(My way of doing it)
About a year ago I started doing something that I thought was pretty bold, and had a certain degree of risk to it, I started actively marketing the novels that I’ve written online.
At the time I said that I’d keep people ‘in the loop’ with how things went, and we could have a bit of a discussion on what works and what doesn’t. It’s been a very interesting journey, and in many ways I’m only just beginning to make any traction, but what a ride its been!
Last week I began by explaining about some Facebook groups that we authors can use and how good they might be. Many of them I found to be really useful, but not always for the direct selling of the books! They’ve been great for learning from others about the whole industry, but some of the best sites actually don’t like you selling the books there, there’s a reason for it. They don’t want to be swamped with everyone just advertising books, but they’ll often give great advice on what to do to get your books in front of people who actually want to buy.
The Author page
Right, you’ve put the book up on Kindle, set up for printing paperbacks with Amazon, so what’s next? Well are you aware that Amazon has given you a place where to tell the world about your books, and it’s totally free?
Its called an Author page, and its probably the most important piece of ‘virtual real estate’ you have, it’s the place where you can literally set up shop to sell your books, and it’s awesome as there’s so much you can do with it. I’ve put a link in to mine below so that you can at least have a look at some of the things you can do with it. mine is nowhere near utilized for all it can do, but one day I’ll get there, go ahead, take a look.
https://www.amazon.com/Lawrence-F-Hebb/e/B01HER49GM?ref_=dbs_p_ebk_r00_abau_000000
I put my first book up on Amazon, and just carried on as if I’d done everything right (actually that bit I did get right for the first novel, it was the later ones I forgot to go in and list on the page) and for three years I couldn’t figure out why the very few books I wold always seemed to be the first one I wrote, the others didn’t seem to be getting any traction!
It was just at the start of December, I thought I was doing everything right, and I’d even started to get sales, but only of the first book in the series, then I discovered the mistake, my author page wasn’t up to date!
One of the authors I follow here on the internet had said in a webinar that if I’d written the books to lead into each other, and if the books themselves were good then for every ten books you sell of the first in the series you should get seven or higher of the second and third in the series, but I was getting a ratio of ten of the first book and maybe two of the second and if I was lucky they were finding the third!
I decided that I had nothing really to lose, so I sat down, worked through the Amazon videos showing how to set the Author page up and worked through the issues not really sure what to expect, what I got was a jump in sales as people could find the books more easily, but there was something else.
Selling direct from the Author page
When I was figuring this out back in December I got a few sales that I couldn’t for the life of me work out where they’d come from! That bugged me as I like to know how things work. I posted on a Facebook group and asked the question, “Where are these sales from?” (I forget the exact words) and the reply I got back was “Chill out bro, probably your Author page!”
See, I’m convinced that Amazon wants to make money, but they want to do it alongside us, they don’t want to do all the work themselves, they want us to work with them, if you’re willing to work at this and learn how to do things like marketing then Amazon and Kindle are more than happy to work with you, but you only get out what you put in!
A little secret
I’ll let you in on something, when I decided to learn about how to market my books I had no idea where things would take me, I had no idea what the potential was, all I knew was that if the Novels I’d written were worth the effort of writing them, then they surely must be worth the effort of trying to market them to some degree.
At the time I was selling maybe a book a month! I’m still very near the bottom rung on this marketing ladder, but my sales have increased sixty fold (at the last count) and with very little effort on my part.
So, do you want free advertising for your books? Stuff you only have to update when you release a new novel (you can do it much more often if you’ve got video and the like) then get on over there and set up an Author page!
Let me know what you think.
Lawrence's letters 