Category: Advertising & Marketing

Increase your July book sales with Smashwords promotion

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Promotions can often be key in marketing. Getting people to buy your book is no easy thing, as I’ve discovered myself, and a few freebies and discounts here and there can offer great incentives for readers to download your book, read it, love it and hopefully spread the word.

If you currently sell with Smashwords and received their email this morning, don’t bin it to your delete box before reading because they’ve announced their Summer/Winter sale. This site-wide promotion starts on July 1st and lasts a month, allowing you to discount your books. You can make them free, 75per cent off, half price, or 25per cent off. If you want to enrol, then do so before July 1st for maximum exposure.

As you can see from the form above, it only takes mere seconds to enrol and you might find a jump in sales. I’ve never used the promotion before, but anything to offer readers a little extra incentive to buy your book is a good opportunity to utilise. Inside Evil will be 50% off for the month, and you’ll be able to buy it at the reduced price using the SSW50 code.

Raising your profile with Authors Den

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For many self publishers the battle with obscurity will begin as soon as the ‘publish‘ button is pressed and we realise that readers aren’t going to automatically flock to our books. Through unsolicited reader reviews and emails from people about your books, you can quickly establish that, yes, your book isn’t crap and there are people out there who are loving it. This can help stop the huge disappointment that is likely to ensue when book sales are slow. If you’re getting one and two star ratings, then perhaps your works needs some fine tuning. But, if you’re getting positive reviews from the few readers that you do have, then it’s a shove in the right direction to keep persevering.

Obscurity is a very hard problem to cure, and visit any self publishing forum you’ll to see hundreds of threads about how to get more sales. Reviews will encourage new readers to buy, but how do you get these reviews in the first place? Getting into the Top 100 is likely to get you seen by more people, but how do you get enough sales to reach these desired spots? Around 1,000 Amazon sales and you’re entering the realms of catching the eye of an algorithm or two so that you’ll appear in some of the spotlight lists. After launching your book and noting sales dribbling in, you may wonder whether you’ll ever make that 1,000.

It seems as if the most positive think that you can do is to write. Write more books, add to existing series, put out titles that people will want to read. However, this takes time, and you can be raising your online profile whilst you write. A Goodreads marketing campaign or a LibraryThing giveaway may help readers find your work and spread the word. Joining sites such as Shelfari, Goodreads and LibraryThing will also help, especially if you participate in discussions. A new site that I’ve come across is Authors Den, and with the owners claiming to have a million visitors a month, then surely creating a profile here is a good idea. Making a profile is easy and you can add books, WITH sales links. It may not give you a thousand sales, but in my eyes, anything to get both your name and book titles seen my more people is a bonus.

How to start a Goodreads book marketing campaign

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Up until this point it’s fair to say that I’ve spent minimal money on self publishing. Through the help of a couple of avid readers, I had Inside Evil vetted and proofread for free. Uploading eBooks costs nothing, and I spent $50 on the cover. In addition, I bought this blog domain; so overall I’ve only spent about $65. This, in truth, is nothing when it comes to creating, publishing and advertising a novel.

Those who know me, know that I’m pretty frugal. Some would say I’m tight – I would say I’m financially organised and careful with my spending. It’s the way I was brought up. Just because you might want to buy something, doesn’t mean you should or can buy it. If you really want, you should save – these are the lessons my parents instilled upon me which, in fairness, have been a great help in life. Still, that didn’t stop me blowing my entire student loan in the first year of university on a sound system, hundreds of DVDs and so much booze that I ran out of money in May and had to live of baked beans and scavenged bread for about two months.

Still, I get aside from the point; I don’t like to spend money if I can help it. However, I have finally bitten the bullet and invested into a Goodreads advertising campaign.

The problem with self publishing is that, after that initially flurry of excitement, book sales can slump. I’ve tried to kick start things with a LibraryThing giveaway, but have only had one review, 4 stars, come in. More about that in another post. I know that some indie writers have been successful enough without having to do any advertising, but for the majority of us, some investment will be needed.

Creating a Goodreads campaign is very easy, after all, they want to take your money. However, for those who are worried that it’s going to be difficult to create, fear not. It only takes a few clicks, a couple of lines of copy and you’re off. Goodreads Self Serve advertising took me less than half an hour to fill out and prepare the adverts, and then it took around 12 hours for them to be authorised. Please note, you will need a creditcard so that you can throw some money into the advertising account. However, you can carefully control your Cost Per Click (CPC) rates and set a limit on your daily spend so that money isn’t literally haemorrhaging out of your account.

