then expanded a bit on the blurb to provide some more details, and finally added the 50-word bio we'd been told to prepare. Apart from making the cover image of my book, and the head and shoulders shot of myself too large, Debbie seemed to think I'd made a pretty decent stab at that.

Plan out a publicity campaign: put some thought into it. Even if (like me), you're not going to be too ambitious, work out what you can reasonably do. Things to consider are contacting your local library or book store to see whether they'd be interested in you showing and talking about the book, or even launching it; local radio or newspaper; contacting local book clubs; and of course your online social media plans. You should have a web site where people can go to find out more about your book. If you can get a review comment from someone influential, that you can put on the cover or back page or inside, that could be hugely valuable to you. Getting reviews are very important, so identify and tee-up potential reviewers and plan how to get review copies to those people in good time before the launch date. The bigger the publicity campaign, the more thought and planning required, especially if it will involve newspapers or magazines, who will typically need a lead time of a few months to plan out how to fit your piece in.

Media training. We talked a little about media training: this means, basically, learning how to be yourself and to communicate the key messages about your book, if you're in the fortunate position of being interviewed on radio or TV. This would include simple things like learning how to speak without mumbling, to how close to the microphone you should speak, to how to ignore the weird and unnerving surroundings and project your authentic self. It did occur to me that if you were going to produce a video interview for putting up on your web site, then some media training might be money very well spent. You should also look and listen to interviews by other authors, to get a feel for how they do it. And consider it from the point of view of what you'd do and say if it were you being interviewed. Put some thought into the likely questions that will be asked (“What's your book about”), and put some thought into the answer so you don't stumble and look foolish.

Interview dos and don'ts. If you are going to be interviewed, Debbie advised: Re-read your book so it's fresh in your mind Have a copy of your book with you Focus on talking about the book and what makes it different or stand out from the crowd Be self-deprecating. You must avoid sound like you're pushing/selling the book. Make up a list of key points you'd like to make (as memory joggers), in case a question will allow you to offer that information Have some anecdotes ready, to illustrate points you want to make – you want to be interesting Don't tell the whole story and give away the ending when the interviewer asks about your book Never say “You'll have to read the book to find that out” Never ask the interview “Did you read the book?” or even “Did you like it?” - they're very busy people, they're unlikely to have done so.

Book Expo Australia. There's a “Book Expo Australia” event held at Sydney Olympic Park, Homebush (this year, on the 17th/18th October), which is “a dedicated event for the reading public to engage with authors and publishers”, where I believe self-published authors are welcome, too.

All in all, it was a valuable and interesting day, and well worth the time and money in my opinion.

Book Expo Australia 2015 Update

I've blogged about Book Expo Australia 2015 in general, but here are some specific things I learned related to book publicity and marketing, along with an idea I had.

Tim Lea gave a very useful talk on Social media and crowd-funding, and he has been kind enough to share his presentation with me. At first I thought "But I'm not planning to do any crowd-funding", but I'm very glad I went along, because it soon became blindingly clear that almost everything he said about crowd-funding applied equally well to marketing, or creating a "brand" for yourself as an author. See:

Summarising what he said: Crowd-funding is incredibly difficult. The key to doing it successfully is planning: a lot of planning! Allow a minimum of three months before you start your campaign: you'll need that time to plan it and prepare material for it, and even longer if you first need to create a social media presence!

ManageFlitter is a tool he recommended, since it can be very helpful in accurately targeting your market: e.g. if you know an author whose readers are likely to be interested in your book's subject, it can show you who that author's followers are, so you can choose which of them you should follow.

In Facebook there are many groups devoted to fantasy and other genres. So think of the angles/themes in your book, and then look through the groups to find those who might be interested.

Find your key influencers. You may not be able to reach them, but with time and diligence you should be able to work your way up the "hierarchy" of influencers if you have an interesting message. People like emotion, they like to understand motivation, so a blog on why you wrote the book is likely to be of interest to potential readers.

If you're blogging, and you happen to be writing on a topic for which some influential people have opinions, you can try contacting them (gently, e.g. via Twitter as a 1st step), and ask if they'd have a quote or a word of advice they'd be willing to share, which you could quote them on in the article you're writing.

You do need to promote yourself. You need to be helpful, though: curate other people's content; tweet or retweet some of their good stuff; share articles of interest to other people in the area you're working. If you're seen as being helpful to "your tribe" then "your tribe" is likely to reward you for your efforts.

See Tim's presentation for more information. He also shares a very good idea in his blog article about using your web site to "introduce yourself" to people who may then decide to connect with.

My own small idea, when I saw how enthusiastic and engaging the booktubing community was, was simply to include some of them when you're sending out free copies of your book to try to get reviews.