The problem with today’s Facebook fan pages
So you’re an author with a Facebook fan page. You’ve got book trailers, polls, quizzes, photo and writing contests running on your page. You’ve even got a few hundred “Facebook Likes” for your page. And yet your book sales are not going up. You then compare yourself to popular authors with tens of thousands of Fans on their Facebook fan pages. And you wonder what they are doing that you’re not doing.
Here’s what’s happening.
If you are a popular mainstream author, the people becoming fans of your page are people who already read your books or have heard enough about you that they are likely to soon become readers.
If you are not yet a literary superstar, then the people who are “Liking” your page are doing so because of some other inducement that you may be providing (“get entered into a prize drawing if you Like my page”). They are unlikely to think about you or notice your book even if they “Like” your Facebook fan page. And they are unlikely to return to your Facebook page or tell their friends about it.
Thus, while a Facebook fan page (and associated bells and whistles such as the BookBuzzr Facebook Fan Page Widget) is a necessary condition for entry into the book marketing game, it is not sufficient.
So how do you actually find some readers for your book?
John Locke’s Principle of Transfer of Loyalty
A few months ago, best-selling author – John Locke – wrote a book – “How I Sold a Million Books”. In this book John comes up with the concept of “Transfer of Loyalty”. The idea is simple and fairly well-known. It is best illustrated by an example.
Let us say that you’ve written a vampire romance book and your target audience is the set of people who liked the Twilight movie series. You write a blog post on the Twilight movie series and promote the blog post on Twitter to Twilight movie fans. Some of these folks will read your blog post and get exposed to your book. Some of your blog post readers may now “transfer their loyalty” to give your book a try.
While this is a fantastic, proven concept, we at BookBuzzr, believe that the principle can be extended to find readers on Facebook.
Characteristics of Facebook users
Some of the characteristics of Facebook users are:
1. They don’t like reading lengthy blog posts while on Facebook.
2. They like playing trivia games
3. They like sharing fun stuff with their friends
4. They are usually thinking WIIFM (What’s in it for me?)
Announcing QuizBuzzr – a revolution in book marketing on Facebook
Melding John Locke’s loyalty transfer principle with our insight about Facebook users, we’ve come up with QuizBuzzr.
QuizBuzzr is a quiz that you, the author, create. There are ten questions in each quiz. The quiz would ideally appeal to your target audience. For example, if you think that fans of the Oprah Winfrey show would enjoy your book, you would create a quiz featuring 10 questions about Oprah Winfrey.
QuizBuzzr also features “Lifelines”. Clicking on these will offer you clues to the correct answer with one twist – some of them require you to share the game with your Facebook friends.
QuizBuzzr is also made interesting by the fact that at each point during the game, you can “Walk Away” from the game thereby saving the points earned till that point or risk it all by trying to answer the next question.
And we’ve built in several ‘viral hooks’ which cause users to share information about the specific quiz and about your book with their Facebook friends.
And winning points in the game allows users to use those points on Freado.com where they can win real prizes including Kindles and best-selling books.
Why is this useful for you?
To summarize, this technology is particularly useful because:
1. You can create several quizzes that are likely to appeal to your readers.
2. It shows up your book at strategic points in the game alongside the questions.
3. As described earlier, it appeals to the average Facebook user.
4. Because of the in-built viral hooks at various points in the game, your book will be surely be marketed.
How can you use QuizBuzzr to market your book on Facebook?
QuizBuzzr will soon be released as a test beta product. It comes bundled with a BookBuzzr Author Pro subscription. To use it to market your book, simply sign-up for a BookBuzzr Author Pro account.
