The offer to access super secret bonus content will be ending on August 15th, 2008. I set up this offer as a promotional experiment, hoping that it would nudge undecided buyers into purchasing the book. I thought it might persuade library book readers to buy a copy instead of just checking the book out. While there was a good response to the offer, most people said they would have bought the book anyway. So, it’s not worth my time to keep approving entries. If you want to get the content, submit a ticket by August 15th, 2008. After that, the doors to the super secret vault will be closed!

Postmortem thoughts

The biggest flaw with this promotion was getting the word out about it. I put a small line in my bio in the book saying you could check this web site for bonus content, but I was not explicit about what the content would be or how to access it. That’s because I wrote my book bio back in September 2007 and at the time I wasn’t sure if I’d have the time to put together this promotion or how exactly I’d run it. To find out about the bonus content, you had to visit my web site, and if you were doing that you were probably already interested enough to buy a copy of the book.

I saw on another author’s web site that she was offering bonus material if you bought two copies of her book. This approach seems like it would work better because it’s targeting people who already bought one copy of the book, nudging them to buy another copy perhaps for a friend or relative. I don’t know how well her promotion went, but if I were to do something like this in the future, I would target people who’d already bought the book instead of trying to sway people who were undecided.