Tag: marketing

  • Marketing: Paid Services and Free Stuff

    1. So, here’s what I’m doing
    2. File preparation
    3. Publishing as a Canadian
    4. Some things to prepare
    5. Distribution: Createspace
    6. Distribution: Amazon
    7. Distribution: Direct Distribution
    8. Distribution: Smashwords
    9. Distribution: Draft2Digital
    10. Distribution: PublishDrive
    11. Marketing: The Numbers, Social Media, and Mailing Lists
    12. Marketing: Paid Services and Free Stuff
    13. Marketing: Getting Reviews

    So if I don’t like doing the social media thing, what do I do for marketing? What is the thing I’ve tried that actually ends up selling me enough books to buy a coffee or two a month?

    Paid services

    Don’t. Just save your money.

    I have tried a whole bunch of paid services over the years. Twitter campaigns, getting in with a bunch of authors to cross promote, Facebook campaigns, good old ads for authors, all sorts of things. Spent a couple hundred bucks over the years trying them. And do you know how much I’ve gotten back as a direct result of them?

    Email subscribers that don’t open the email or click on the links. Four sales. Total.

    Smashwords

    Smashwords is fantastic for giving authors promotional options for their fanbases. You can create coupons for individual books and give them out to whoever you want for whatever purposes you want, which is fantastic. If you just want readers and to get your book into as many hands as possible, this is probably the easiest way to do that. 

    On top of that, you can also set books to free on Smashwords. I think I’ve mentioned this in the Smashwords post, but I don’t set my books for free on Smashwords. I instead have a few books available where the reader can set the price, and that price can be free. In most cases, folks will just take them for free, but others will still offer you something that they can afford for them.

    Contests

    You know what? If you’re just looking for numbers of people to sign up for a mailing list, a contest is fantastic and you don’t have to arrange to sent too many books out to people. But from my experience, a contest is not how you build followers. The ones I’ve run and participated in have only earned me temporary followers with no sales boost, and a lot of unsubscribes and bounces as soon as I sent out the first newsletter. Getting people to your newsletter is great, but a lot of them don’t decide to stay.

    Instafreebie

    I’ve only been doing Instafreebie ((Use that link to help me out!)) for a short time, but this has actually resulted in a good number of sales since being part of the program. I have a mix of first books in series and previews of other books, and enroll in a bunch group giveaways. A lot of people download freebies and I see an increase in sales across all the channels I distribute to.

    The thing to remember with Instafreebie is that they require an ePub and do not offer a conversion service. Because of this, and because of how I use it, I use the ePubs from Draft2Digital again, because those have links to other books presented to the reader when they finish reading. If it’s a preview, I have to open up Calibre and manually add a link to the download page for the book they are currently reading.

    And, for the most part, that’s what’s worked. Except for that one last thing: Reviews.

  • Marketing: The Numbers, Social Media, and Mailing Lists

    1. So, here’s what I’m doing
    2. File preparation
    3. Publishing as a Canadian
    4. Some things to prepare
    5. Distribution: Createspace
    6. Distribution: Amazon
    7. Distribution: Direct Distribution
    8. Distribution: Smashwords
    9. Distribution: Draft2Digital
    10. Distribution: PublishDrive
    11. Marketing: The Numbers, Social Media, and Mailing Lists
    12. Marketing: Paid Services and Free Stuff
    13. Marketing: Getting Reviews

    Okay. So. Marketing. Let’s get one thing straight.

    I am not someone to come to for marketing advice. I am awful at marketing, largely because it makes me very uncomfortable. There’s plenty of places that will tell you that these people want your book and you are just helping them find it. 

    See, I’ll walk into a store to look for pants, but I don’t want the sales associate to help me find them. Get me?

    So yeah, marketing is not my strong suit. Still, I have to do some of it. You can come up with a much better plan than I have, though I can at least help to give you a starting point and tell you what’s worked for me without making me feel too terrible.

    Okay? Okay. Let’s get into this.

    The 10% Rule

    Ten percent is not the firm number, mind you, but it’s a good general rule that I’ve found. One in ten people on average will take an action. One in ten people will click on a link to a book. One in ten of those people will check out the excerpt or summary. One in ten of those will actually purchase. One in ten of those will go to see a second book if a link is presented to them. And so on. 

    As someone who wants to sell books, this means you want to get as many people as possible to land on your book page so that eventually you will hit enough people to result in a purchase. In many cases, this means spam, and this is why I am not good with marketing. 

    Twitter, Facebook, and the rest

    I have all of these things, but honestly do very little in the way of marketing through them. My Twitter sometimes has me talking about the projects I’m working on. Facebook is mostly an author page that has the blog cross-posted to it and the occasional book announcement. I have never been comfortable using these platforms for marketing, but I have them. Mostly because I did use them properly at some point.

    And by properly, I mean I spammed the hell out of people. And it did get me sales, don’t get me wrong, but I also hated doing it. So now I use them like a normal person and occasionally tweet out something about a promo happening or post about an upcoming book. Most of anything that might be considered marketing happens on the blog.

    Author Blog

    This thing you’re reading! I read all the articles at one point about what to post and how often. You want to provide helpful-but-related materials to what you’re currently working on. Throw in a bonus scene! Do character interviews! Release a soundtrack! Do cover reveals and sneak peeks! That’s how you attract people who will read your work, by appealing to people who are already interested in your work.

    This didn’t work for me. At all.

    The posts that gained the most traction for me were the ones about writing and publishing. These were the ones that got interaction, shares, and feedback. And the reason for that is very obvious.

    The Indie Author Problem

    Look. I’m an indie author. I feel for them. I’ve read the same things they have, I’ve done some of the same things they’re doing, and I know that they are doing what’s been recommended. But I hate other indie authors on social media.

    When you state you’re an indie author ((Or put the keywords “novelist” or “writer” in the description)) most of the people randomly following you are going to be other indie authors. And that sounds great, right? Nice support group? Nope.

    About 90% of the folks who follow you are following you exclusively to get a follow back and so that they can then promote their books to you. Their feeds are all retweets of other people and advertisements of their books. The actual person is not there, it’s just an automated feed. Sometimes they will post something, but it will be something generic and non threatening, something that a bot could have come up with to try and make them seem like a real person. Something to maybe capitalize on a trend or hashtag.

    The reason is simple enough. The theory is that enough eyes mean that eventually someone clicks. And if enough of those eventuallys happen, then someone will actually purchase their books. And honestly, it does work if you are persistent enough. But it makes your own social media unusable at a certain point.

    If this is fine with you, go ahead. Just be warned. I opted to stop, though, and go back to being a person occasionally shouting into the void between drafts. 

    Mailchimp

    I do my mailing lists on Mailchimp and it’s been pretty painless, honestly. Once a month now, I send out a newsletter that includes whatever freebie giveaway I’m participating in at the moment, news about any book releases and upcoming events, and anything else that might be interesting. 

    I get a lot more traction and action out of the mailing lists than anything else because most of the people who sign up for it are actual readers who want to know what’s coming next. Every place I have a sign up for my mailing list is optional so I hope that the only people who join it are actually interested. Which helps me feel like I’m not actually spamming all these folks.

    I’m also planning to give out some extras, so if you wanted to join the mailing list, there’s a box over to the left there…

    Well, it was worth a shot.