On this blog, I've put up some print advertising I've done for the books and I plan to put up more. However, this advertising campaign was not for the book as much as for the book signing. In any signing, it's best to have a large crowd of people. That's why I tend to do book signings in restaurants and bars than in book stores. People will come out, largely out of curiosity. In their minds, if they don't want to buy the book, at least they can have a drink or something to eat and enjoy a night out.

Your job as an author or marketer is to get the crowd there. Whether or not they buy books is secondary - you worry about that during the event. But it's critical to draw a crowd. Crowds are dynamic, like rolling snowballs. People will come in just to see what the ruckus is all about.

For this targeted e-mail campaign, I used a company called Echomail, facilitated by the local newspaper. It's important that you don't "spam" people - this was a list of people who had opted in to receive advertising coupons via email. And with that type of e-mail campaign, you can drill down to those who like books or who tend to read X number of books a month.

Of course, it's also important to run concurrent advertising in other media. When this e-mail campaign was delivered, I also had print ads running in the local newspaper. And guess what? The targeted e-mail brought in the majority of the crowd!