by Sandra Lord
Following are my notes from William Hertling’s workshop Every Trick in the Book for Optimizing Sales and Presence on Amazon, presented at the Willamette Writers Conference last August 2013.
Marketing should include cover design, reviews of your book, and exposure. For goals, you should build creditibility, relationships, and momentum - getting your first 100 sales. Some approaches to your goals are: Experiment and observe what sells. Find readers who read books like yours. It’s essential to have a website. The site doesn’t need to be beautiful, but it must be effective.
Post Launch
1. Fans - answer e-mails, give them something personal, e.g., why you wrote the book. This makes a “super fan”. Keep in touch with them.
2. Reach out to communities that would enjoy your book.
Facebook Ads
List your book’s title, a short description, appeal to fans of a genre author. The cost is approximately $.50 per time someone clicks on your ad.
Landing Influences
Go to Google to see how your book is doing. “Google Alerts” tells you when a hit is made. Cultivate relationships.
Pricing Books
$2.99 book - on Kindle you make $2. Above $4.99 a book - not price competitive.
POD - $9.99. You make $2/book. If book is longer than 250 pages, you’ll have to price it higher than $9.99.
For those of you interested in self-publishing (his tactics can apply to traditional publishing also) go to Hertling’s website www.williamhertling.com for more good information. I also recommend his book, Indie & Small Press Book Marketing.
The Blue Sage Writers of Idaho is a loosely organized group comprised of both published and unpublished writers. The group meets once a month to share tips, tricks, camaraderie and to critique each other's work. We are not accepting new members at this time but are happy to have authors or beginning writers visit twice.
Good post Sandy. Wheatmark says the same thing about websites. We need to have one, and they also stress the importance of blogging. Blog at least once a week, and syndicate your blogs to the social networks.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info, Sandy. Things were quite different in the 90s. I need all the help I can get.
ReplyDeleteSherry