Great Example of Author 2.0 Marketing and Connection…And What You Can Do Right Now!

It is a new world of book marketing out there, and it is brilliant to see how authors are embracing it!

Here is a little story of what happened to me this week that I thought I would share, so you can learn from it and also tips on what you can do to replicate this kind of connection success.

Last week I went to a fantastic business bookstore in Brisbane called McGills. I love to browse there in my lunch times at the day job. It gives me a break and I like to see what latest books are out.

A new book caught my eye, The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media but it was $42.50 and there is no way I will spend that much on a book, unless it is “must have”. (I generally order books from the US from Amazon.com as it is cheaper, even with shipping.)

Now I have my International Kindle, I searched whilst still in the shop and found it was available in Kindle format. So I bought it right then and within minutes it was on my Kindle. I had lunch reading it in the Brisbane sunshine (review to come in a separate post).

Since I enjoy sharing these things, I went onto Twitter on my iPhone (Tweetie app) and tweeted:

“Just found a book I wanted in McGills bookshop. Found it $31 cheaper on my Kindle. Aussie retailers won't be able to match these prices.”

[A follower of mine @angee asked what I bought.]

“@angee Just bought Digital Handshake Paul Chaney. Re social media business. I'm reading around this topic currently!”

Within about 30 mins I got this tweet:

From @pchaney: “@thecreativepenn – Joanna, thank you for purchasing my book. Let me know what you think; so far, so good in terms of feedback.”

“@pchaney. very impressive! Connecting as per your book. Love it. Will be deserving of a blog post. I'll let you know thoughts. Thanks.”

From @pchaney: “@thecreativepenn – I watch mentions of my book & my name very closely ; will lk forward to see what you have to say. And thanks again.”

Paul further showed his interest by friending me on Facebook with a personal message, which I really appreciated.

How can you learn from this and action lessons learned now?

• If you are a US author/publisher, put your books and backlist onto the Kindle. Now it is international, there will soon be hundreds of thousands, if not millions new buyers. You can publish at dtp.amazon.com. If you are not in the US, keep an eye out for when Amazon opens up to international publishers. I had an email from them saying it was in progress. I would not have bought this book in print.

• Set up a Twitter Alert for your name, your book name or your company name (or all of them), plus any keywords you might be interested in. You'll get an email with where these are mentioned on Twitter.

• Set up a Google Alert for the same topics and you'll get another email.

• If someone mentions these topics, connect in some way. It might be an email response, or a tweet or a message on Facebook. Acknowledge the person and also say something personal. Paul used my name in the tweet above which showed it was not just some automated message.

• From the reader perspective, if you are enjoying a book, tweet/blog/Facebook about it and you might be surprised at the response you get from the author!

This is a perfect example of the kind of business model people are starting to move to. It revolves around trust, networks and connections rather than advertising. Authors have to be business people in order to sell books, so I will be blogging more about this in the next few weeks.

I will also be reviewing the following excellent books that I have been recently reading on a similar theme: Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk, Trust Agents from Chris Brogan & Julian Smith, Socialnomics by Eric Qualman and of course The Digital Handshake by Paul Chaney.

In the course of reading these books and tweeting about them I have also had brief tweet conversations with @chrisbrogan and @equalman so these guys are living what they are preaching. More to come on these social media lessons!