Category Archives: Marketing

A guest post by Sean Golden.

You’ve done it. You’ve finally finished your first novel. After months or years of tears, sweat and blood, your baby is about to meet the world. But if you are self-publishing, or have an Indie publisher, you may find yourself not only the author, but also your book’s primary marketer and promoter. So what do you do?

No matter how brilliant your novel is, if nobody sees it, nobody will buy it. How do you break out of the gray mass of obscurity and catch the attention of potential buyers? My first novel didn’t break any sales records, but if a couple thousand sales in the first four months sounds interesting to you, here’s the approach I took, broken into three main areas:

Proper presentation (cover, blurb, categories, etc.)
Social media
Reviews

Proper Presentation:

Presentation starts with the categories and keywords you associate with your book. Categories and keywords determine the genre lists and search results in which your book will ultimately appear. There are few decisions you will make that will ultimately impact your sales more than which categories and keywords you choose to associate with your book. Paradoxically, the more you sell, the more important this is due to the algorithms online book sellers use to present readers with purchasing options. Choosing the wrong categories and keywords is like presenting a selection of shoes to a shopper looking for hats. Amazon.com provides this excellent guide to categories and keywords.

Once you have your book appearing in the appropriate lists and search results, the next thing a reader will see is your cover. A good cover is more than nice artwork and title text. To get your cover to stand out, I suggest that it accomplish three specific things:

Be readable in the most common online thumbnail sizes
Match genre expectations
Have dynamic, eye-catching artwork

The purpose of your cover is to encourage a reader to click on it. Nothing screams “self-published” like an amateurish cover. If you can’t create professional quality art yourself, find someone else to do it for you. Keep in mind that your art will be scaled down in the thumbnails. Once a reader clicks on the thumbnail, they will be presented with your book’s summary page, which is where they will (hopefully) read your blurb. If the blurb catches their imagination, there’s a chance they’ll click “Buy.” It’s beyond the scope of this post to explain how to write a good blurb, but here’s one article with excellent advice.

Your book’s presentation should be viewed as the bedrock of your strategy. Everything else you do will drive people to the page with your book cover and blurb. Even if you can tease them with an online ad, if they get to your book summary page and the cover is lackluster, not genre specific, or the blurb doesn’t sell them, they won’t click “buy.”

Social Media:

Let’s assume that you have that foundation in place. The next goal is to get people to land on that summary page. This is where social media comes in. And social media means more than just Facebook and Twitter. My daughter, Sarah Golden, is my social media guru. When I first self-published Warrior, I did a short post on Facebook letting my friends and family know that I had a book out. I dragged my Twitter account out of mothballs and started Tweeting. But that only gave me a small boost in sales for about a week.

Then Sarah jumped in. She either created, or had me create, accounts on multiple social media platforms including an author page on Facebook. Here’s the page she created for my novel on Pinterest. I also joined Goodreads and created an author and a book page there. Then I joined other reader or author blogs, such as KBoards. The results of Sarah’s social media campaign were striking. My sales went from a few per day, to twenty per day and higher. Pinterest allows me to give my readers content that lets them see a lot more about the story than I can squeeze into a Facebook post. It also allows others to post their own content.

The real value of social media is that it allows readers to get to know the author. I try hard not to use my author blog as merely another way to ask people to buy my books. I try to give them an idea of who I am, what I enjoy, what I’m doing and how I write. The more human and approachable I am to readers, the more likely they are to be interested in what I write. I also try to interact in the reading/writing community, attending conventions, writing blurbs for other authors, etc. Kevin James Anderson gives a lot of great advice, but perhaps the best advice he has given me is “Don’t be a jerk.” And that means online as well as in person.

Reviews:

While reviews don’t immediately get you noticed, they are part of your book’s presentation whether you like it or not. Self-published books have a reputation for poor grammar, plot holes and other ills that traditional publishers work hard to avoid. If your book has reviews warning about those things, savvy readers will shy away even if you have a great presentation. Reviews that are critical of your plot or story are painful, but readers expect that. What will kill your sales are reviews saying the book is difficult to read due to poor writing or editing. If you get such reviews, revise and re-publish your book.

