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.