Ideas solicited for promotion

I’ve been researching today what other self-published authors do to get the word out about their books beyond their own sphere of influence. (i.e., my Facebook and Twitter friends are getting tired of being bombed about the book)

I’ve read several great suggestions and here are a few of the better ones:

  • Sponsor a Pinterest contest. (I hardly use Pinterest, though I confess to having an account.) I wouldn’t know how to go about this without further research, but I did learn that the times of 6-10p are the optimal pinning times. Wow.
  • Create a launch team. I wish I’d thought of that back in December. I’d love to implement the idea of a 30-day period to see what could happen. Basically, you recruit 6-10 people and ask them to help you identify avenues for promotion and to even use their circles of influence – both digital and personal to get the word out about the book.
  • Giveaways. I’ve done this on both librarything.com and goodreads.com. Perhaps I didn’t give away enough copies (5 on each), but the stipulation was to write a review of about 200 words related to the book to enter the giveaway. I haven’t seen any fruit from either giveaway yet.
  • Mail out books to select bloggers and sites. In process.
  • Create an internship. This idea was submitted via Twitter by Allie, and it’s a great one since Virginia Tech has an excellent PR and communications department. I’m going to look more into it.
  • Simply suck it up and find a literary agent. This is a strong option as well since I have other writing projects in queue.

What other ideas do you have to help a self-published author or content creator?