Final Thoughts:

If there is one thing that you take away from reading this, I hope it is the importance of presentation: cover, blurb, category, and keywords. All the effort and money spent on driving readers to your book’s landing page will be wasted if the reader gets there and isn’t convinced the product is worth their money. Good luck!

Sean Golden Bio:

I’ve had a long and varied career outside of writing, starting as a construction worker putting glass in high-rise office buildings while I was working my way through college seeking a degree in physics. After graduation I ended up writing Macintosh programs and creating a Mac software product for a software company. Eventually I took over as Publisher of all of the software products before leaving to become a project manager of software development in a Fortune 500 company. That led to a 20 year career in corporate software development that ended in December of 2014 when I decided it was time to retire from the corporate rat race.During all of those years I wrote and published technical articles and stories for the local newspaper. But I never published my first novel until January 2015. Now I am writing full time and intend for this to be my last career. I have had stories half-written or outlined in my desk for decades, and now it is time to get them on paper and out to the public.I am happily married, and have been for almost 30 years now, and have raised two kids. My literary interests are varied, but I primarily read and write science fiction or epic fantasy.

Marketing 101

June 12, 2015

fictorians

Business Doug Dandridge Guest Posts Marketing No Comments

A guest post by Doug Dandridge.

I’m not sure if you can call me the world’s greatest expert on self-marketing. However, since I am closing in on 130,000 book sales in thirty-four months, I must be doing something right. I have made over $300,000.00 in that time period, and am a full time working author. In this blog, I will give a quick rundown on some of the things I have done. I will go ahead and plug a book I wrote which is available on Amazon called How I Sold 100,000 Books On Amazon. I’ve heard from some people who read the book and reported increased success. I don’t have time to go into everything in this brief essay, but will cover what I think are the most important points. Of course, most important is to write a book that a lot of people will want to read when you put it out there. But that is of no use if you can’t attract people to give it a try.

Establish a web presence. You want your name, not just the name of your book, to take up the top slots in a Google search. There are several things I did here. First, I established a web site, with a lot of outgoing links, which hopefully will help generate more incoming links. This will raise it up in the search algorithms. Next I established a blog. I was able to get domain names for both blog and website that were my name, dougdandridge, one with a .com, one with a .net. I went on Amazon and Goodreads and rated a hell of a lot of books I had read, and left actual reviews for most of them. Blog when you can. It doesn’t have to be daily, and don’t just blog on how people can buy your book. Blog on things of interest around the topics of your books. I do blogs on armor, modern and future weapons, tropes, movies, all kinds of stuff, and then also do a couple of blogs, with excerpts, whenever I put out a book. And don’t let the number of subscribers put you off. I only have about a 150 subscribers, but my blog, published about every other week, gets hundreds of views a day. That’s because I also tweet the blog, with hashtags, and post it on a number of Facebook pages frequented by people interested in fantasy, scifi or ebooks in general. Also do blogs for other people when asked, and ask them if they don’t get around to it. I have done blogs for people like David Farland, and for people who have less than fifty subscribers. I feel like it is a reciprical effort, helping both parties. The result is that I have the top twenty slots on Google for Doug Dandridge now. When I started out I was on page two with one entry, and there aren’t that many Doug Dandridges out there to compete with.

Advertise your other books in each of your books, with hyperlinks to make it easy for readers to get to them. I also have a newsletter, which, while it has slightly less than 300 subscribers, has a much better than average opening rate. The newsletter is probably responsible for a couple of hundred early sales of each book, driving them up the genre charts, which gets even more attention. Reviews are important, probably as much as anything. Not actually what they said, but how they rate you, and the average of those ratings. Do not buy reviews. Repeat, do not buy reviews. But if anyone compliments you, on Facebook, your blog or by email, ask them if they will give you a review. One review I got was a three star for another series, but he complimented me on my Exodus series, and I asked him is we would be kind enough to write a review for one of those books. I got another five star review out of that transaction.

