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Headtalker

A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
We're setting up a Headtalker campaign to get the word out about Faerie Rising, and we would like to make a post about it here on Scribes, but we're not sure which forum would be appropriate. Basically, Headtalker is a site that generates web flash mobs by asking people to donate a single post on their individual feeds, be they Twitter, Facebook, ect., on a specific date and time. It's pretty cool.
 

A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
I've noticed that we don't have a cross-promotion forum, where we as authors can help to signal boost each other's books through HeadTalker campaigns and social media takeovers and other fun and valuable promotional events. What do we think about creating a space where we can discuss this growing aspect of marketing our works?
 
I've noticed that we don't have a cross-promotion forum, where we as authors can help to signal boost each other's books through HeadTalker campaigns and social media takeovers and other fun and valuable promotional events. What do we think about creating a space where we can discuss this growing aspect of marketing our works?

Though I don't currently have something ready to cross-promote, I'm in for the idea of having a space for discussing cross-promotion ideas, and participating with the understanding that I'd receive the benefits of cross-promotion later, when I am ready. A forum about writing fantasy seems like the kind of place where cross-promotion would be of interest to more than a handful of members.
 

Black Dragon

Staff
Administrator
We're open to new ideas. Just explain what Headtalker and cross-promotion is all about for authors. I seem to be out of the loop on this.
 

Curatia

Scribe
A. E. asked me to take this one as I do most of the cross-promotion for our team. At its core, cross-promotion is the idea that one indie author is alone and screaming into the void about their story. Some people will hear the scream, but one voice is pretty small against the void. But when authors boost authors, suddenly there is a legion of voices screaming for your story. It is the notion that we are much stronger together. I promote not only my book, but the books of many other indies as well - and they reciprocate. We all reach a much larger audience than our individual efforts would reach.

How does this work practically? That part is always evolving. There have been authors boosting authors groups on Twitter and Facebook for some time. You join a group and whenever you post or tweet, the members of your group share or retweet for you, and you do the same for them. This has created quite a bit more attention for individual authors who are just starting to be noticed.

Flash forward a few years, and the success of Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites has created an amazing new venue for authors to help other authors. Crowdspeaking sites - of which Thunderclap and HeadTalker are the most popular, allow you to pool the combined social media contacts of everyone who supports your campaign in order to create a social media flash mob of sorts at a specified time and date. Each site has slightly different rules and a different culture, but they have some similarities.

For both, you create a free campaign, basically a message that you want help getting to readers at a particular time and date. I'll use our own example for this one. Our first novel is coming out April 1st. Early in March, we started a free crowdspeaking campaign (we used HeadTalker). We created the message we want to go out to as many people as we can reach on April 1st. Then we set a minimum supporter level. Since this is our first novel, and we weren't sure how many people would be willing to help, we set it at 25. What that means is that we needed to find 25 people to donate a post (or tweet) from their social media accounts to spread our message on April 1st. As long as we reached our minimum supporter level, on April 1st, at 10am, our message goes out to every contact on all of those supporters' social media feeds. If a campaign doesn't reach the minimum supporter level, then the message doesn't go out. We then went to our groups, and our personal contacts, and asked them to donate one post by clicking on a link to our campaign and clicking support. That click lets them authorize the crowdspeaking platform to post one single post by us on their feed at the end of the campaign. That's it. It doesn't cost our supporters anything, but they are able to help massively boost our signal on release day (how massively? We currently have 28 supporters 2 days in to the campaign, and as of tonight the release day post will go to more than 920K people.)

That is the beauty of this kind of cross-promotion. We don't know 920K people. We don't even really know 3K people, but other people are willing to help us get the word out about our project and we do the same for them. That is the essence of authors boosting authors, what is now being jargoned as cross-promotion.

I've put the link to the two most popular crowdspeaking sites below. Thunderclap (because it requires a minimum of 100 supporters per campaign) is great for established authors with great networking. HeadTalker campaigns (with a minimum of 25 supporters) is great for new authors.

Cross-promotion is something that is always evolving as indies come up with new ways to help each other. I've focused on crowdspeaking here, but there are many other tricks in the growing indie arsenal, from old standbys like guest blogging and author interviews to Facebook Event Takeovers.

We were just thinking that it might be nice to have a place dedicated here to coming up with ideas and spreading the word about what has worked and what has not for all of us. This site has such a wide range of talent and varying levels of success in this business, we were thinking that a forum about how we can help each other might be of interest.

HeadTalker - Free Crowdspeaking
Thunderclap
 

Black Dragon

Staff
Administrator
Curatia,

Thank you for the detailed explanation.

If there is enough interest, we could create a new area devoted to cross-promotion and crowdfunding. If you know anyone who is interested, have them comment on this thread.
 
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