I’ve been holding off on releasing another newsletter until I can point people to the TUYO World Companion, though I’ll certainly have to send out an announcement about the upcoming sales. That may be right before the Tuyo series sale. Ideally the TWC will go live at the same time that the promotion is running.
Meanwhile, I’ve been setting up a different promotion.
I’ve been dragging my feet a bit about doing another Black Dog promotion for various reasons — among other things, I’ll do more serious promotion when Silver Circle releases — but I haven’t run a promotion for this series since March and I have to say, I can sure tell. I’ve set one up for early September, and again, I’ll be trying a BookBub ad at the same time.
You see how I’m drawing on the same basic design as for the Tuyo series: the first book prominent and the others at the bottom, the announcement itself white on red. Here’s a nifty tool that’s useful for putting ads together: a 3D cover image generator. You can use your ebook cover to generate either Kindle covers or 3D paper covers. It’s fast, easy, and free, which is pretty nice of whomever made it. I made a donation because I didn’t have any 3D cover images for this series, so I really appreciate this tool.
Anyway, what I expect is some sales and then a decent bounce in KU. But I’m not really going to take promotion seriously until I have Silver Circle ready to go. Then we’ll see what I can do. That’s mostly for next year. Along with so much else, because I have various plans for how to handle this series. It underperforms right now. If it did even half as well as the Tuyo series … that may be a lot to ask. A third as well, say. I think that’s my goal for next year: get it to perform a third as well as the Tuyo series.
The authors I’m targeting for this series are totally different (almost totally) from the authors I targeted for the Tuyo series. It’s tricky because for this series, I want UF authors who aren’t really emphasizing romance all that much, ideally UF aimed at somewhat younger readers. Not Ilona Andrews; her books are all romances. Not Patricia Briggs; she has too many followers.
So far I’m targeting Anne Bishop, Leigh Bardugo, Sarah Maass, Elizabeth Hunter, VE Schwab, Maggie Stiefvater — some of these are a bit of a stretch. I’m also targeting a fair number of authors I’ve never read anything by and sometimes authors I’ve never heard of. Eva Chase, Joel Shepherd, KM Shea, KF Breen, quite a few others. These are authors whose books turn up on the product pages for the Mercy Thompson series and for Stiefvater’s Shiver, among others. I can see that this is a series where running the author tests as David Gaughran recommends would probably be useful. Not right now, I don’t want to take time for this, but later this year or next year.
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I very much enjoy K.M. Shea’s fairytale retellings, and her light high-fantasy, and her isekai (under the name A.M. Sohma), but I think you might be aiming straight at the readers of her Magiford series with “Black Dog”… and Magiford is her only series so far that doesn’t do a single thing for me!
I haven’t read “Black Dog” because, well, it strikes me as being very much like Magiford. But if it’s going to be free sometime as the poster says, I’ll give it a shot – after all, I could be completely wrong and then I’d have a new series!
For urban fantasy with not too much romance, you could consider adding Sarah Rees Brennan, since that describes her Demon’s Lexicon series.
I like the look of this ad. The background doesn’t have the recognizable focus of the snow tiger, so you’re free to organise the books anywhere you want. The red banners don’t clash badly with the tone of the overal colour, and they are eye-catching.
I like the way you did it, with the novella/short story collections visually smaller and with the same cover image, clearly different from the long novels but also clearly alternating with them.
Hanneke, thank you, and I managed to move the tiger over in a way that I think works better.
Sarah Rees Brennan is a GREAT suggestion, thank you, Rowan.
Heather, the Black Dog sale will start Sept 1, so that will indeed be a good time to pick up the first book. Also, good to hear that KM Shea is probably a good choice to target. Maybe I should try something of hers …
I like K.M. Shea’s Magiford series. She writes in threes, sets of 3 books about the same protagonist, in contemporary paranormal romance/adventures; the next trilogy has different protagonists but set in the same world, mostly the same city of Magiford.
One set of 3 is about werewolves, another about fae, a third about wizards and vampires, but they all live around the same town (where there are humans too) and interact with each other there, though they each have their own domains.
The people from earlier trilogies reappear as supporting characters in later trilogies, so you can read them in random order but then you’d know the romance from the earlier trilogy will work out – not much of a spoiler, after reading a few of her books you do get the sense that it will.
In the latest trilogy you can see that the Magiford world is working towards dealing with a more overarching villainous plot that is triggering each trilogy’s individual troubles; but they still work well as separate three-book arcs.
I find them fairly light and easy to read, relatively low stress and ditto on the horrifying aspects. Though there are a lot of monsters, chases and fights I find them overal less stressful to read than Copper Mountain was. Some underlying sense of optimism, maybe?
WR Gingell might also be worth putting into the algorithm.
Black Dog and Shea’s Magiford set of linked series are really, really different from one another, for what it’s worth.
Maybe Margaret Rogerson, Annette Marie, Victoria Goddard, Audrey Faye, Kelley Armstrong?
(I also wouldn’t consider the Magiford series to be similar to the Black Dog series.)
Kathryn and MadScientist are right, I didn’t mean to imply the Black Dog and Magiford series are similar.
For one, Black Dog series doesn’t fit neatly into the paranormal romance category, even though there are some relationships developing; and it’s much higher tension, less light.
But I did like both, at least up to Copper Mountain – that one was on the edge of too much horror, for me. So there might be other readers who would like both.
Thanks for your suggestions, everyone! I’m definitely adding these authors to the targeting!
UF/Paranormal/Contemporary all blend together, especially if you have vampires, werewolves, or both. It would be nice if the marketing labels didn’t shove those categories together so hard when a different kind of categorization would probably be more useful. Or if everyone agreed that if the story follows romance beats, it’s paranormal; but if it doesn’t, it’s not.