William Mangieri's Blogs: Let the COUPONS Begin!!!

Time to focus on the writing business - well, not writing exactly, but marketing and promotion.

For those of you who really know me, or who’ve been reading and paying attention, a theme that occasionally repeats in my postings is the continuing saga of William Mangieri and the Horrors of Self-Promotion.

In everyone’s life, there are times when you HAVE TO SELL SOMETHING – whether it’s ideas or positions, or merchandise. It’s very hard for me to approach anyone and suggest that they part with their hard earned money to buy something I’m selling. Back in my teens, I did the door to door thing, but it was with people who already wanted the product – I was really just a deliveryman. When I hit twenty, I was suckered in by one of those ads for an office job that would always be filled by the time you got there, but “We do have some sales openings” (ALWAYS selling VACUUM CLEANERS.) I trained for a week, and the Filter Queen was an excellent machine if you wanted to suck up carriage bolts, but I was horribly uncomfortable asking ANYONE to buy one. Of course, $400 seemed like a huge amount of money to me in 1977, but even if it had been $40 I still would have struggled. I lasted one weekend and then looked for employment elsewhere.

I haven’t been doing this writing gig for very long. I know I can create product, but I cripple myself when it comes to promotion. It would be easy to use the excuse that this world of eBooks and Indie publishing is such a new thing that no one really knows how to do it, but the fact is that I SUCK AT IT.

In an effort to give SELF-promotion another go, I’ve decided to try out the COUPON feature on smashwords.com. So, each week I will feature a 50%-OFF COUPON on a selected ePublication.

Of course, I’d appreciate it if those of you who take advantage of this “deep discount” would PLEASE post a review after you’ve read it (I am amazed at how hard it is to get those – I thought that nowadays everyone and their cats were posting their opinions all day, every day, on everything online. Who knew this wasn’t the case?)

BE AWARE: the coupon is only good on smashwords.com, but you can get any format there, whether you use a Kindle, or a NOOK, or whatever device you do your reading on.

This week’s featured book is “In a Flash”; here’s the link to the story on smashwords.com: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/120247?ref=notimetothink

Use coupon code FY86V to get 50% off the list price at check out. The coupon will only be good until February 9^th, so GET IT WHILE IT’S HOT!!!

(sorry – didn’t mean to be pushy - just saying…)

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William Mangieri’s writing (including his latest ePublication “Dredging Things Up”) can be found in many places, such as: