Tag: book marketing

Social Media and the Author

Is social media marketing simply a distraction from other, more productive activities, or does it work to move books?

You may have wondered this from time-to-time. There seems to be little correlation between your number of Twitter followers and your sales figures.

Most authors are not good marketers. We seem to either over-enthuse about our books, to the point we drive people away, or we are so meek we barely mention ever having written a book. We think to ourselves, isn’t that the kind of thing my 2,500 fans ought to know? Continue reading “Social Media and the Author”

Planting Seeds…

Author Ken La Salle
Author Ken La Salle

Guest post
by Ken La Salle

As a writer, I sometimes have to remind myself to think beyond my current project (or projects). I find it important to remember to play the long game and not focus only on the immediate. This is a career I’m building, not a fairy tale. Things take time.

It is with this in mind that I decided to write these words to share with you.

Recently, I’ve been trying to get my philosophical memoir, Climbing Maya (available in ebook and paperback), recognized by a few media outlets in the hopes of driving up sales. When I talk about media outlets, I’m talking about newspapers, magazine, television and… oh, but I live in southern California where nobody reads and the TV market isn’t even aware of my existence. Taking that into consideration, media becomes blogs, podcasts, and radio (with a smattering of others hopefuls along the way). Continue reading “Planting Seeds…”

Introducing BookScather

Indie authors sweat bullets over getting reviews and worrying about bad reviews. It turns out we’ve been going about this all wrong.

Studies show that bad reviews on books by unknown authors actually result in a spike in sales. Who can argue with studies?

Add to this the number of indie author elites bemoaning the state of indie writing. Now look at Amazon and its scorched-earth policy on obliterating suspect favorable reviews while ignoring suspect bad reviews. Amazon is in the process of eliminating ALL author to author reviews.

It’s going to be all right, folks. Even in these trying times, one man has the vision and courage to come to the rescue of the indie community—and that man is me. Continue reading “Introducing BookScather”

Tuesday Tutorial: Bublish

All right everyone. I will take the plunge and try my hand at a tutorial. Let me tell you about Bublish and guide you through how to use it. Hey, if I can do this, anyone can. No, really, I mean it. Please do forgive the lack of artistry on the arrows. I am no artist.

Bublish has been around only since June of this year, so I had the good luck to be an early subscriber. Bublish is the brainchild of Kathy Meis and Charles Wyke-Smith. I have had extensive email contact with Kathy and she was kind enough to spend 40 minutes one-on-one with me when I hit a snag. (Thanks Kathy.) I have nothing but praise for the support I have received.

What makes Bublish unique is that it has the author take snippets of text from their book and asks them to write an insight about that snippet, then share it on Facebook and Twitter. Do this regularly and you will have tweets going out that are non-repetitive, interesting and – my favourite – not pushy buy my book spam messages. They are little hooks meant to entice a prospective reader to take a closer look at your work. Heck, they might even want to buy it. The links for buying are on the site, so that is just a click away. Continue reading “Tuesday Tutorial: Bublish”