Something I do that’s different that I don’t see a lot of other authors do is crowd sourcing. “How do you crowd source books?” one might ask.
I actually do it fairly regularly. I give my readers voices in what blogs they want to see and what I’ll write about if I have multiple ideas, usually taking the most votes for what I write on that day. I also give a little bit of say in my fiction.
When I was finishing up For Steam And Country, I actually had several names I liked for the book. The original title was simply The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle, which I later determined to be better as a series title. I also used Zaira’s Airship, but I didn’t want to deail with people having to try to spell “Zaira” and “Del Arroz” at the same time Amazon. Trust me, no one would have ever found my book!
So I had a few good titles, For Steam And Country in my opinion was the strongest of that, but really at the end of the day a title, it’s most important what the readers like. So I put up a poll. I threw down a few other names I thought of, and it was actually a pretty tight vote, but For Steam And Country won out, and now you have that as the title of the book!
Today, I’m doing it for my space opera. I’ve got a character and I was interested in what name sounded best for an alient supporting character female. It’s a little thing, but my readers actually have a small say in what happens in my book.
Now does this do much? I don’t know. People seem to like it. Every time I run one of these I get more people voting than the last. Which is engagement on social media, which means at the very least, people are paying attention and remember. That’s not a bad thing. At the most, someone got to help shape my book and that means they’re going to be more passionate about the final product.
It lets me interact with folk as well, which is fun. And fun is what counts.
There’s all these social media marketing books out there, and i’m sure most of them would be telling me I’m doing it wrong, but it keeps seeming to work. Try it, let me know what you think of the engagement!
interesting you bring this topic up. Can I refer you to Spain where this is a popular option? The popular platform is called Verkami.
There’s an independent publisher called Capitalbooks which uses crowd sourcing to publishbools. Finally a digital only cultural website nuvol.com is now out in paper and it’s based on a mix of subscription and crowd sourcing. It also publishes ebooks and this is a subscription service that looks like a bit of crowdfunding.
I suspect that given the Editorial Planet’s quasi monopoly a lot of authors choose this route as an alternative.