New Media and New Marketing VIII

I'm all about marketing strategy right now, hence the existence of this blog, but so far I can't see how anybody breaks through to the public consciousness. One of the strategies that a number of "experts" suggest is getting on bulletin boards. So I joined the Christian boards that I could find, and I wanna tell you, they are dead as a doornail. Many won't allow links to be posted, many won't allow promotion of any kind. The ones that do, I have found, get no traffic anyway. Many seem to exist to minister to lonely or troubled people somewhere out there in the cyber world, as if that were really possible on the Internet.

One board I've found that does seem to have some muscle is KindleBoards, which I believe is Amazon-sponsored and seeks to serve Kindle users overall. This bulletin board gets a lot of traffic, and gives writers and readers with similar tastes an opportunity to interact.

Unfortunately, Christian writing is trod underfoot there. There are only about eight authors listed under the "religious" genre, out of who knows how many untold thousands of authors with e-books at the Kindle Store. The link for "The Job" has received a grand total of one comment in its four-month existence. Since the author of a thread can post and therefore bump the thread only once a week, this means that "The Job" thread spends most of its time buried in the listings where nobody can find it.

So I've conspired with some of the other writers of spiritual works there to maintain the thread Writing for the Spirit, dedicated to discussing Christian writing. As long as a few of us post once a day or so, the thread should stay near the top of the list and be seen by visitors to the bulletin board. We may even have an intelligent conversation. I started it up this weekend, and so far it's been pretty busy, but we'll see how dedicated the writers are there to keep in vital.

BTW, somebody bought "Wars of the Aoten" off of Smashwords. Though this blog is dedicated to "The Job," obviously, I do have two other books for sale. Here are links to Smashwords, if you're interested. They're also available on Amazon and B&N, but my royalties are higher from Smashwords, and they have all the different e-book formats.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/26915

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/31861