Seven Tips on how to sell books on Kindle
This post was originally a guest post over on Patty Henderson’s blog, The Henderson Files, entitled 7 Tips on how to sell books on Kindle. I am reprinting it here. First of all, why should you listen to me, an unknown author, tell you how to sell your book on Kindle? A little more than a year ago, I was a semi-retired professor of U.S. Women’s history who, besides a few academic articles, had never published a thing. What I did have was a manuscript of an historical mystery I had written 20 years earlier, based on my doctoral research on working women in the late nineteenth century. In the 20 years after writing the first draft, while I pursued my teaching career, I found an agent, collected rejections, lost an agent, published briefly with a small Print on Demand (POD) Read more…
Marketing or Selling: What’s the difference and why do I like to do one and not the other?
To sell: “to influence or induce to make a purchase” Merriam-webster.com To market: “to expose for sale in a market.” Merriam-webster.com People commenting on the new trends in publishing frequently say that for self-published authors to be successful they need to be entrepreneurs. In fact they often say any author who wants to be successful needs to participate fully in the selling of their own books. I heard stories for years from my traditionally published friends about going to conventions to network with book sellers, arranging book tours, book signings, and speaking engagements at local libraries, and how much they dreaded this aspect of being a published author. Author Forums and groups like Murder Must Advertise are still dominated by similar discussions of the ins and outs of selling books, including these traditional methods. As I prepared my historical mystery, Read more…
Write, write, write…
I just added a 1000wordsaday badge onto this site, because I have finally begun to stop putting marketing before writing. I know that for months I have said that I would do this, but in January I finally did. I averaged between 500-900 words a day for the month of January, but in the first week of February I averaged 1400, so I felt I could safely enter this challenge set up by Debbie Ohi on Inkygirl.com. For those of you who have been following my blog, you may remember that I wrote the first draft of my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, over twenty years ago, which means most of my fiction writing experience in those past twenty years has been rewriting. I am very good a rewriting, but I wasn’t so sure about my ability to write fresh Read more…
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…
The Promise of Fall: How to Achieve a Balanced Writing Life
Labor Day has come and gone, marking the end of a summer that went by so fast it gave me whiplash and the beginning of fall, which has always been my favorite season, even here in Southern California where September is often the hottest month of the year. I was one of those odd kids who loved the return of school days, as the nights grew cooler in my Pennsylvania home town, my blood ran faster, washing away the sluggish dreaminess that a summer spent reading had produced. Adulthood, and a teaching career that mimicked the rhythms of my youth, meant fall continued to represent a time of increased activity. This summer I was supposed to make serious progress on my second historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits. I was supposed to make so much progress that when fall came, and I Read more…
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