From Zero...
A blog about the process of building up a fan base/network from the ground up with no experience.
What We're Working With
The word of mouth is for a book called "Paranormal America". Paranormal America is a collection of paranormal experiences from all around the country. It's available on eBook for Kindle and Paperback.
My wife has been fascinated with the paranormal since she was in her mid-teens and had an experience of her own. One day, she had the idea to collect stories from strangers and put together a book which would include her own experience.
Originally, she was only targeting people in our local area, but soon we had the idea to expand and get stories from all over the United States. After deciding to collect one story from each state, my wife set out on the daunting task of placing hundreds of Craigslist ads in various cities all over the country asking people to submit their stories.
The response was good and steady. Each day she would receive anywhere from 20 to 30 submissions.
The stories range from seeing ghosts or having them move and throw things around their homes to potential alien abductions. Some people have seen creatures they can't explain or witnessed dark figures with ominous intentions. Other have been possessed or even had certain inanimate objects appear to take on a presence; while others still have connected with children from their past lives. There are truly no exceptions to the strange and unexplained phenomena these people have seen in their lives.
After several weeks of submissions and reading hundreds of stories, we selected the most interesting story from each of the fifty states.
What We're Trying To Do
We're trying to spread the word for this book and hopefully sell enough copies that each of the 50 authors selected will receive a nice paycheck for their efforts. We realize that we'll need to sell a lot of copies for them to do anything beyond a trip to McDonald's!
We'll be trying out various ideas and methods and testing the results as we go along. We will report them here with brutal honesty; for your sake and our own.
I'm coming at this with no experience whatsoever in marketing or sales but with an open mind and a lot of positive intentions and big goals. And I don't plan to quit trying until I figure out what works!
Thanks for reading, hopefully you'll learn something from our mistakes!
-Jason
P.S.
Your tips and advice are always welcome! :)
