Just what you needed

...another blog post about how to sell your books. I don't want to repeat everything you have seen a hundred times already. Things like "use social media" or "do giveaways".  There's some of that in this post, because those two things are inescapable must do's for anyone who wants to sell more than three books to Aunt Mary and mom and dad. Here is what I do to promote my books. It works well enough that I actually sell some of them.

Use Amazon Kindle Select.

This is number one. Yeah, I know, everyone bitches about Amazon and its policy of exclusivity and so on. But unless you are doing really well on the other platforms and selling a significant number of books, KDP Select is the only way to go. Why? Because you want to take advantage of the many websites that will list your book when it goes free and almost all of them want an Amazon page to link to. You MUST do free promos. You can't list for free on Amazon. Amazon will sometimes match a $0.00 price on another platform, but you can't count on it, you can't plan for it and that means you don't have a plan that includes Amazon. Without Amazon you have eliminated around 80% of your potential market. Therefore, an opinion:

WARNING: OPINION ALERT

You can't reasonably plan a successful free promotion without Amazon.

KDP Select success depends on a lot of things. You need eight or ten or more 4 and 5 star reviews. You plan a promo a month ahead. Many sites want three to four weeks notice of a freebie. Sites change, the requirements change, sites come and go. The whole thing of self promotion is in constant flux. BTW, if you write erotica many sites will not list your promotion, so that might be a consideration for you.

Some sites want three days, some the same day or one day notice. Author Marketing Club  (http://www.authormarketingclub.com) is a good resource, free, and gives an easy way to list promos on many sites.

Plan a 3 day promo Friday-Sunday. Make sure you tweet about it, mention it on facebook (follow the posting rules in various groups) , Goodreads (join), and especially a few select Amazon discussion forums for authors (the only ones that allow self promo and product listing).

Follow up with a thank you to the groups, etc. where you posted. Success means a lot of free downloads. To me, that means at least a few thousand. Giveaways work better if the writer has a series. One book, okay, but the idea is to stimulate sales of all books. In my thriller series, White Jade is the first in the series and gets people interested in the series as a whole. It's priced at .99. The other books are 3.99.

Where else except KDP Select can you instantly get ten or fifteen thousand people to discover your book for free? Plus you get borrows that pay, a shot at being on one or two top 100 lists and if you do okay, promo flyers go out from Amazon. Yes! Amazon promotes you!

I rest my case.

Social Media (okay, have to talk about it)

Facebook: you need an author page. Pay FB to promote likes, it's worth it. Figure $60.00/month. Acknowledge the folks who "like" your page.

Twitter: Get an account. Get as many followers as you can. It's simple and free. Follow everyone back, follow the suggestions Twitter sends, don't worry about it. Tweet as often as you feel like it but don't always push the books. (conventional wisdom). Post stuff that's interesting. Retweet anything you find interesting. Support people. Don't spend a lot of time on it.

Twitter has a lot of members who will retweet your free promo post if you follow them and/or let them know about your promo. You can find them by a search on the web (Google) or by looking for "free" etc on Twitter. Learn about hashtags. There's a lot of info out there, but you have to look for it. I'm not going to attempt to put it here.

Amazon forums: pick one or two and join in. On promo days, look for other Amazon author forums (there are many) to post. Again, don't spend a lot of time...maybe a half hour or so.

Goodreads: same thing as Amazon.

There are a lot of other social media sites like Pinterest. If you like them and use them, fine. Don't get caught up in all the social media whirl or you won't have any energy or time to write.

What else should you do?

Ads: Use discretion and don't spend a lot of money. There are a lot of sites that will advertise your promo for $5 or less. Use them if you like. Ads are hit and miss. I don't know what works and what doesn't. Don't worry about it, use your intuition and do your research.

Make a plan. A budget is good (I'm bad at that). DON'T spend hours a day on self-promotion. Write instead. An hour a day is probably right at most for self promo.

Get a professionally designed website. This is your main portal, your contact point, your key exposure on the web. Do it as well as you can.

Get a professionally designed cover. Everyone who knows anything says this. They're right. Use the money you didn't spend on ads to get the design services you need. It doesn't have to cost thousands of dollars.

Use the author page on Amazon. It's important. Make it interesting but not full of your life history.

Write good descriptions for the sales page and the best blurbs you can. Study how the big guys do it and shamelessly copy their style.

Respond to readers, always. Acknowledge people who help you. Share resources.

Help out other authors when you can. That can be an encouraging word, a retweet, a comment in a blog, a shared article or something on your facebook page. It's not hard.

