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…
Why I Decided To Self-Publish: Part One-The Long and Winding Road
In this blog I will discuss the pros and cons of being an indie author, using my own experience with the self-publication of my historical novel, Maids of Misfortune, as an example. This first series of posts will be about why it took over thirty years to go from my first idea for the novel to the published work. I suspect that my story will feel familiar to many. Like many authors, my desire to write was rooted firmly in my childhood as a voracious reader. By third grade I embraced the title book worm; it seemed preferable to being a shy nobody, but it wasn’t exactly a career choice. In fact, for a middle class girl growing up in the fifties and early sixties, there didn’t seem to be very many interesting career choices, period. So, I suspect that Read more…
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