I just published my first book through KDP on Amazon. I'm super excited and am happy with the whole process. Now I know that a lot of the promoting is up to me. For those of you who are ahead of where I am, what was your process for self-promotion? I've done quite a bit of research but am finding myself feeling very overwhelmed on where to start. Advice from those who have been there, done that is very welcome! Thanks in advance!
You should put a link to your book in your signature, and promote it on every forum/website you use, in the most subtle way possible. To be honest you should have had a plan in place before publishing it, so you need to catch up a bit. Putting a book on Amazon is not particularly difficult, getting to people aware of its existence and interested in it is.
Start a blog Get on Goodreads and find similar books to add yours to a list Post your work here in the bookstore tab Post it on Facebook Maybe google for some websites that review e-books and send them an email asking them if they'll give yours a read and give them a free copy.
Don't forget twitter. You can also run promos on amazon, like have it free or 99 cents for a short period of time which bumps up your numbers in the rankings and your book will show up higher in searches, and get on lists for top sellers, which will eventually increase your sales, too. And the promotions give you something to announce on all the social media sites.
JamesBrown - I have done some promotions about the book as far as pre-sale info, etc. I've sold an okay amount in the less than 24 hours it's been for sale. So it's not like I just published it and then was like, "Why aren't people buying this?" I'm just wondering what avenues people have used that they liked the best and found most useful. I'll definitely put it in my signature - thank you! peachalulu - Thank you for your suggestions! I have tried blogs in the past and totally don't know what I would post about other than my book - which doesn't seem like it would be enough to post frequently on. I will look into it more. I will find out about Goodreads, thank you! I will also check out the bookstore tab. Chicagogirlz - I'm VERY new to Twitter. I have an account but I find myself very overwhelmed by Twitter for some reason. Which is funny because I can navigate and post on FB with ease. Thanks for the reminder about promos on Amazon!
@Dallionz : You can have an author blog. There you can have various pages whith bio, book summaries etc, but in the blog section, which you link up with facebook, you can do character intros, post dialogue snippets, post the reviews, then start talking about your next book. It's not hard to populate a blog with content, the more focused the topics, the better. you might nit have many blog followers, but it's there, part of the package and maybe your new web home.
Jazzabel - Thank you for the thoughts on what I can have on an author blog. I will make a point of creating one this weekend. And you make a good point of having a web home besides my Facebook page or something like that. I appreciate your suggestions.
I've put mine free on Amazon for 5 days and it reached an extra 34 people - I don't know if that's a lot for a new book from a new author, but that's 34 more readers than it has reached at full price so far. Another thing I've done to promote my book is to create an audio book of the prologue and the first chapter, with links in the description to the Amazon pages for all the different regions. My reasoning is if they like what they hear and they want to find out how it ends, it may tempt them into buying a copy. I'm not sure how well my Yorkshire accent will persuade people to buy it though.
In my experience, the best promotion for a book is another book. So make sure you're still writing and working on creating new fiction at the same time as you're working on the promo stuff. Honestly, blogs and tweets and whatever are only effective if people are going to follow your blog and twitter accounts, and it's going to be pretty hard to convince them to do that without a good reason. If they haven't read your book, why would they want to read a bunch of extra stuff about it, and if they HAVE read your book, then you can't sell it to them again, so you're left with either trying to sell them the next book or they're no use to you. I'm not saying you shouldn't blog or tweet, just don't spend TOO much energy on it. Is there anything specific about your book you could play off? Like, if it's set in a certain area, could you contact the media for that area and see if they'll give you some coverage? If you live in a small town, the newspaper might be interested in your activity. If your book is set in an unusual milieu, can you post at message boards or contact media dedicated to that world? (eg. if your book is about a team of spelunkers having adventures in a new cavern, could you try to market it to some sort of cave explorer societies?) Think about how you choose the books you yourself read, and try to figure out how to get your book exposure on similar channels.
This HuffPo article has some good marketing advice about using Goodreads including ads and the Giveaway: The Power of the Goodreads Giveaways
