UnBoxed Ten

Ten Authors and Groups Who Promote Outside the Box

Author Doug Clegg is offering a new serial horror novel, The Locust as he writes it week-by-week exclusively to his newsletter subscribers. You can check out the first episode on Scribd here.* Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I no longer recommend using their service. See my post about this scam here.

Probably the oddest author promotional web site I've seen in a while; I think we have to call this one online performance art. You have to click through about 55 times to get through the entire thing, but it's definitely different, as is the author, Miranda July.

Most authors write letters to readers as promo, but Grant Cooperon, one of the protagonists from author Marjorie M. Liu's brilliant Hunter Kiss novels, writes his own letters. Borders has all four parts of his letter to his unborn daughter up in audio format here (and whoa, what a great voice -- he sounds just like the Grant I've imagined.)

Writer Evan Ratliff has vanished and he'll pay you $5K to find him. Maybe you can pay him $10K and he'll stay lost? Probably not.

The Random House authors who have been giving away ARCs via their Read It Forward venture; a great approach to getting ARCs into the hands of interested readers (link swiped from Maria Zannini)

I don't know who started Snippet Saturday*, but authors like Jaci Burton and Sasha White have been using it in network with other writers to get samples of their work up on their blogs while linking to others who are doing the same.

Authors Shiloh Walker and Sasha White have both done amazing things with promotional trading cards.

Promo can hardly be considered buried treasure, unless you do what British author Kit Williams did back in the seventies, setting off a massive treasure hunt for a golden bejewelled hare amulet he buried somewhere in England as part of promotion for his children's book Masquerade. I remember this because my cousins over in the UK went nuts trying to find it. There was some bruha about the guy who found it getting inside info from Williams' ex-girlfriend, and then it was auctioned off and disappeared for a couple of decades, but this past month finally got his amulet back.

There's the box, and then there's the sandbox -- all sorts of writing communities have massive sites out there, but few combine fun, ease of navigation and inventiveness the way The Writing Playground does.

Author Lara Zielin acts, sings and delights in her promotional video "Editing Letter" (thanks to Margaret Yang for the heads-up on this one.)

*Added: Snippet Saturday was started by author Lauren Dane; thanks to Marianne Arkins for the heads-up.