Book Reviews for Sale: Tomoson

Tomoson LogoHere at IU, we do our best to stay up-to-date on sites that are helpful to indies, whether that’s advice on writing, lessons learned on self-publishing, or ways to market and promote books. Keeping our finger on the pulse is difficult, however, just because the digital world changes so rapidly. Since we’re not dealing with brick and mortar stores anymore, businesses can (and do) change their operating procedures at the drop of a hat. We’ve seen it over and over: a site starts out giving free information, but then suddenly a paywall goes up and you have to ante up to get the good stuff. Or a site offers free promotions, but then switches to a paid process. We all know it costs money to keep a business going, so moving to a paid service is not surprising. But like everything else online, the important thing to consider is: are you getting value for your money? Continue reading “Book Reviews for Sale: Tomoson”

Promotions with Tomoson

Some time back, I heard about Tomoson, a site for promoting products, including books. Curious, I checked it out. It’s an interesting idea. It’s essentially a meeting point for people who have a product to promote and bloggers looking for products to review. They describe themselves like this:

Tomoson was created because there needed to be a better way of managing product promotions with bloggers. The process was always so long, manual, and time consuming. Tomoson is the fast and efficient way to communicate with all your promotional bloggers or find new ones to review products.

I decided to run a promotion of my book, Queen’s Gold. I set it up on June 6 of this year and ran it through August 31. I realized after the fact that I really didn’t need to run it for that length of time, but found out once you set up a promotion, you cannot change the timing on it, so that was fine. Continue reading “Promotions with Tomoson”

Have others promote your book – How to get Reviews

Fellow Indies Unlimited Minion Ed McNally had a great post the other day about self-promotion. We all hate it, but it is a necessary evil. I want to shift gears a bit from where Ed led us and examine a method to allow others to promote us—reviews. Reviews are more important than just getting feedback about your book. It’s common knowledge that Amazon figures reviews in their ranking system. So the more reviews you have, the better ranked your book could be.

Please stay with me until the end of the post where I’ll divulge a super million dollar secret for book promotions (I’m not selling anything, just in case this sounded like an infomercial.) Okay, maybe not a million dollars, but it sure helps.

Reviews are one of the best methods to generate buzz about your book, without you being the one shouting from the rooftops. We’ve all spent countless conversations begging our friends and relatives to “post a review, please!” It’s frustrating and many times, a fruitless endeavor. So, how do we go about getting reviews? Continue reading “Have others promote your book – How to get Reviews”