How to do an Author Showcase at B2B CyCon

Heidi Angell
Dec 7, 2016
3 min read

As many of you know, I am doing marketing for the B2B CyCon this year. I volunteered to assist with this because I had such a great time last year and I really got a lot out of it. Unfortunately, there were a lot of authors who didn't. It was one of the biggest issues we had last year, some authors had AMAZING results, but others felt that they didn't get anything.

Part of the reason that they didn't get anything is that they didn't know how to maximize their marketing to get the best results. Angela B. Chysler at Brain to Books does this event every year to help authors. We agreed that we needed to give authors step by step instructions on how best to maximize their results.

One of the staples of B2B CyCon is the Book expo (it's in the name, for goodness sakes!) and author showcase. The Book Expo is done on the website and is kind of a mini Amazon displaying the books of authors at the CyCon. We have spent the whole year planning the best way to do the book expo so that it will be a great display of browsing joy for readers at the CyCon to buy.

But the author showcase is basically your booth at the CyCon. Just like a booth at an in real life event, your booth is your opportunity to show off everything that makes you great as an author. This is where you get to maximize your exposure at the CyCon.

We are doing things just a little bit different this year, in that we are entering the first posts on Goodreads to get authors started. We will be dividing everything into categories and Jin Okubo is managing all the booth start ups. (Check out all his awesome hard work so far, Here!)

But after that first post, the booth is yours to decorate as you wish. Here is the booth I did last year.

The first thing that you will notice is that I make use of pictures, just like I would at a real life event.

The very first image shows off all my books, my website theme, and a picture of me. It is a snapshot to catch readers' attention.

After I do the intro post, I then go in and introduce each of my series. Again, I make ample use of images. Not only showing the book covers, but also image quotes. At the end, I drove traffic to my website. I did this, rather than sending it to Amazon, so that I could track clicks to that page using Google Analytics. That is why I can say that I KNOW that I had great results from the CyCon last year. I can't track what sales came from CyCon because my books are on multiple sales platforms and I had a major book launch before the event, and had some other marketing things going on that weekend, but I was able to see how many clicks I got from Goodreads to my book pages. it was over 300 clicks. That is a lot of exposure just from my author showcase!

I also utilized the author showcase to provide links to all the other events that I was doing at the CyCon. As you can see, I did A LOT of events. It was a whirlwind weekend and tons of fun!

Readers were able to see all the fun things I was doing, and were able to learn more about me. Yes, readers are there looking for books, but the reality is that they are also looking to meet fun new authors. They could find books at Amazon, B & N, Smashwords, or through a google search. But readers love to be able to fangirl or fanboy as much as the rest of us, and in some ways even more.

Readers are going to CyCon so they can meet new authors, readers, and participate in bookish fun! Give them what they are looking for!

The last thing you want to do is make sure that you engage with the people visiting your booth. Make them want to get to know you.

And give them a way to continue to build the relationship after the CyCon. I invited them to sign up to my e-newsletter and get a free copy of my e-book The Hunters. That weekend I got 100 new subscribers to my blog.

What questions do you have about B2B CyCon 2017? How about the Author Showcase? Let us know in the comments below.

Until next time,