An Intro to Cold Coffee Café

Charlie RayGuest post
by Charlie Ray

As hard as it is to write a book, it’s even harder to market it once it’s written. Advertising your book is time consuming, and can be expensive. There are, however, a number of ways to promote your work without having to spend too much time or money.

In fact, I recently discovered a site that allows you to promote your work widely, and, while there are promotional packages for a fee, you can also promote your work for free. Cold Coffee Café, Cold Coffee Press Site, allows you to set up a blog site where you can put links to purchase your books, book trailers, excerpts of works in progress, or just about anything else you’d like. Go here to sign up. Getting up and running is easy, and in the end you’ll have a personal page on the Cold Coffee Café site as well as links to other authors and author services.

Here’s what my page looks like: http://coldcoffeecafe.com/profile/CharlesRay. In addition to photos of the covers of all my published works – with buy links and summaries – which is prominently featured, there are spaces for video trailers as well as Facebook-like postings and articles. Once you’re up and running, your books are also featured on the main site, and there are share buttons which allow you to cross-promote your work on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, as well as via email to your mailing lists. If you have another blog, you can set up an RSS feed so that your posts on that blog will also show up on your Cold Coffee Café site. If you have problems setting up your page, the site owner is pretty good about reaching out with advice and assistance, unlike other blog sites where you’re on your own.

As with any promotion, there are no guarantees. But, if you’re looking to spread the word about your writing, this is a low-stress way to do it. I signed on early, when there were less than a dozen people active on the site. In the past few weeks, more and more people have been learning of it, and the number of authors has grown to over 200. With that many authors sharing across their networks, your opportunity to become known to readers is increased geometrically. It’s still too early to know if the hour a week it takes me to keep my page updated will be worth it. I’ve gotten a couple of new reviews and probably double digit new sales on a couple of my titles.

The competitions on the site have also been interesting; mainly because they focus on two areas that are important to marketing that authors often overlook – covers and trailers. I’ve entered both, unfortunately not winning yet, but just getting a look at the winners has been useful to me in my own subsequent efforts. It’s easy to get yourself spread thin in the effort to market your work, so it helps if you have a marketing plan. If your plan has heavy emphasis on social media platforms, along with the mega-sites like Facebook and Tumblr, small sites like this can be useful for works in specific genres, such as fantasy or sci-fi.

Cold Coffee Café is not going to get you on the bestseller list, nor will it make you rich. But, it is a chance to spread word about your writing to a broader audience, and get to know fellow writers – share ideas, learn new techniques, and maybe in the process sell a few more books. Drop in and sit a spell. The coffee’s cold, but the welcome is warm.


 

Charles Ray is a former government official who is now a fulltime freelance writer. He is the author of the Buffalo Soldier historical fiction series, and the Al Pennyback mystery series. Learn more about Charles at his Amazon author page. His blogs can be read at: http://charlesaray.blogspot.com and http://charlieray45.wordpress.com

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14 thoughts on “An Intro to Cold Coffee Café”

    1. Sometimes cold coffee let’s you know the conversation has been good or the writing, productive! It tastes so great when relished like that

  1. Thank you Charlie. The site is very clean and easy on the eyes. It is generous of you to share and it looks like it could be another foot, ah heck ,3 feet forward.

    Nice hat.

  2. I am appallingly bad with tech stuff. All I could find were paid for packages. If I sign in -so to speak – can I see how to do a free blog thing?

    I do not think tech speak and get lost on websites. Sorry I am definitely allergic to computers!

  3. Just checked out the Amazon preview of your book, The Last Gunfighters. I don’t usually read Westerns (even those that take place in 1914), but I sure enjoyed what I read.

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