Showing posts with label Derek Haines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Derek Haines. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 31

Derek Haines: Are Free Ebooks A Good Marketing Strategy?


Derek Haines over at The Vandal talks about whether offering one of your books for free is a good marketing tool. His conclusion:
I suppose the conclusion I have drawn is that the free book promotion option offered by KDP Select is a worthwhile marketing tool and a chance to get noticed and get your name out there as an author. Although it’s a bit pot luck, that’s still better than nothing. Trying to get a few good free book listing sites to add your book is certainly a way to help boost your exposure and is definitely worthwhile as is a bit of good old fashioned self promotion on your own social media networks.
It looks as though, even after Amazon's changes to its ranking algorithm, making ones ebook free can still be effective in raising paid ebook sales. It's interesting, though, that it doesn't always work. Out of four books Derek tried this with, only one did amazingly well. Still, he writes that "I can see from my unit sales and borrows that July was a very good month. A five fold increase on June".

You can read Derek's entire article here: Do Free Ebook Promotions Work? My Conclusion

Of course luck will always be a factor, but, if Derek's experience is representative, it's a mistake to put too much weight on how any one book does. If one book doesn't take off, that doesn't mean another won't.

Related articles:
- 50 Shades Of Alice In Wonderland: Another Indie Success Story
- Writer Beware: The Return Of The Vanity Press
- Forget NaNoWriMo: How To Write A Novel In A Weekend

Photo credit: pix.plz


Friday, June 22

The Vandal's 10 Ways To Promote Your Book

10 ways for writers to promote their book
10 Ways To Promote Your Book

Derek Haines' blog is one that I read regularly, it was one of his posts that convinced me to set up my own website, although that is still a work in progress. Here are the first 5 of his 10 ways to promote your books, the remaining 5 can be found on his website.
  1. Use a Facebook Page. I made the mistake of using my personal Facebook profile for too long before realising my error. Keep your personal life away from your book marketing and set up a Page. It’s more professional and much easier to manage.
  2. Always be positive. It doesn’t matter in what form your communication takes. Whether it be posting on Twitter, Facebook or another social platform, never be negative. Even if you are insulted, do not react. Ignore, and even block that user. Keep what you post friendly, informative, complimentary and of course also add news or interesting tit bits about your books.
  3. Use multiple Twitter accounts. This may have been frowned on earlier, but I believe it’s a necessity for effective promotion. It serves to keep your main account, that is the one using your own name, relatively free of direct promotional material. As it is the account you use to interact with friends and probably other writers, filling your own timeline with book promotion is not going to be received well. By setting up another account (or two), you can aim at different target groups to follow and build a new following. Of course you need to add content to these accounts, but there are many ways to almost automate the process. Think about posting interesting bloggers, related news stories or even selective retweeting. Then add your promotional content in between.
  4. Use Stumbleupon. This is a great way to get your books and blog posts discovered, and by a large audience. Stumbleupon is second only to Twitter for me in attracting new traffic to my blog.
  5. Write and publish under a pen name. This may sound off topic when talking about self promotion, but it’s a great way to experiment and try new writing ideas. Amazon allows publishing under a pen name on your own account, so it opens up a lot of possibilities. I have used it to experiment with writing short novellas in new genres. To do a little promotion and test the market, I use one of my secondary Twitter accounts. If it looks like it could work, you can then unpublish, change the cover and title as well as make any other changes you think would improve the book then republish under your own name. As you hold the rights under both names, there’s no problem in republishing the same book again under your own name.
To read the rest of Derek's article, click here: 10 Ideas To Promote Self Published Books
[Update (Oct 29, 2012): I just re-read the above direct quotation from Derek's blog and was shocked. I'm not sure if Derek Haines has changed his opinion about using multiple Twitter accounts to promote ones books, but doing this is NOT best practices.

Honesty is the best policy. Represent yourself as yourself. If you want multiple Twitter accounts, that's fine, just be sure to clearly identify yourself as the account holder of each one.]

I have a StumbleUpon account, but hadn't thought of using it to promote my own books. Great idea! This is one of the reasons why I love the wonderful community of indie bloggers, they're so marvelously helpful.

[Update (Oct 29, 2012): I never used my StumbleUpon account to promote my books or my blog, at least not in any way objectionable. And, as you can see if you look at the account, I clearly identified myself as Karen Woodward. I'm not passing judgement on anyone who used the sort of tactics Derek describes, I just want to make it clear I never followed suit and that I do not recommend the practice.]

Here's a tip of my own: Pinterest. I've been using it off and on for the past few weeks just because it's fun, but I think it could be a great way to share links with a new audience. In case you're interested, here's my Pinterest page.

Cheers!

Monday, May 28

Using A Book To Market Your Blog


Many people start blogs to market books, but lately I've been hearing about it the other way round, using a book to market a blog.

Derek Haines writes about this in his latest blog post, Why Is This Book So Popular?
I continue to be astonished when I look at my book sales each month. There is one book that stands out, and it sits at the very bottom of my KDP bookshelf. I compiled Vandalism of Words a long time ago as little promotional idea for my blog. At around 200 pages it is a decent length collection of bits and pieces that had appeared on my blog over a number of years. Originally released in paperback, I then published it in ebook on both Kindle and Smashwords.

I offered it for free on Smashwords and then Amazon picked up the free price and matched it. So for the last two years or more, it has been free on both sites. Now without fail, this book is downloaded at least 600 times each month, and surprisingly, even sells a few paperback copies.
If you'd like to download Derek's book, here's a link to the Kindle store: Vandalism Of Words.

Happy reading!

Thursday, May 17

An Indie Writer Shares His Experience With KDP Select


I've written a few posts about publishing on Amazon and tried to say something intelligent, or at least intelligible, about KDP Select and whether paying the price of exclusivity with Amazon for the perks of being in its lending library are worth it.  (For those who don't know, in order to enroll your book in Amazon's KDP Select program one cannot publish that book anywhere else, not even ones own website.)

Fortunately Derek Haines has shared his experience with KDP Select. He writes:
If my conclusion about KDP Select was purely based on the number of borrowed books and having the ability to give my books away, of course I would be out. But there’s just one rather strange consequence that I’ve noticed since joining. My ebook sales keep increasing each month. For the life of me I can’t really put my finger on the reason though. Perhaps it’s all because of the free books, or maybe because I’ve changed deodorant. I really don’t know. But giving Amazon exclusivity has resulted in far, far more sales for me and more than make up for the few ebooks I used to sell on other retailers each month. As well as that it’s much easier to keep track of payments from just one source.
- The Vandal
 Thanks Derek! This is the kind of information indie authors love, it's good of you to share.

By the way, Derek's blog, The Vandal, is an excellent place to get tips about writing, blogging and the entire world of writing.

Related Articles:
- Amazon's Ranking Algorithm Has Changed: what this means for indie authors
- Self Publishing on Amazon: Kindle Direct Publishing