The quarterly Romance Bookworms free blasts are organized by author collective effort!
Since 2014, romance author Zoe York has organized a “stuff your e-reader” free book blast. All self-published romance authors are welcome to participate. If you know an author who has participated in the past(see note below), ask them for an invitation to the Facebook planning group! Any author who is currently in the group can extend a direct invitation to another author, and at that point, should explain how the event is organized and what the general principle are (but those are also listed below).
NOTE: Zoe is not the best person to extend this invite, because she’s also a group admin, and her invites skirt you past the welcome questions, which are important to answer! So…anyone else other than Zoe.
It’s also important that you get a little primer on how the promos work (this is part of our collaborative approach), and if Zoe gave that primer to every author who wanted to participate, she’d never get any writing done. The other authors who participate should be happy to carry a little bit of this work, don’t hesitate to message any acquaintance involved.
It’s good networking practice to craft a polite message to a fellow author asking them about promo. Here’s a standard message you can copy and paste: Hi [Their name]! I see that you have a book in the free book blast that Zoe York organizes. I understand from the romancebookworms.com website that any participating author can extend an invite to the organizing group to a new author (that’s me!). I copied this message from the website, in fact. Could I ask you to invite me, please?
Q: Why can’t you share the planning group link here?
A: Because Facebook is a dink. If we make the group public, they recommend it to random people, which makes administering the group (a volunteer, part-time effort) prohibitive.
Q: Is this a paid promotional opportunity?
A: Nope. There are no fees to participate, and no application, either. All authors in the group are welcome to directly grow the co-operative effort by inviting their colleagues.
How Does This Work: The General Rules!
For one day only, authors share a collective landing page (this website) that has lists of currently free books.
Every author must send an email newsletter. There are no requirements for email list size.
Social media sharing is also encouraged, both by authors and readers.
This is a communal effort, with graphics and text explaining the event being crowd sourced. The more you put into it, the more you will get out of it.
It is your responsibility to make sure the book you submit for an event is actually free. Set your free days before you fill out the form, and if you’re wide, price match at the time that you fill it out. Setting a book free cannot be left to the last minute. In order to join the group, you must already know how to make a book free. If you haven’t yet figured that part of publishing out, please wait until you have more experience before joining. This group is not for debut authors with only one book. There is little to no marketing value in making a book free unless it is part of a metadata-connected series.
This is a one-woman show. Zoe organizes it the way she has observed it to work best (no covers, simple lists, only free books and only retailer links). Any question you may have about another way to run it has already been asked, and now Zoe has a brain injury, so probably best not to ask them again of her. Reach out to the person who invites you to the group, or another friend in the group, and ask them instead.
Each quarter’s event has its own sign-up form, and there is never any requirement that anyone participate. Feel free to join and lurk and watch.
This promo is not worth stressing over, or ditching other promo plans for. There will be another one next quarter. Use this to augment your existing marketing strategy when appropriate.
The FB group is literally only for organizing the event. No promo allowed, no marketing questions allowed, no random other posts allowed. There are other groups for that.
Can’t think of a tenth rule, but thank you for reading all the way to the bottom.