New attitudes in the book marketing game!

I know many of you have felt the way I have from time to time. What is this game we’ve gotten ourselves into? And yet we can’t seem to stop no matter how low our sales or how many of our friends ask us why in heaven’s name we’re doing this. It’s because we love to write, isn’t that so? For me it’s an obsession that will not leave me alone. 

But trying to understand and learn the reasons why some are successful and others are not—this is tricky. It does not have to do with quality—that much I’ve determined. To do well you simply have to wear another hat—a marketing hat. And with this hat on you must read boring and long treatises on how to make a Facebook ad that sells and where to give your book away for free and how to get an e-mail marketing list going. Everyone has said that the more books you have out the better you do—I have not found this to be true. The only thing good about it is that my readers have more to choose from and might end up buying a book or two!

I have balked at the idea of giving my books away, feeling better about offering them for .99. But everyone says that a Bookbub deal will lead to sales for months afterward—I have yet to get them to accept one of my books, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. I have also heard that giving the first book in a series away will generate sales for the rest. I did try this and ended up getting myself kicked off KDP select for an entire year! I didn’t go about it correctly—don’t make my mistake! Apparently if you approach this correctly Amazon will price match—look it up on a forum before you do what I did.

Basically we as self-published authors are expected to do everything. And this is hard if you want to spend your time writing. I hired a marketer for a while to help me with keywords and with super urls, the meaning of which I am still attempting to understand. Chris O’Byrne at Jetlaunch is not expensive and can help you through some of the more complicated issues. And he edits! My latest marketing endeavor is sponsored ads on Amazon. This morning I listened to a webinar on the subject given by:

 Dave at Kindlepreneur. If you click on this link soon you will reap the benefits--with what I gleaned from listening I have now placed an ad for one of my books. It is a long webinar but there is a lot of information packed in. Mark Dawson and Jon Loomer also have FREE courses on doing FB ads. So don’t give up hope—you can wear all the hats and still have time for writing! The main thing is not to give up!