Is Kindle Countdown the new Free? Keeping books visible in 2014
For the past year there has been a good deal of hand-wringing over the question of KDP Select free promotions. Have they de-valued fiction, do they attract negative reviews, do they even work anymore? As anyone who regularly reads my blog posts knows, I have been a strong proponent of offering ebooks free for promotional purposes, and free promotions have been very good to me in terms of increasing my reviews and keeping my books visible and selling. However, I also believe one of the distinct advantages we have as indie authors is our ability to use our own sales data to respond innovatively to changes in the marketing environment. As a result, in the past year I followed a number of different strategies to keep the books in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series visible, including beginning to experiment Read more…
Happy Holidays
As I wrap up the last presents (with 5 grandchildren this is not an easy chore), I can’t help but count my blessings. In December of 2009 I published my first book, Maids of Misfortune, with few expectations beyond the satisfaction of knowing my family and friends who had heard about this book for over twenty years would finally be able to see it in print. Four years later, I continue to be astounded at how greatly I have exceeded those expectations. I now have three books and two short stories in my Victorian San Francisco series, and over 300,000 of these books and stories have been bought or downloaded––a number that seems simply unreal. I have also made uncounted number of friends from among fans of the series and the other authors with whom I have shared this remarkable indie author Read more…
How to Get your books into the right Categories and Sub-categories: Readers to Books/Books to Readers—Part Three
Introduction: Two years ago, I wrote a blog piece about the importance of using categories, keywords, and tags (which no longer exist) to make your books visible in the Kindle Store. A year later I wrote an update that expanded on this and discussed how having your book in the right categories could make free and discount promotions more effective. The basic argument I made hasn’t changed––that an author needs to understand how categories work in order to use them to improve the chance their books will be found by readers who are browsing in the Kindle store. If you aren’t convinced of the importance of categories in improving discoverability—you might want to go back and skim through those two posts or just google “discoverability and categories” to see the multiple posts on this topic. However, for most of you, Read more…
Holiday Gift Promotions
Thanks to the fans of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, 2013 turned out to be another excellent year for me as an Indie Author. So in a spirit of gratitude I thought I would run a series of different holiday promotions, discounting my books in various ways. First, at $6. 99, this newly published box set of the first three ebooks in my series represents a greater than 40% discount of the combined cost of the three novels. Nearly a 1000 pages of Victorian romance and mystery and perfect as a gift to give to readers of almost any age. My second promotion starts today, as Maids of Misfortune goes on a Kindle Countdown and will be 99 cents in the Kindle store from November 23-29, 2013. Let your friends and family know, or better yet, gift them a copy Read more…
Readers to Books/Books to Readers-Part Two: How to Sell Books in the Kindle Store with the Search Bar
In my tips for selling on Amazon, I suggested that authors should: “Think about selling from the buyer’s perspective.” In part one of this new series of posts, I addressed that issue in detail by examining the Kindle store from the reader’s perspective. Here, in part two, I describe some of the things that authors can do to make their books more visible to readers who use the Kindle store Search Bar to shop for books. How to make the Search Box work for you Just as authors have no control over which books vendors display in the front windows and on the display tables of their physical bookstores, so authors have little control over what books Amazon displays on the main Kindle Store Page. The one part of this first page that authors do have some influence over, however, Read more…
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