Is there a point of critical mass in marketing a book when it begins to sell itself?
At the beginning of September I made a pledge to myself to cut back on marketing, step up my writing, and see what effect this had on my sales. So how did I do? Well, I wasn’t completely successful in terms of writing. A trip, a cold, several sets of papers to grade became useful excuses not to write, but I did write 2,000 more words, and have 5 chapters of Uneasy Spirits, my sequel to Maids of Misfortune, completed. More importantly, I am much more engaged in the process of writing. For those of you who have read my earlier posts, you know that I wrote the first draft of Maids of Misfortune 20 years before I actually published it. Well, I also outlined the plot of Uneasy Spirits many years ago, so it has taken me awhile to Read more…
Working Amazon: Some strategies for selling in e-retail stores
Lesson #8 of the Publetariate Vault University’s Platform/Promotion Curriculum, by Zoe Winters, is called “Working Amazon.” I know it is skipping ahead, but I recently spent a good deal of time looking into what had “worked” and what hadn’t in selling my book in the large internet retailers Amazon, and I would like to tell people what I learned in the hope that others who are embarking on this wonderful journey of self-publishing will benefit from my experience. Until recently, when an author’s book was traditionally published (or independently published in the traditional way), there were three essential steps a publisher and author took to get the book sold. The first major step was to get the book on the shelves of bookstores. The second step was to find ways to inform people about the book and convince them to Read more…
Establishing a Brand
I have been working my way through the Platform/Promo Lessons in Publetariate’s Vault University curriculum by April Hamilton and Zoe Winters (I was fortunate enough to win access to Vault University as a winner of Publetariate’s First Anniversary Contest.) While I don’t plan on revealing any detail on the excellent material presented in this curriculum (if you are interested, the fee is just $5 a month for monthly lessons, and I would highly recommend signing up and/or purchasing a copy of April Hamilton’s Indie Author Guide), I am using the subject headings of the sixteen “lessons” in the curriculum to evaluate my own attempts at promotion of my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery. As someone who has been teaching (and therefore evaluating students) for 35 years I figure it will be a humbling experience to Read more…
Help! How do I get people to find my book while on Smashwords?
I put my book, Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery, up as an ebook on Smashwords and Kindle at approximately the same time, for the same price ($4) in December 2009. In the six months since I published the book I have only sold 2 books on Smashwords, while at the same time, I have sold 120 books on Kindle. What I am trying to figure out is: why the difference and is there anything I can do about this? A year ago on the Smashwords blog, (http://bit.ly/c79MXp)Mark Coker wrote that “Approximately 80 percent of Smashwords web site visitors arrive to Smashwords via deep links, meaning they arrive to an author page or an author’s book page…” But today, the group I am interested in is the other 20% who are simply browsing for a book to check Read more…
Analysis of first quarterly Sales or Can I call myself a real published author yet????
Last year as I was making the decision whether or not to self-publish my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, I read blog after blog post that tried to parse the differences among traditional publishers, small presses, subsidy and/or vanity publishers, and independent or self-published authors. While I found little absolute agreement, I was left with the impression that if you self-published a book that ended up being bought primarily by immediate family and friends, you were probably involved in vanity publishing, no matter what method you used. This idea was reinforced when I read such statements as those by Jane Smith in her blog How Publishing Really Works that self-published books sold on average “between forty and two hundred copies…”(http://bit.ly/6gvvj2) and that “Despite some highly publicized successes, the average book from a POD service sells fewer than 200 copies–mostly to the authors Read more…
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