Okay, so I’ve figured out how marketing books gets done. You write what you think is a good book. The first variable is whether it’s in a popular genre or not. Currently the old genres like science fiction and crime are sort of old fashioned and neglected. The popular sub-genres combine the old genres with romance or outright pornography. Apparently, the largest segment of the book-reading population consists of frustrated women of various reading predilections but definitely needing, let us be kind and call it, “romantic” content. Okay, that’s strike one against me already.
So, now that you have the text, you edit it or pay an editor to find grammatical errors. Not fun but necessary. I did it myself so it’s probably not 100% but as they say, good enough for government work. But editors can do a lot more than find typos. They can critique everything from character description to pacing all the way up to whether the hero rides away into the sunset with or without the beautiful girl. I thought about hiring one of those but when I spoke to her, I didn’t really like the vibe. I kinda thought she would object to my tone vis-à-vis blue haired antifa trolls. So, strike two against me already.
And after that you have to set up your book page and your author page on Amazon and set up your Amazon ads and all that stuff. I actually paid a marketer to do that stuff and I guess I got a professional result for all the money I spent. But that doesn’t get you much in the way of visibility. You’ll sell some hundreds of copies. A couple of hundred would be disappointing. Six or eight hundred would be extremely good. So I sold about four or five hundred copies. Let’s call that a B- result. No strike against me there. But not the home run I wanted (if I may mix my metaphors for the moment).
After six months of dissatisfaction with the roll out of my book and viewing a multitude of YouTube videos on marketing books I had a plan to test the idea that book promotional giveaways would be a way to get the “visibility” I wanted. So, I combined a five-day Amazon Kindle giveaway with a FreeBooksy five-day promo package. This put my book in front of five different lists of book readers (one each day) who match up with the subject of my book. FreeBooksy (and associated lists) claim that their lists have hundreds of thousands of readers. So I plunked down about four hundred bucks for this plan and voila! halfway into the plan I’ve gotten over two thousand books given away. So, I think this worked.
Now there are lots of caveats. How many of the people who went to Amazon will end up reading the book? How many would spend actual money to buy a sequel? How many will bother to put up a rating or a review on Amazon? So, the jury is still out on some aspects of this strategy but as of this morning (third day of promo) my book is number sixty (60) on the top 100 Free in Kindle Store list. And before this I never got higher than 78,000.
Of course, once I write my sequel, I’ll have to do this whole thing over again so that people who liked “The Sniper” will buy (WITH MONEY!!!) the sequel. But that’s alright. Proof of concept gives me confidence that I can bring the horse to water. It’s up to him to decide if he wants to drink (or read) Boy, these metaphors are getting really strained. So that was what I did on my summer vacation.