To prevent huge losses without any actual results, I decided to follow Lindsay Buroker’s advice and go with a targeted market campaign. Whilst you can advertise to everyone, you pay for every click. If these clicks aren’t getting you actual sales, then you’re effectively wasting money and being very inefficient. As it is, I am bidding 30cents for a click. With a royalty rate on Inside Evil of $2.70, it means that if I get one sale for every nine clicks, then I’m breaking even.

In addition to carefully selecting the groups of people I want my novel targeted at, I’ve included the price, the genre and the fact that Inside Evil is an eBook in the actual ad copy. This should stop people wanting paperbacks or crime thrillers clicking on the link and wasting my hard earned cash.

Currently I’m testing out two ads, both pointing to Amazon, to see which has the better CPC rate. I’ll probably add adverts for B&N and Smashwords over time, but at the moment I’m choosing to focus on Amazon whilst I get to grips with the advertising process.

In regards to money, I’ve only dumped $35 into the account. I’ve set a maximum of $5 per day, which gives me 16 clicks. You may not think this is very high, but CPC rates can be pretty unimpressive, as low as 0.05per cent, meaning that for me to max out I’ll actually need to have 32,000 indents during the space of the day to get those 16 clicks. We’ll see how it goes, but I’m not expecting to see these high numbers. And, of course, you can change your maximums or dump more cash in at any time.

Another note to add is that your advertising fund will cover all of your ads. I initially thought I would put $35 in for each of the two ads, but upon creating the second advert, I discovered that they come under the same umbrella. This is great as it offers you the chance to play around with your CPC bid costs and different advert copies without having to invest an increasingly large sum of money.

So, you can see that creating a Goodreads book marketing campaign is fairly easy. From perusing forums and Kindleboards, it seems that some people have success with this route whilst others don’t.  My adverts have been live less than a day and have had 973 indents and no clicks so far.

I will update over the coming weeks 🙂

Increasing book sales by using a mailing list

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I recently read a very interesting blog over at Lindsay Buroker’s excellent website. Lindsay talked about how important it was to cultivate a fan base, a following, a group of happy readers who love your work and can’t wait to devour more of your words. It was suggested that if you can cultivate around 10,000 fans, you can be pretty comfortable whether the market for ebooks crashes or Amazon changes its algorithms to make finding your titles even harder. This is a very obvious concept when it’s clearly pointed out, but I hadn’t given it much thought before. Build a thriving fan base, and you can be pretty much assured that you’ll have ‘X’ number of buyers and readers when any new work comes out.

Lindsay’s post made me realise the importance of creating a mailing list from the word go. It doesn’t mean more workload, and you certainly don’t have to be producing a newsletter every month. However, it does offer you a direct link to those who have read your work and are more than happy to know about milestone news. By milestone news I mean the launch of a new title, a public book reading that you may be doing, or perhaps an exciting competition you’re running. It’s important here not to overdo your contact with fans and bombard people with every new blog post and piece of information that you can possible think off – that’s one sure way of having people un-subscribe.

Creating a mailing list is VERY simple, and even Hotmail offers the ability to create categories of people who you can send mail to. Each time a reader wants to be added to the  mailing list I simply add them under a contact name of ‘Inside Evil Updates’ and add them to the appropriate category. Then, when the time comes, simply send a group notice to subscribers using the BCC mailing address (this avoids you sending out the contact emails of EVERYONE on your mailing list to each other) and hey presto, job done.

But, how do you get subscribers?

  • Put a note in the back of your books. At the end of your books, simply tell readers that if they send you an email at ‘X’ address with ‘Y’ in the subject line, they can be added to a mailing list for important author events.
  • Put a note on your website. If people are visiting your website, then there’s a good chance that they may have read, or be about to read, your books. Offer them an obvious chance to stay in the loop.
  • Flatly and out-rightly ask people. I’ve had a couple of emails from readers already and in my response, have ASKED them if they’d like to be put on the mailing list. NEVER just assume the best and add people, because this could put a black mark next to your name when emails start arriving in their inbox.

It’s now my belief that from the moment you finish your book, you should be looking to create that vital fan base. Nurture them, talk to them, help them grow. Writing is a pleasure, and having readers respond positively to your work is a complete wonder. And, though I’ve only just started out, my mailing list is already growing, offering the promise of readers when my next novel hits the virtual shelves.

May’s increasing sales

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May’s been a great month for me. Today, not to blow my own trumpet ‘too’ loudly, it’s my birthday. I’m 31 on the 31st of May…if only I could get 31 sales today too. 😉 Talking of sales, May has, by far, been my best month and I’ve noted a 233% increase in my books rocketing off the shelves. OK, ‘rocketing‘ may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I’ve increased from THREE sales last month, to 10 sales this month. See, I’ve had so many sales that it’s now not grammatically correct to spell out the number!

