A Brilliant Yet Flawed Book Campaign

At the recent Mega Book Marketing University in Los Angeles, one of the presentations was about the virtual book tour. If you haven't heard about this new technology from Alex Mandossian, it's brilliant and involves several parts.

First, you create an "Ask page" which gathers questions from anyone who wants to ask you a question during a teleseminar. They gave us the template for this page. Each one is created the same and one of the examples they gave is from an attorney in the Phoenix area, Steven Allen. Steve is promoting his new book, You Can't Take It With You and was attending the event in Los Angeles. They told us about his virtual book tour on March 7th.

I did not make the live book tour but in yesterday's mail I received a personal handwritten card from Steve as a follow-up from our personal meeting along with an invitation to see the replay of his teleseminar. I went to the page, looked around and the link for the teleseminar replay was not on the page. I've written a short note to Steve and encouraged him or his webmaster to fix it. Hopefully by the time you look at this example, the right link will be added to the section that is turning from blue to red.

Then I began to look a bit closer at the handwritten card from Steve. It came from Sendoutcards. I checked that site--and it's another fascinating technology company. For a fee, you can program their system to handwrite cards and mail them out to your list. I wondered how a busy attorney like Steve Allen would be able to handwrite such a card and I found the answer.

My point is these types of book campaigns are only excellent if every part of them works. It does not work to send me to a page so I can listen to the replay of a teleseminar and the link isn't on the page. As I've mentioned repeatedly in these entries, the devil is in the details.

Alex Mandossian has created an amazing set of tools. Through the Ask page, the author gathers questions about the book that his listeners want to hear the answers. These questions shape the content of the teleseminar (and the replay). Here's some of the other books which have toured and more information about it.

No matter what you are doing--Internet, writing a book, writing a magazine article or anything else--you have to check and double check these details to make sure everything is working. And if it is not working, then take immediate steps to fix it. Otherwise you will do brilliant yet flawed work.