I got started with Amazon giveaways. I have given away almost 16K ebooks, and several of those giveaways have driven my sales. The trick is to not just do the giveaway, but to advertise those dates. I use Author’s Marketing Club, which has a free page where you can visit sites that let you advertise your free book. Most of the sites are free, some charge a nominal fee, but it’s worth it. You also blog and tweet the giveaway. How well have they worked? In September of 2012 I gave away 4,100 copies of The Deep Dark Well, a book which has sold almost 6,000 copies since. When I released the first of my Exodus: Empires at War books, it started flying off the Amazon servers. In May 2014 I did a giveaway of that very Exodus book, just after releasing book 6. I gave away 4,900 copies of book 1. The five Exodus books were selling between fifty and a hundred books a month at that time. After the giveaway, each volume sold over five hundred copies in May, including the one I had just given away. Over two thousand books, for over six thousand dollars in royalties. Cha ching. So they are still useful, if done properly.

Twitter is a big part of my platform. And twitter doesn’t work well at all when you’re just starting out. What I did was join an indie author’s site, Independent Authors Network, and started retweeting the tweets from some of their most followed authors. Eventually I was tweeting about fifty authors, and when I started to tweet my own books, I was being retweeted to several hundred thousand followers. And I learned about hashtags, which get your tweets in front of people who are not following you or anyone you know. Hootsuite was also useful in scheduling tweets around the clock, so I could get my message in front of fans in Australia.

And those are my basic steps for getting some notice. Some may work well for you, some may not. Among the strategies that don’t work are paid advertisements. Among others that work well are volunteering to do essays on other blogs, like this one. Or, as Kevin J. Anderson says when offered an opportunity that might help, “I can do that.”

Doug Dandridge Bio:
Doug Dandridge is a Florida native, Army veteran and ex-professional college student who spent way too much time in the halls of academia. He has worked as a psychotherapist, drug counselor, and, most recently, for the Florida Department of Children and Families. An early reader of Heinlein, Howard, Moorcock and Asimov, he has always had a love for the fantastic in books, TV and movies. Doug started submitting science fiction and fantasy in 1997 and collected over four hundred rejection letters. In Decmeber of 2011 he put his first self-publishing efforts online. He currently has 26 books on Amazon, with two more due out over the summer. After a slow 8 month start, he has sold over 125,000 copies of his work in a 33 month period, and his Exodus: Empires at War science fiction series has placed five consecutive books at the number one rank on the Amazon.UK Space Opera and Military Science Fiction lists, and top five on Amazon.US. He has been published in Kevin J. Anderson’s Five By Five military science fiction anthology, and has been invited to submit to several others. He quit his day job in March 2013, and has since made a successful career as a self-published author

Goodreads Giveaway

June 11, 2015

Frank Morin

Frank Morin Giveaways 3 Comments

There are lots of pros and cons to Goodreads, and everyone who uses it has an opinion. If you’ve never used Goodreads, it’s explained as a facebook-like social media for readers. You can track books you want to read, you’re currently reading, and those you’ve read. You can rate books, leave reviews, join chats, and browse many lists. There are a lot of good features.

The cons to Goodreads usually tie back to bad behaviors of other Goodreads users. I won’t go into that since I’ve been lucky enough not to run afoul of any of the Goodreads trolls I’ve heard so much about. I’ll just say, it can be a useful site but, as with everything, tread with caution and don’t allow others to dictate how you feel about yourself.

For me, Goodreads has been a good thing. I enjoy seeing what friends are reading and following other authors I enjoy. One of the features of Goodreads I was slow to take advantage of is the Goodreads Giveaways, but they can be great for readers and for authors.

For readers, it’s easy to sign up for many giveaways, entering for chances to win free physical copies of books that look interesting. It’s a no-risk way to perhaps explore a new author’s work.

For authors, setting up a giveaway is a very inexpensive way to reach hundreds or even thousands of potential readers. How do they work?

