Monthly Archives: August 2014

Things Learned

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I haven’t heard back from MERP, so I’m guessing that’s a dead end. I would have thought they’d at least have a bot send me a notification that they got my request and would get back to me with their decision in so many days. Jakiblue sent me some other links for Blog Tours and I may look into them.

Of more interest are my initial findings on the DIY ads at Goodreads. My ad has been running for a week now. According to their daily statistics they’ve placed my ad 3512 times on pages people are looking at. This has resulted in exactly 0 (zero) clicks. The good news is my $50 is lasting a good long time – LoL. The bad news is that either people don’t care about the ad or they’re not seeing it. I know that when I go to the various pages at Goodreads, the ads are along the side of the page and toward the bottom. Unless I scroll down the page for some reason, I often don’t see them at all. Other times, when I do see something that catches my eye, it’s usually right after I’ve clicked to go somewhere else and then I can’t get the same ad to pop back up.

In other news, I started a Giveaway on Goodreads. I’m putting up for grabs one print version of my book. The Giveaway is open to everyone. Goodreads handles the entire thing (aside from me being responsible for getting the book sent out to the winner). I’m running the sign up time until September 9th (my birthday!). There’s still several days available to sign up. Tell your friends. Heck, tell your enemies!

I’ll report back next week with further news on my DIY ad, and update y’all on the Giveaway.

Learning Through Trial and Error

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Okay, so I read about how to market myself before I actually published my book. Of course, I don’t have a head for such things, so all the information sorta just slithered through and back out of my grey matter. Jakiblue, who has Google-fu skillz, has attempted to help me out by pointing out the various places that do blog tours. I finally caved in and signed up for one – Merp Squad Tours – and I now await their decision. Having never done a tour, I have no idea what to expect. With luck I’ll get accepted and learn a few things in the process.

Merp is free, by the way. I’m trying to sell books, not keep myself in dept by paying for all kinds of promotions. Still, I thought maybe I should at least attempt to invest something into promoting myself, so I’m giving the Goodreads ads a try. What it boils down to is you give them your budget (I went with $50), and put together and image link with a synopsis, and they charge you out of your budget by the number of clicks you get. You set aside a limit per day. My budget allows for .50 per click with 10 clicks per day. My promotion continues until my $50 gets used up. So, assuming ten people a day click on my ad, my promotion will last ten days. I have zero idea how effective such site specific ads are, but I’m willing to invest $50 to get an idea.

If I sell 15 ebooks as a result of the ads I will make back what I invested. That doesn’t seem like an outrageous number of books, so I don’t feel I’m risking too much. As of today, I have sold a total of 54 books in a little less than a month. Considering the fact I wasn’t sure I’d even manage to sell one book when I put it out there, I’m feeling pretty warm and fuzzy.

If anyone who has picked up my book is reading this, thank you so much.

OH, and of course I’ll post back when I have some idea what my ad accomplishes. If nothing else, perhaps my findings will help some other new author-publisher out there.

Still Getting My Feet Wet

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Things are chugging along with the first book. A few people I don’t know have actually picked it up, and that’s a start. I have my first ever review, and it’s about as wonderful of a review as I could ever hope for. It seems to be responsible for the three sales from people that I don’t know (or at least they haven’t told me they know me). I’m excited and gratified by the attention.

I can’t just loll about hoping for more strokes to my ego though, so I’m settling down for a long day of typing/editing/writing. I finished up Chapter 5 of the sequel last night. It’s in desperate need of pruning, but that can wait until I finish entering the rest of the story. Getting distance from it will allow me to make better choices in terms of what to keep, what to eliminate, and what to move.

Chapter 6 will be the focus of today’s work. It’s much shorter than Chapter 5, and tighter written, so it should go much faster. I think I’ll move a scene from a later chapter to it, which will accomplish a couple of things. One, it will bolster the page count of an otherwise too short chapter, and two, it will place a scene earlier in the timeline, which will make a lot more sense in terms of character development. It’s also a less than serious scene and the story could use something to lighten the mood at this point.