Okay, so I\u2019ve figured out how marketing books gets done.\u00a0 You write what you think is a good book.\u00a0 The first variable is whether it\u2019s in a popular genre or not.\u00a0 Currently the old genres like science fiction and crime are sort of old fashioned and neglected.\u00a0 The popular sub-genres combine the old genres with romance or outright pornography.\u00a0 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, \u201cromantic\u201d content.\u00a0 Okay, that\u2019s strike one against me already.<\/p>\n
So, now that you have the text, you edit it or pay an editor to find grammatical errors.\u00a0 Not fun but necessary.\u00a0 I did it myself so it\u2019s probably not 100% but as they say, good enough for government work.\u00a0 But editors can do a lot more than find typos.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I thought about hiring one of those but when I spoke to her, I didn\u2019t really like the vibe.\u00a0 I kinda thought she would object to my tone vis-\u00e0-vis blue haired antifa trolls.\u00a0 So, strike two against me already.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I actually paid a marketer to do that stuff and I guess I got a professional result for all the money I spent.\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t get you much in the way of visibility.\u00a0 You\u2019ll sell some hundreds of copies.\u00a0 A couple of hundred would be disappointing. Six or eight hundred would be extremely good.\u00a0 So I sold about four or five hundred copies.\u00a0 Let\u2019s call that a B- result.\u00a0 No strike against me there.\u00a0 But not the home run I wanted (if I may mix my metaphors for the moment).<\/p>\n
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 \u201cvisibility\u201d I wanted.\u00a0 So, I combined a five-day Amazon Kindle giveaway with a FreeBooksy five-day promo package.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 FreeBooksy (and associated lists) claim that their lists have hundreds of thousands of readers.\u00a0 So I plunked down about four hundred bucks for this plan and voila! halfway into the plan I\u2019ve gotten over two thousand books given away.\u00a0 So, I think this worked.<\/p>\n
Now there are lots of caveats.\u00a0 How many of the people who went to Amazon will end up reading the book?\u00a0 How many would spend actual money to buy a sequel?\u00a0 How many will bother to put up a rating or a review on Amazon?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And before this I never got higher than 78,000.<\/p>\n
Of course, once I write my sequel, I\u2019ll have to do this whole thing over again so that people who liked \u201cThe Sniper\u201d will buy (WITH MONEY!!!) the sequel.\u00a0 But that\u2019s alright.\u00a0 Proof of concept gives me confidence that I can bring the horse to water.\u00a0 It\u2019s up to him to decide if he wants to drink (or read) Boy, these metaphors are getting really strained.\u00a0 So that was what I did on my summer vacation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Okay, so I\u2019ve figured out how marketing books gets done.\u00a0 You write what you think is a good book.\u00a0 The first variable is whether it\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,1289,1263,237,4,242],"tags":[5147,5290,1290],"class_list":["post-38071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-book-marketing","tag-book-promotions","tag-my-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n