We’ve worked with Cozy Mystery author Daryl Wood Gerber (who also writes as Avery Aames) on a few projects, the latest of which is a sort of round robin contest with fellow authors Janet Bolin, Krista Davis and Maggie Sefton.
The main goal of the contest was to build email numbers for each author’s mailing list and also engage their readers in a fun way. What we came up with is a word scramble. Each author gave us two words or phrases that we incorporated into their page tabs on Facebook. Readers could visit each author’s page and unscramble the anagrams for each author allowing for a possible four maximum entries into the drawing.
Each entry page was set up with a “fan-gate” so readers new to the author’s page had to like the page in order to enter the contest. All in all, with cross promotion from all the authors, engagement and likes increased. The phrases were not all easy, so they all dropped little hints from the other authors.
Consideration was also made for readers accessing FB via mobile devices since page tabs currently do not appear or work on the mobile apps. We gave a direct link to the contest itself in order to maximize accessibility.
All in all, it has been a fun contest with great response from readers – and extra cross-exposure for all authors involved.
