Competition and Cross Promotion

Authors are not our competition . . .and Cross Promotion

In today’s fast pace world of texting, e-mailing, television, movies, and video games for the home computer, home television, and even your cell phone, it is amazing that anybody still reads books.

Thankfully there still is a love of reading and in spite of all the things vying for our attention the potential market of people buying books is growing every day.

The way we read books is helping that because with the growth and expansion of e-readers around the world the way we digest our books is changing.

I love the fact that many of the books I read my Kindle can read them to me with the text to speech function.  This doesn't diminish the time I actually spend reading, it only serves to turn other times like driving or folding clothes times I can also enjoy listening to a good book.

As a new Indie Author I am always on the lookout for cheap and inexpensive ways to help market my books.  I know of two authors I plan to approach before publishing my next novel with the idea of cross promoting our books together.  At the end of my book I will include the first chapter of the next book in the series along with the first chapter of another author who writes similar stuff to what I write.  With each we can provide links to the other books.

That coupled with social media exchanges between the two authors on their blogs, tweeting about each other’s books; we can push like-minded readers into reading both our stuff and following both of us.  As I can only write one to two full length novels a year and as of yet been able to get that many edited and published within the same time period it will not take a reader long to read everything I have written.  So they will be reading other peoples stuff in between my books.  By Cross Promoting books with like authors we help each other get the word out about our books and with each sale of a book it is one more chance to help each other along our road to being successful best-selling authors.

Collaboration is an inexpensive way to bridge the gap between us, do it yourself authors, and the Big Publishing Houses which provide full services and prepaid royalties to their authors.  I personally have no interest in selling the rights to my work to a large company for a fraction of the royalties I can make publishing the book myself.  As the skill sets of the Indie Writers increases and we join together to help each other we are gaining ground on the Goliath s of the publishing industry.

Posted in: competition cross promotion texting e-mailing television movies video games reading collaboration