...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.
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 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.
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.
