I've written a sci-fi/thriller anthology called Tale of the Mundane Fantastic. It's published on Amazon Kindle, not paperback. Right now I'm trying to market it. Many messages have been sent on social media; twitter, facebook, and pinterest. We have a website on which this can be placed. Amazon had an advertising service we'll eventually pay for. Is there anything else I can use to market this? What would you suggest?
When you call it an “anthology,” I expect to see works by multiple authors. When it’s just one author, I expect it to be called a collection. More importantly: 1) you need a better cover, IMO. To me, this has a significant impact on whether I’ll take time to look at something or pass it over. 2) looking at the sample, it looks like the formatting is screwed up. Maybe that’s just the sample, I don’t know. And I was looking on my phone, but combined with the cover the presentation seems amateurish. That’s a hard sell. One you get the above sorted, if necessary, look at BookBub. Hard to get recommended there, but if you can that’s big. Google Ad Words or a Facebook Ad campaign is something to consider as well.
I just pulled up the sample on my Kindle. The formatting is definitely messed up. That doesn’t cost you anything but time to fix, and you should fix it. I don’t think many people will buy a book that isn’t formatted right, and it’ll cost you in negative comments in reviews as well.
I strongly doubt anyone can get their first book featured on bookbub cold . For one thing you need a minimum of reviews. There are bookbub ads you can bid for like you do on ams. There are also things like freebooksy and bargainbooksy Personally I wouldn't bother with any paid advertising until you have more than one book. Also you need to sort your keywords and Seo out, I can't even find it on amazon or google
Probably true about BookBub. But paid ads for my first book worked well—came out well ahead on it. But I’d fix the book formatting first.
I guess it really depends on the book, some people wind up seriously in the hole. I've not seen the book concerned, but in general decent editing, formatting, and cover is a minimum requirement before any other kind of marketing
Yep found it now, definitely needs a new cover and a structural edit and a line edit if the sample is anything to go by, plus decent formatting. The way speech is laid out is very odd. Eotd no amount of marketing is going to help if the readers it attracts are turned off by the product. Personally I'd lose the preface and put the acknowledgments at the back so as not to waste space in the sample.
I've made several format adjustments. Don't think I got all the format adjustments, because I'm still new at this. The cover is more impressive, and I got rid of the preface as one of you suggested. Tell me specifically what adjustments I still need to make.
Has the manuscript been by a professional editor or failing that some beta readers ? Also that cover is worse. Tbh you'd be better off paying for a professional cover design than spending money on advertising as that stands If you really must do your own use something like canva which has templates and get some better cover art from unsplash or pixabay
The manuscript had been read by several beta readers, most of them approving. I don't know how to properly format this, and it would probably be better to pay for a cover.
Smashwords has a free style guide here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/52 You can ignore most of it, but look at the section on formatting--how to indent (don't use tabs), use manual page breaks instead of returns across multiple lines, etc. If you follow that, you should be able to fix any formatting issues. Are you using Amazon's own cover designer in KDP? You're not going to get a great cover with that, to be honest. I like this one better except for some of the text placement at the bottom, but I agree that you are better off getting someone professional to do the cover.
Personally I'd suggest that instead of going into KU he might be better off going wide with kobo, iBooks etc, and using an aggregator like draft to digital or smash words to do the distro ...I don't know about smash words but d2d do the formatting as part of their service. persinallly I'd be tempted to put it free and promote via freebooksy but that is only any good if he has more follow up work to use it as a loss leader for. That said its getting ahead as a shitload more editing is needed first. For example the thing that stood out to me in the sample was the colossal info dump, Also when doing speech the tag should be on the same line as the dialogue is Bob said " bla bla blah" not Bob said " blah bla blah"
