A Blog About eBooks, Now Advertising an eBook About eBooks

Since around October, I’ve been talking a lot about the future of books and the future of eBooks.

I’ve made a guide about how writers should blog in a way that gets people to read your stuff.

I’ve also talked about how building a platform and an audience is crucial to getting anyone to actually buy your eBook in the first place.

It’s time to put my hypothesis to the test.

Yesterday, I self-published my first short story collection, “Technology & Culture Stink!”

(Here’s one of the short stories, if you want a preview)

There are 17 stories in total. They’re all satirical.

The common topics are:

• eBooks
• social media
• iPhones
• celebrity worship
• culture

Here’s where content marketing comes into play

It would be really, really great if you decided to pay $2.99 for my short story collection. Really, it would. I mean, that’s only 17 cents a story, right?

Just look at the beautiful cover:

Here’s the link again, if you’re now intrigued!

But I’m not counting on it.

Why would you buy an eBook by an author who hasn’t been vetted by a 3rd-party source?

The only way to show potential readers that a self-published short story collection is worth anything is through content marketing.

Over the coming months, I will be branching out of my techno-eBook topics. I’ll keep writing about those, but I’m also going to be writing about the topics listed above.

The idea is to intrigue readers enough that they take a closer look at the short story collection.

Essentially, I’m putting the ideas in my guide to action and everyone who has read this blog before will be in on it, woohoo!

My hypothesis is simple:

Content marketing for authors is just marketing your ideas by intriguing potential readers with more ideas. 

If I write an essay railing against the effects of iPhones on memory, then say how one of my short stories is about iPhones and it’s in my new short story collection… will people read it?

Let’s find out.

The breakdown

1. I already know blog posts can intrigue readers into downloading things for free, which I’ve discovered when offering my free guide about blogging at the bottom of blog posts about blogging.

2. My hypothesis is that you can get people interested in your work by writing essays about the topics in the work.

3. Excerpts from books may be effective, but my suspicion is that they have to be placed in CONTEXT with a topic that’s more likely to draw visitors.