First, you have to decide how many copies of your book (ARC copies or final, published copies) you plan to give away, and to which countries you’re willing to ship to. The cost of the books and the shipping is all yours to swallow.

Next, design your giveaway.

The simplest approach is to add your cover, title, and a brief blurb. That’s all you need and you can launch the giveaway. You specify the start and end dates of the giveaway, and let it rip. This works, but there are tons of giveaways running, and the downside is it’s hard to find a specific book among the long lists of giveaways. So it’s easy to get lost in the flood. I’ve found that most of the readers you snag to sign-up for your giveaway are won in the first days and in the final days of the giveaway, when it’s near one end of the list or the other. It’s easier for people to find them.

There’s a simple way to increase your discovery rate and boost the number of readers who sign up for the giveaway. To do so, you must make a secondary giveaway image.

As you can see, it’s a pretty simple thing to put together. But this image displays larger than the basic cover and helps pop out from the long lists of plain giveaways when readers are scanning the page, helping to draw their gaze. If you have a great cover and an enticing one-liner, you can get them to add the book.

For Set in Stone, my first giveaway, over 1000 people signed up for the giveaway – 2 signed hardcover copies. Even better, over 500 people added Set in Stone to their “To Read” queue! Not everyone is going to eventually buy the book, but by clicking that they want to read it, the chances are higher. That’s five hundred potential sales by investing a few minutes in setting up the giveaway, plus the cost of a couple of hardcovers plus shipping. If I hadn’t listed Set in Stone in the giveaway, none of those people would have known anything about it and none of them would have even considered reading it.

I did a local book launch for Set in Stone and did everything I could to let folks in my circles know about it, but the Goodreads giveaway allowed me to reach beyond my normal circles. The book has sold pretty well in its first month since being released, and I believe that at least part of that success is due to the Goodreads giveaway helping me reach a wider audience.

Here’s the image we just designed for the giveaway of Memory Hunter, an alternate history novel I’m releasing July 24^th. It’s an awesome book with an incredible cover, and is available already for pre-order here. I’m hoping it will catch a lot of readers’ attention.

Anyone interested in checking out a currently live giveaway, or even signing up for the free hardcovers, here’s the link to my giveaway.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Memory Hunter

by Frank Morin

Giveaway ends July 17, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to Win

Convention Selling Tips

June 9, 2015

Travis Heermann

Business Conventions Marketing Networking Professional Behavior 2 Comments

Let me start off with the caveat that I am not an expert merchandiser. Everything I’m going to talk about below comes from a few years of hand-selling my books at conventions. I know people who can do this immensely better than I can. I’ve seen them selling scores of books like veritable sales machines. For me, however… well, one can only push a natural introvert so far.

Nevertheless, my aim here is to offer a few basic building blocks for those who are just starting out. Hopefully these tips will let you meet people and sell books at conventions without coming across Joe Obnoxio, Desperate N00B.

I’ve been selling books actively at conventions for about the last six years, starting with the release of Heart of the Ronin in 2009. Since then, three more novels have come out from various publishers. I’ve also landed short stories in a number of anthologies, which I also I sell at tables and in booths in the exhibitor halls. I’ve sold at cons of every size, from a scant couple hundred to massive mega-cons like Dragon Con and Denver Comic Con. The point is not to give you a writing resume, but to say that hand-selling at conventions gets easier not only with experience, but also with more titles on your table, offering opportunities to appeal to different tastes.

Get on programming. The most efficient way to reach the greatest number of potential readers is to participate in programming. Target some conventions that you plan to attend. Their websites always have contact information for the programming organizer(s). Unless the convention is DragonCon or GenCon, which are both overwhelmed by programming requests, they are actively looking for professionals to sit on panels.

Did you see that keyword I slipped in there? Professionals. Behaving as a professional at all times goes a long way. Even if you don’t feel like one with only one novel or a couple of short stories, you can behave like one. Fake it till you make it. For more information on this, check out Million Dollar Professionalism for Writers, by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta.

When you’re on the panel:

Be prepared.
Be erudite.
Be engaging.
Talk more about the other authors’ books. Writers who talk incessantly about their own stuff risk coming across as an egotistical jackass.

