John Locke has sold a million copies of his various books. He has also written a very useful guide titled “How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months” that describes his methods.
One of the key principles in the book is the idea of “transfer of loyalty”. While this is a well-known and much used principle in marketing, John has used it to great effect in creating effective blog posts that promote his books. Hence, I’ve referred to it as the John Locke principle.
So what is this principle?
Take a topic that will be of interest to your audience and somehow tie your own content to that topic so as to get the audience to transfer its loyalty to your content. For example, let’s say that you’ve written a book that will appeal to Harry Potter fans. You write a blog post about the latest Harry Potter movie. Then you push your blog post on Twitter to people who are looking for anything related to Harry Potter. They land up on your blog post, realize that you’ve got a book that has something for the Harry Potter aficionado and voila, you’ve got a potential customer!
The method is really simple and really effective.
Many writers were already using this principle in their blog posts prior to the release of John’s manual. Now with the release of the book, the number of writers creating blogs that are intended to get readers to transfer their loyalty is bound to explode.
At BookBuzzr, we believe that this method can be used to market books by creating word games and quiz games that help get new readers. In fact, we developed our Hangman game technology some months ago keeping this principle in mind (although at that time it did not have a name or a famous author endorsing the system!) A word game that allows for transfer of loyalty has novelty value. Done right, it may work even better than a blog post. Here’s why:
1. It can be consumed faster than a blog post.
2. It can be more fun and interactive than a blog post.
3. In most cases, it’s faster to create than a blog post.
Working Example:
BookBuzzr Author Pro subscriber – Eric Hamilton Wilson – has written a book that revolves around the death of Princess Diana. He describes his book ‘Love & Death In Paris ’97’ as under:
“This suspenseful novel contains themes of love and loss, peace and forgiveness. It follows the adventures of Daniel Plain, a young man from Seattle who moves in Paris in the fateful year of 1997. Daniel’s life becomes intertwined with events linked to Diana, Princess of Wales, and he finds himself in great danger as he seeks to unravel the mysteries surrounding the tragic loss of the people’s princess.”
To promote his book, Eric Hamilton has created a Hangman trivia game that challenges the reader to make up the words. Try the game below and see if the concept works for you.
Now all Eric Hamilton has to do is to market this game to people who are interested in Princess Diana (and I think there are about a billion such people in the world!) One way for him to market this game is to send a tweet to all people on Twitter who are interested in Princess Diana or have included the Hastag #princessdiana in their tweets.
We’re also working on a very effective quiz game technology that will help BookBuzzr authors implement this principle. Stay tuned.
