Are Indie Books Being Squeezed out of Book Promo Sites?

NoIndiesI was at dinner with a couple of friends recently and my buddy reached over and grabbed my wrist. He told me that his wife was using his credit card to pay for books on her Amazon account. She was buying books every day, and it was all my fault. After he released me, she leaned over and said she couldn’t leave the house in the morning without checking her daily emails from three different book promo sites. We laughed it off and he admitted that secretly he was glad because even though she was buying more books than she had when she was buying print books she was actually spending less money.

She’d found those book promotion sites from Facebook posts that I’d promoted. Now she purchases books almost every day and she’s very happy. She doesn’t care who publishes the book; she just wants to find a good read, and sites like Bookbub, Peoplereads, and The Fussy Librarian offer great books. It’s just that simple. I’m one of many who post links to these sites and others and it’s helped them build their lists of subscribers. Things are changing though. A colleague pointed out to me recently that a book promotion website that we’d utilized in the past, (not one of those listed above), posted in their guidelines that their main emphasis was now on promoting mainstream published books. And they said they intended to only promote a limited number of independently published books. That means the majority of books on their site are published traditionally. Continue reading “Are Indie Books Being Squeezed out of Book Promo Sites?”

Booktastik Hopes to Spread the Word about Good Books

booktastik_black_250x250There’s a new book promotion site out there attempting to reach readers with great books from authors. Booktastik has been around since January of this year, with the goal of being both an author- and reader-friendly site. Unlike many of the other daily subscriber email sites, Booktastik features shorter works (so long as they’re more than 20,000 words). IU chatted with Booktastik’s Dionne Lister about what separates Booktastik from the pack and how the first five months of book sharing has been going. Continue reading “Booktastik Hopes to Spread the Word about Good Books”

Book Promo Sites That Work

Book Promo PicEverybody wants to know which book promo sites get the job done. Now it’s time to share your experiences with book promo sites and which ones worked the best for you.

Some sites do better with free books than paid or discount books. Some sites do better with moving certain genres, so tell us about who did best for you and be sure to include whether the book you promoted was free or discounted, and what genre it was. Tell us the name of the site and give us a link! We’ll try to contact the ones everybody likes to see if they’ll do an interview!

All Mystery Newsletter: A Great Free Promo Resource

all mystery newsletterIf you write mysteries, you’re kind of in luck. Because that’s a very high sales value genre. One very concrete measure of that is the pricing on BookBub—the highest priced advertising on their newsletter at $1500 for a book over $2.00. But there’s a way to get your book promo mailed to readers in that niche without the expense: the All Mystery! newsletter.

Rebecca Dahlke’s lively tipsheet/site for mystery novels has had an interesting history, particularly in light of that discussion of pricing. She explains the service’s bounce from free to fee back to free like this, “I started All Mystery e-newsletter in 2010. It went out once a month and it was free to all authors. Then social media fired up and more was needed, including the time I spent to produce, so a fee was charged. However, I’ve recently been able to revamp All Mystery, adding some much needed muscle to the social media aspect–and now I’m happy to be able to offer promotion again for Nada, zip, zero, nada.” Continue reading “All Mystery Newsletter: A Great Free Promo Resource”