There is no competition. What, you say? Think about it. There are over 30,000,000 readers in the US alone. Enough for everyone. Just write a good book. If you're not thinking about how the other guy is taking sales from you, you are not immersing yourself in resentment and poverty thinking. No one is taking sales from you. Everyone can succeed.

Keep  writing. Get more than one book out there. DON'T fall into the trap of quantity vs. quality. Write the best book you can. Lately I see and hear a lot of talk about "commodity" writing, the idea being that cheap junk will bring in money because a lot of people don't care about quality, they just want something to read. I hate the whole idea of that and I don't agree.

Don't give up and get discouraged. If your book is well written and it's not selling, you need to find ways to get it out to as many people as possible, which brings us back to KDP Select as the best venue.

Be patient. This process takes time. It took Lee Child ten years to be an "overnight success". Figure a couple of years to start making consistent sales, maybe longer, maybe less. But believe in yourself.

Give up resentment about Amazon. I see a lot of that. It's a waste of time. Without Amazon the Indie Revolution would be almost non-existent. Be grateful. It's okay if they make a lot of money.

Set your intention. This is the most important thing of all. By this I mean that you KNOW you are a.) successful b.) going to make a bunch of bucks someday c.) you can trust the universe to back you up d.) your work is good enough to sell and sell well and e.) you're not worried about it, because you are definitely going to succeed AND you can FEEL it. Try it, you'll see.

Now go out there and sell a lot of books.

Alex Lukeman

"With a little help from your friends"

When Siggy asked me if I'd like to write something for Writers Get Together, my immediate response was “I'd love to!”

Upon further thought, I realized this meant I'd have to come up with something to write. Between writing novels and thinking up mildly clever or vaguely informative things for my own blog, I volunteered to write for someone else's? Crap. Yes, she said I could re-post something from mine, but that didn't seem like the answer – if people want to read that, they can go to my blog, right? I could also post an excerpt from my book, but that didn't sit right, either, because I already spend so much time at shameless self-promotion.

Hmm: promotion. Now there's a thought.

You can read author blogs ad nauseum that will tell you the elements needed to find success in the world of independent (and particularly electronic) publishing: a well-written book, eye-catching cover, intriguing blurb, precise formatting, luck. And a platform.

A platform is like a following – people who will buy your book, read it and share it with their friends, relatives, neighbours, co-workers, the kid down the street and the meter maid. And hopefully everyone else they meet.

“That sounds easy,” I sez reading that.

So out I go into the world of Facebook and Twitter, friending everyone I can find, following everyone with a pulse. More than 1300 people agree to be my friend (see, Ma? I'm popular!), but only people related to me follow on Twitter. That's okay, though, because now I have a platform.

I start sharing news and links to my book, telling people about my blog. I tweet clever quotations, share funny pictures. And what happens? Do my book sales skyrocket? Do people start knocking at my door asking to be my friend? Do tweeps start following me in droves?

Nope.

Select members of my family share my FB posts with their 97 friends (most of whom are my friends, too). A few people I know take the time to click the little 'like' icon at the bottom of my posts, declaring to the world their affinity for whatever I had to say. My ten-year-old daughter tells all her school friends what a great writer her Daddy is (God bless her). My Mom tells me she'd retweet anything I have to say...if she was on Twitter.

Okay, indie publishing gurus, how is this going to help me become successful enough to quit my job and write full-time?

It won't.

The secret to successful promo in the social media world rests in the power of the group. My platform + your platform + his platform + her platform = success.

Does anyone remember the old Pert shampoo commercial with the amazing multiplying woman? “She tells two friends, then she tells two friends, and so on, and so on.” All those tiny woman heads in that commercial added together made for many sales for Pert shampoo, but only because they each told two friends. If I tell my friends, and you tell your friends, and they tell their friends...and then we do it again. For you, for me, for her, for him.

I like to do the Twitter math. When I share a link to my blog, 153 people potentially see it (yeah, I still don't have that many followers, but it's growing). For my last post, I saw my link retweeted at least 7 times, increasing the number of eyes potentially seeing it to over 2500 sets. Far more impact.

But be warned, fellow indies, this can't be done selfishly. Truly care about helping your peers, put their success ahead of yours, and you may be happily surprised at the results. For everybody.

To that end, my platform is your platform. Drop me a line if you'd like to guest on my blog, tag me when you have an important link to share, DM me when you have something to retweet.

It's a big, scary world out there, indie authors and readers who read us, but together we can survive and thrive.

Indie authors of the world unite! And together we'll take over the world!

Mwah, ha ha ha.

Find Bruce Blake at:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=640723713

https://twitter.com/#!/bruceablake

http://bruceblake.wordpress.com/

http://www.on-unfaithful-wings.com/