Guest post
by Parker Moose
On June 8th, I released my debut novel. The world replied with crickets. The next day I sent a message to all of my contacts on Twitter and Facebook asking them to buy my book. That got me about a 10 percent response rate and a brief bump in Amazon’s rankings. But then I ran out of people who thought they might have known me in high school, and it was back to anonymity.
Lured by the siren song and royalties of KDP Select, I chose to be exclusive with Amazon and tried my first free promotion. The results of that were inconclusive, except for another brief bump in the standings and the unexpected finding that Germans really love free books. But then, sales tapered off again. It was time to get serious. Continue reading “A Dinosaur in a Young Adult’s World”
I thought it was a simple question, just like my answer. Kat Brooks mentioned that while sampling books using the “look inside” feature at Amazon she’d been seeing a lot of books front loaded with reviewer quotes among the front matter before the start of the actual book. Her question was whether the reviewer quotes were going to influence our buying decisions.
Sometimes I feel like my posts at Indies Unlimited help too little, or maybe that should be they help, but complain too much. Largely, I see that as a difference between my logical role as a contributor here, and the majority of IU’s other contributors. While most of IU’s posts are written by authors, Cathy Speight and I are exceptions. We’re book reviewers. Other contributors can talk about how to craft proper dialogue, their experiences with KDP Select, and various marketing techniques, and all of us can pass on our experiences with social media or (in Cathy’s case), help with punctuation usage, but there are areas Cathy and I can talk about that the other minions can’t. We see the best indie books out there (largely written by IU readers) and the worst (the authors who I’m guessing frequent those other sites instead). When we see trends in those “worst books,” we can point them out. These can be reminders or cautionary tales for those faithful IU readers and, for those other people who stumble in from elsewhere, possibly help them see the error of their ways. They’ll not only become better at their job as an author, but may eventually rise to the level of the faithful IU reader. Raising everyone’s game, helps us all. Which leads to my current criticism. 