I know that hitting the lowest possible double digit figure for monthly sales may seem a ridiculous thing to be celebrating, but I’m moving in the right direction and that’s a good thing. I’ve had a unsolicited five star review on Amazon.co.uk, I’ve had an email from a reader asking if I’m writing another book, and I’ve been getting great feedback from a couple of reviewers. I’ve had Inside Evil proofed from tip to toe so as to remove as many errors as possible (there were quite a few, I’ll admit it). And, let’s not forget, I had a new cover created.

When you’re first starting out in the publishing world, it’s little things that thrill you. Any sale is very exciting, a positive review makes your jaw hit the floor, and moving into a Top 100 list offers so much excitement that it’s almost impossible to stop screaming and dancing around the house (yes, I did this). I could never understand the rankings. I was listed as at some stupid seven millionth and something in the Kindle store, yet I didn’t appear in any other category lists. I wanted to know exactly how awfully low I was for specific genres. Then, I sold a few books and suddenly I was #87 in Horror and #93 in Occult in the co.uk listings. I didn’t stay there for very long mind you, but I don’t really care. I, me, Geoff Wakeling was, for the briefest moment, in a top 100 list. Awesome.

With May almost over, I’m already looking forward to June. This lovely summer month should see me feature on a few website reviews. In addition, my LibraryThing promotion finishes on June 5th. I’ll then be sending out 50 copies of Inside Evil to readers for reviews, so I hope that a few more positives may come back from the promotion. Ultimately, I hope this will lead to more sales as news of the book is spread across the web.

In the meantime I’m cracking on with the second book of the Inside Evil series. I’m almost ready to reveal the name, I just need to ponder it a little more before it’s set in stone. I’m also readying for a tiny weeny competition, the winner of which will have their idea featured in Book Two. Details to come.

For now, I must go and celebrate my day with another cup of tea, maybe some cake, and definitely some more writing. 🙂

A new cover

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I’ve been pondering about getting a new cover made up for Inside Evil for a while as my efforts weren’t a staggering success. There’s lots of debate on Kindle forums and other communities about whether a good cover increases sells. Whilst the majority of people advocate the need for an awesome cover, I’ve seen quite a lot of books that are selling reasonably well with pretty dire cover art. However, it seems pretty obvious that, for those flicking through Amazon’s ebook lists, an eye catching piece of art work will draw more attention from potential readers.

I want my entire ebook to be the best that it can be, and so I hired the creative genius of Char Adlesperger over at Wicked Cover Designs. I’d heard lots of good things about her, and for $55, an ebook cover was an absolute bargain.

Working with Char was incredible, and not only was it cheap to get a cover done, but fast. I put in my request on Saturday, and by mid afternoon yesterday (less than three days), the title was complete. I’d given her an outline of some features that I’d thought about, and I think Char brought them together amazingly. Adding to that, she even suggested adding a strap-line to bring the entire cover together and entice more readers; something that I hadn’t thought of myself.

I’m overjoyed with the results, and can’t recommend Char enough. Whether it sells more books or not, I certainly think its eye-catching and I’m really happy with the results. Now, I have to get back to writing the next in the series, if only to see what Char can come up with next!

Library Thing – Giveaway Promotion

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There are many resources that you can use when it comes to advertising a book. I like to take the passive marketing approach, joining in with discussions posted on communities and groups such as Kindle Boards (KB) and Goodreads and getting clicks from signatures, rather than aggressively posting about my work. KB really is a must if you’re a self published author, and you’ll find all manner of help in the Writer’s Cafe forum. Meanwhile, I am slowly getting to grips with Goodreads, and after my post the other day, I’ve noted that Inside Evil is now on several people’s ‘to be read’ lists. I haven’t actively advertised at all. I’ve simply engaged with readers and writers in the forum and they’ve decided to add my book.

I’ve been looking for a way to offer a limited number of freebies of late because, of course, getting people to read your book must be your main aim. Having opted out of KDP Select, there’s no way I can offer freebies of my book on Amazon other than changing the actual book price to zero. However, someone on KB talked about Library Thing and the opportunity for no-cost free promotions and so I decided to get involved.

I’d taken a look at Library Thing once before, when I initially published and was looking for advertising options. However, I hadn’t realised that they offered a wonderful give-away option. It’s superbly easy to navigate and as long as you’re not offering your title for free anywhere else, you can sign up a certain number of copies to be offered to members. I’ve set a one month deadline and 50 copies, and on June 5th, Library Thing will email me a list of people who have requested my free book in turn for a review, along with their email address so that I can send out the correct files.

I only set this up a few hours ago, and I already have one request, so it seems like it could be a great way to get a book out there, especially if you’re a new writer. I can only speculate as to whether reviews will come out of this promotion, but I think Library Thing could be a good resource for building fans and spreading the word.