Before putting our new book out in print, we wanted to get feedback and a bigger audience. We took a chance on a "public and peer review" to improve the quality of our book and get word of mouth going at the same time. Did it work?
Authors and business people often do crazy things to get the word out about their new book or product. The best way to do something can sometimes be right in front of them. Take, for example, the promotion of a book. It is one of the hardest things to figure out. In the United States, at least 50,000 authors are published every year. Electronic books are written by tens of thousands of authors. Most of them don't stand out. Few authors reach any of their goals to get more people to read their books.
Samples are a way to get the word out about your book and make sure it's perfect before it hits the shelves. Focus groups, pollsters, and other marketing experts are used by big companies to build their brand names. This is like putting seeds in the ground to make a garden or orchard grow. If you plant more seeds, you have a better chance of getting vegetables or apple trees. As an author, you can get people interested in your book by giving away free copies or "seeding." During the publishing process, we came up with a clever way to draw in readers and improve our book at the same time.
We've been publishing books for a long time, so we tried out something that every author secretly fears: a peer review. But we did it in a different way. We didn't want to wait until the book came out to read the reviews, so we put it on our website and took all criticism at that time. Our book is called "Investing in the Great Uranium Bull Market: A Practical Investor's Guide to Uranium Stocks." This was a "Public and Peer Review" of the book.
Before putting up the first eight chapters of this book's electronic version, we told subscribers a few days in advance that the book would be available for Open Review on June 18 at 11:59 p.m. In the email telling you about the pre-publication of the book, we reminded you to "tell a friend."
By the time this book was ready to be published electronically, the number of people who had signed up for it had gone up by nearly 10%. We got more new subscribers in less than a week than we had in the previous few months. For the week, our Alexa ranking had also moved ahead of almost 1 million other websites. The one-week draw from the email alert had also made the average for the last three months 267 percent higher!
We got more readers because of this chance to advertise. It could now give us a wider range of opinions, which could help us make the book better. There will hopefully be those annoying copy editors who can help point out mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Experts from the industries we have written about have also taken tests like this one in the past. This gives our research more depth and, in the end, makes a better product for our readers.
After we talk about how well our public and peer review went, stay tuned for our next publicity surprise. The key is to plan a series of teasers that will keep people coming back to your website and smartly convince them that they have to read your book.
