Come and Talk

I have to admit that I’m finding the next stage of this project a challenge. I’m finding it difficult to find people who are willing to give Escape with a Good Book (or Escape as I’m now referring to it as in some areas) a try. I’ve reached out to a number of bloggers and had mixed results. One person has been exceptional with their support and time and I cannot thank them enough. Thank you Clare.

I’ve had few responses from anyone else. I understand. Would I reply to an email that suddenly dropped into my inbox? Would it get as far as my inbox or just sit in a spam folder until it was automatically deleted?

I sat down at the kitchen table one evening this week and did a little brainstorming. At the end of the session I wrote down, “TURN ALL OF THIS INTO A BLOG POST.” Here is that blog post with the essence of that nighttime scribbling plus some extra thoughts along the way.

Am I trying to contact the wrong people at the moment? Perhaps reaching out to people who blog about books is the wrong crowd. A number of them review books that they receive and one assumes that they’d want to be reviewing new titles rather than books that have been published for any real length of time. Perhaps I’m asking people the wrong questions. I’m not offering any real incentive for people to join. That’s a problem too.

Let’s look at these issues separately.

Who

What kind of person would use Escape? People who borrow books from the library. People who use second-hand bookshops. People who read brand new books, and thus visit bookstores. People who read.

Maybe I need to begin with a niche. Initially I was thinking niche as in books in a specific genre, or author. I’m also thinking of a specific person. Someone who doesn’t mind trying out something new.

How

What would provide an incentive for people then? Something for free? Well I can do that. I can offer free shipping for a period of time; bearing in mind that it’s solely myself funding this ‘project’. A while ago I thought about actually offering free books. My thinking was that I could ask people to sign-up to the site, create a wish list for books that they’d like to read and then I could source those books and send them out to the relevant people. Perhaps those people would then offer those same books on Escape and we could gather some momentum that way. I don’t think that I’ve actually published anything saying this though so it’s just a thought in my head at the moment.

Making Changes

As I was drafting this post I was also playing around with a few images and words and trying to design a simple poster (image below). Something to promote the site and draw people in. I’m fairly happy with the result. At the same time I began to produce a separate page to this blog - Can You Help? - to achieve the same result. The colours used for the online Can You Help page are more in line with the theme and colours used on this site whereas the poster is a lot bolder. I tried to use the colours of the poster on the website but I wasn’t overly happy with the yellow/orange and brown and decided to go with a completely different image in the end.

Again as I was writing this I decided that I needed to add something to the blog home page. As a result there is now a call to action on the home page (at the time of writing this at least) which leads to the Can You Help page. For someone who usually doesn’t worry too much about images it does feel like I’m throwing lots of images into this.

The next question that comes to me is, where do I find these people? Or perhaps not where, but how do I best position marketing material so that the right people will see it? I paid a visit to a local coffee shop this week and they have a notice board. The problem seems to be that this notice board is absolutely plastered with flyers and the like. If I got permission to put something up there it’s just going to fade into the background. I went to the local library where I saw a notice board but this time everything seemed community focussed. Which is a good thing but not somewhere that seems appropriate for any marketing / advertising material.

The use of social media to promote things is… …interesting. Social media is usually something that I stay clear of. This does make things trickier for me; spending a little time trying to figure out how things work. Converting views of social media posts to views of the Escape site seems to be an issue. I also find that just because someone ‘likes’ a post on Instagram doesn’t mean that they will actually be interested in using the thing that you are offering. This is probably worthy of a blog post of its own.

Before I managed to get this post completed I also made some updates to the main Escape site. I’m no longer forcing users to subscribe before they are allowed access. They can now view a home page that shows featured books and some promotional links, i.e. subscribe and ‘help build the Escape site’ links.

This post seems a bit rambly and incomplete. That is probably indicative of where I am with all of this at the moment. It feels like I’m stood on some minor side street talking about this thing that I’ve built while the occasional person walks by, they either smile politely or they look in the other direction and pretend to themselves that I’m not there. Perhaps I just need to stick to a plan and try that for a while. If that plan yields nothing then perhaps I can review it and change my approach.

GB