I just returned from BEA (Book Expo America) in New York and boy, are my arms tired. Seriously. With publishers handing out signed ARCs right and left, I should have brought an oxcart. Aside from meeting authors and publishing professionals, scarfing up swag, and nearly getting trampled by a gang of fans waiting to see Neil Gaiman and Amy Tan, I attended a full-day event called uPublishU, which consisted of workshop after workshop of tips and best practices for self-publishing. Continue reading “How to Increase Your Internet Discoverability”
Tag: Guy Kawasaki
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”
Direct Marketing for Indies (NOT)
We’d all like to sell more books, right? And we’re marketing directly to our readers (or trying to), right? So maybe we should be looking to direct marketers for advice.
With that thought, I picked up the number-one bestselling Kindle book in the direct marketing category: Crush It With Kindle: How to self publish your books on Kindle and promote them to #1 bestseller status, by John Tighe. Leaving aside the typos in the title (“with” should be lower case, and “self-publish” ought to be hyphenated), I was hoping for some big insights. Alas, the only thing I learned was how to make my book resemble an infomercial. Continue reading “Direct Marketing for Indies (NOT)”