Marketing: How to find (and lose) your target audience in one fell swoop.

What Not to Do Number 4:

Do not accidentally take over someone else's Facebook Group. They don't like it.
In the blogs/ videos and webpages I read intermittently, there was the admonition to use Fb as a marketing tool to let people know that your book exists ( however brilliant your book is, it will just lie on the shelf of the biggest bookshop in the world and no one will be able to find it unless you promote it.
First I shortened the url (web address) of my place in Amazon.  You do this by visiting one of the websites who do this for free - making an extremely long web address:  
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_12?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=clarissa+and+the+poor+relations&sprefix=clarissa+and%2Cstripbooks%2C286
into : 
http://amzn.to/1O6TJv8

You can see the advantage - it allows you to tweet your link easily.
I used http://www.bitly.com
for this but tinyurl and other sites work too.
With bitly (for free) comes a breakdown of where the clicks on your link come from. I could see facebook, twitter and other places I posted and I was able to discover what was working for me .(twitter not at all in my case)

So where did I post? Well as always I followed the instructions I got from my research.
a. fb groups that promote ebooks
b. twitter
c. When kdp offered free days to help my downloads (if not my pocket) I found this:http://www.steamfeed.com/72-places-promote-kindle-book-free/

 A lot of the links don't work for me and I mean to make a slightly shorter version of this list to help readers of this blog.
So what happened? My free book downloads went wild. It works.
It took me a bit further up the ranking, and a strange thing happened on bitly - I could see that a lot of downloads could not be accounted for by clicks - people on Amazon were finding me for themselves.
My stupidity? I found a fb group that was my perfect audience. As it was Georgette Heyer that inspired me to write Clarissa, I found The Georgette Heyer Appreciation Group and had fun discussing her books, asked permission to post mine. But during the free promo, so many of the group members commented on my post that it began to take over the page. Suddenly,  the group did not appear on my list - where was it? I can only assume I was blackballed by someone complaining to the admin.
Audience lost never to return -- a big fat shame.
What would I do differently? Possible post, but not reply to everyone. Or post less directly? It is so hard to know. I might have tried to friend more group members individually. They loved Clarissa, they told me - but when another Alicia Cameron novel arrives, they may never find out.
Beware taking over a group - even if you don't mean to.

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