Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Marketing and Promoting Books

Free for a limited time

With some feet dragging and hesitation, I'm slowly trying to transition my focus from writing to marketing. This means that I now set marketing goals every morning and I have to accomplish them before I settle back into my story. I try to market before lunch, leaving me the afternoon to write. Just yesterday, Amazon price-matched my award winning novel, Beyond the Fortuneteller's Tent, making it free. It's interesting that while I haven't promoted it at all on Amazon, it's already had more than 350 downloads, making me wonder how readers have found it. I did mention it in my most recent newsletter, but there I provided the Barnes and Noble link because when I sent out the newsletter, it wasn't free on Amazon. Because Amazon is my heaviest player, I'm sharing the stats for Amazon only. Currently, before promotions, here are my Beyond stats. Keep in mind, the reason I'm giving my book away is to drive sales to the sequels.

Beyond the Fortuneteller's Tent
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #460 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)

Tomorrow will be the first of my promotions with Book Machine. Membership for readers is free and will give you access to free Kindle books and quality deals, especially tailored to your favorite genres. This link will take you to the page: http://www.thebooksmachine.com 

I'm excited about this marketing blitz for my Beyond series. It piggybacks with a countdown deal at the beginning of the October for Witch Winter, the sequel to Witch Ways, which will be followed a free promotion of The Highwayman Incident that coincides with the release of my third book in the Witching Well series. 

As you can see, I've decided that the secret to selling books is pretty much the same secret to any level of success. You have to show up. Every day. It's like running. You have to put on your sneakers, regularly--whatever that means to you. If you want to run a marathon, if you're smart, you'll have a training schedule and you'll follow it religiously, because if you don't, at best, you'll probably find yourself vomiting along the side of the road, and, at worst, you'll be picked up lying on the side of the road by the National Guard. (That was my only goal when I ran a marathon, not to be carried away by the National Guard. I made it, by the way. It was a long time ago, but I'm still learning and practicing those lessons of endurance.

Even though I've found marketing challenging, now that I'm armed with my spreadsheets and I've made up a plan (that will be sure to fluctuate as I learn) I'm finding it easier to spend my mornings plugging my books. 

Be sure and drop by to see how the stats change in the upcoming days!

September 17th

It's two days into my promo. Today, I had listings with AskDavid.com and BKnights Fiverr and I gave away 342 copies. More importantly, though, are the sales of my other Beyond Books. Here's my listing as of now. 


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