If you pull this off, the audience will recognize it, and some of them will seek you out after the panel to ask questions, which is the perfect time to tell them you have a booth/table where you’re selling your books.

Cooperate with other authors. Buying booths or tables at the massive conventions like DragonCon is cost-prohibitive, where costs for a booth run into the thousands of dollars. When you split those costs with fellow authors, however, the fees become much more reasonable.

The cost of a $3,000 booth split ten ways is a bargain when you consider that 80,000 fans with red-hot money in their pockets will filter past over the course of a four-day weekend.

So round up some of your author friends, form some sort of collective, and take a convention by storm.

Engage the potential readers one at a time. So when you have a potential new reader in front of you, what is an effective way to sell books? It is not to shove the book in her hand and say, “Buy this.”

Talk about the reader first. Engage them in conversation about the convention. Is she enjoying herself? The longer you talk to someone, the more likely he/she is to walk away with one of your books.
Ask if he/she is a reader. If it’s obvious she is, then skip this and ask what kind of books she likes. Nearly always, the response is so general that it’s not useful. “Science fiction and fantasy.” Your job then is to help her narrow it down. Urban fantasy? Military SF? Literary? Who has she been reading? What are her favorites?
The aim here is to steer her toward a book of yours that is aligned with her tastes. She’ll appreciate your thoughtfulness. And if there’s no chance of connection at all—she reads romance and you write horror—you’ll both know sooner, and she can go on her way, further appreciating that you didn’t waste her time.
In advance, create a one- or two-sentence sales pitch for each of your books, something that summarizes it in a nutshell. Make it as snappy as possible. When you have identified which of your books the potential reader might enjoy, give her your sales pitch.
If you’re selling in a booth with other authors, this could be also a chance to talk up your companions’ books. Maybe you lost a sale for yourself, but your friend will certainly appreciate it.

If you really want to build your sales skills, read a book or two on the subject of how to steer people into giving you their money. There is a tried and true structure to it, honed over decades of snake oil salesmen.

Once you’ve learned the method, the next thing you need is practice. Get out there and do it. Sometimes you’ll succeed and both the reader and you will walk away with that rosy glow of success. Often they will walk away, and your only choice is to wait for the next one to come along. Take what you learned from previous miss, adjust, and then do it all over again.

Don’t be a dick. Be gracious. Be friendly. Be humble. Just listen to the horror stories about how William Shatner or Harlan Ellison behaved on a bad day toward a fan for lessons in what not to do. If you’re reading this, you probably have not yet reached the literary stature of Harlan Ellison, so you cannot afford many social faux pas. A single, disgruntled fan in the age of the internet can truly hurt a budding career.

Final thoughts. The thing to remember is that competitiveness in this business is the chief signpost on the road to Crazy Land. You’ll make yourself miserable if you worry about how much you’re selling/not selling, comparing yourself to others. There are too many other opportunities for writers to make themselves miserable without jumping onto this one.

It is highly unlikely that you will sell enough books at a convention to cover your costs, so don’t get too caught up in that. Aside from the mental health aspect of meeting/hanging out with fellow writers, the main benefit is that you’ve made some personal connections with new readers, who are then more likely to become the kind of fans who will sustain your career in the long-term. They’ll come back next year to see if your next book is out.

And when you see the joy in their faces that they have, in fact, found this cool author they met last year, that expression is worth the cost of any convention to a writer’s soul.

About the Author: Travis Heermann

Travis Heermann’s novel Spirit of the Ronin, will be published in June, 2015.

Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, editor, poker player, poet, biker, roustabout, he is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of Death Wind, The Ronin Trilogy, The Wild Boys, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Perihelion SF, Fiction River, Historical Lovecraft, and Cemetery Dance’s Shivers VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including the Firefly Roleplaying Game, Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and the science fiction MMORPG, EVE Online.

In 2015, he’s moving to New Zealand with a couple of lovely ladies and a burning desire to claim Hobbiton as his own.

You can find him on…

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