Greg Hamerton | fantasy author

Effective book promotion and online marketing can make a big difference to building the brand of any new fantasy author. As part of my own efforts to publicise my fantasy novels, I’ve been studying graphic design and online marketing with the folks over at Sessions College for Professional Design. Highly recommended! Their courses don’t come cheap, but the content is detailed, relevant and very useful. This website was designed using principles covered in the course, and I’m knee deep in the Photoshop and InDesign modules now. Although studying graphic design takes a significant chunk of time out of writing new fantasy novels, it allows me to add a creative touch to my work which helps to make my books stand out from the crowd.

So this week I’ve been busy with banner adverts to go out on the Google network. In the past, people used to click on those flashing colourful boxes. Everything was interesting. Nowadays banners have become a low-impact kind of advertising, because people recognise the look of a banner advert and automatically ignore it, unless it’s really clever, compelling and eye-catching.

This is why it only makes sense to pay for banner ads when someone clicks through (Pay-per-Click). Then it doesn’t really bother me how many people have ignored the advert before I get my first click … what matters is how many ‘clickers’ go on to buy my books. So the words and images used in the advert must tie in very closely with what I’m trying to promote, or I’ll be paying for people who get to see my books and go ‘No, this isn’t my kind of thing.’ Maybe they like fairy-fantasies, or scary-fantasies … or hairy-fantasies. So I’ve done my best to focus on what the Lifesong offers and what kind of readers would like it.

First up is a series introduction, to appeal to as many people as possible. When I started the Tale of the Lifesong fantasy series I was aiming to seduce readers from beyond the narrow confines of the fantasy genre. Since the overwhelming majority of respondents to my current fantasy novel giveaway on Goodreads are women, this informed the colours I chose and the idea of ‘being swept away’ to entice readers with a romantic idea of fantasy rather than a dark and gritty style used in an advert targetted at men. I’m aware that the GoodReads site is mainly frequented by women aged 18-24, so this could account for the high number of female respondents, but I’ve always known that my readers are more likely to be female. Most of my male friends don’t read novels; they do stuff. So here’s one for the girls:

Then I needed something to promote the first book on its own. My work centres around the ideas of magic. It was always what I felt was missing in a lot of fantasy, particularly in The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf would just smack his staff down and say ‘You will not pass’ and there’d be, like, light and the Ballrag would fail, but I always wanted to know, how did it work? I mean, really, how did he do it? With this idea in mind I set out on a quest to unravel the mysteries. If you’re intrigued by the idea of magic, you’ll probably love the books, so this ad is all about the idea of having a talent for magic and holding onto it. Unfortunately the exploding sprite makes Google Adwords flag it up for ‘strobing/flashing’ so I had to pause the ad at the end and not loop it. Gee, thanks Google. Just imagine what kind of adverts we’d be getting if advertisers were allowed to flash at us.

The tone of the second novel is definitely grittier and more chaotic. It is more hard-boiled high fantasy. If you’re interested in Second Sight, you’ve probably already read The Riddler’s Gift. If you weren’t a fantasy reader before, I’ve successfully converted you! So in the final one I show my true colours: