I recently published an eBook, a travel guide. You can see it here: on Amazon.com.
If you write a travel guide to any place, the smart play is to sell a print book in a gift shop at that place. But my book is an eBook and not available in print (yet). If I can’t sell it in gift shops, then how to market the eBook to local tourists?
If you write an eBook, a purely digital thing, the smart way to advertise it is digitally; click this link – buy it now. Yet, because my book is a visitor guide, a very local subject, I have not found a website venue that is both very good and local.
My idea is to distribute some “rack cards” where local tourist literature is displayed. It’s not ideal because it’s difficult to convert a piece of paper into a digital sale. This is exactly the purpose of QR Codes. A QR code is like a web link, a URL, but for cameras.
I have never been a fan of QR codes because, until recently, I did not have a “smart” phone capable of recognizing QR codes. But I am warming up to QR codes now. For a subset of the tourist population, a QR code on my printed card will allow people to quickly find my eBook, look at the preview pages, and maybe purchase it.
How does a person get a QR code? Apparently anybody can generate a QR code for just about anything. It’s free. Although you can pay for a subscription that provides interesting features, such as tracking the number of people who actually use your code, this is not required.
Here are just a few of the many websites that can generate QR codes for free:
beqrious.com
goqr.me
unitag.io
Some QR sites (e.g. http://www.visualead.com) require you to sign-in or sign-up before you are allowed to download the resulting graphic file of your QR code.
Who actually uses QR codes? Here is some interesting data at QRstuff.com
q1-2014-qr-code-trends
Somewhere I have seen a QR code displayed on a website. What’s the point to that? It’s just … I mean … technology … it’s stupid, right?