Throwing Things In Elevators

An elevator pitch is a concise summary of what you're selling. Everyone from entrepreneurs to potential dates uses them and I've seen them discussed several times by authors talking about self-promotion. In fact, I most recently read about them in this blog post by Rik Davnall.

Self-promotion is something I struggle with. It's not that I don't want to sell copies of my book. I do! I just don't want to annoy people into ignoring me. I've come across so many overly aggressive self-promoters and they don't make me want to buy their books or read their blogs. They make me want to ignore them. So I do. That's not good for them and there's a chance I'm missing out on something great, so it's not good for me, either.

I've been working on my elevator pitches. Especially as I draw closer to finishing my next story, I want to get into the habit of self-promoting. I have no problem tweeting and Facebooking links to my blog posts, and that earned me to 421 hits last month. (I want to make it to 500 this month.) Getting links out there works. When I posted the link to my website on that local classifieds site, I got seventy hits on the ad, ten hits on my site, three hits on my blog, and one book sale. To me, that's not bad. It's a solid start.

But it's just that. A start. I'm in this for the long haul. I have to start implementing what I learn. And that means using elevator pitches.

So far, these are the ones I have for Cass Gets Her Kicks:

Like road trips? Like classic cars? Like sex? Then you might like Cass Gets Her Kicks. Just 99 cents from [insert bookseller here, followed by link]. 

Cass Gets Her Kicks received its first five-star review on Smashwords!

Plain old Cass with the widening ass of rapidly-approaching middle age was Cass With the Great Ass to this man-child?

They're not bad, but they could be better. And I definitely need more of them.