Tag: Marketing

Helping you become a #1 Bestselling Author

Bestselling Author … Bestselling Novel … sounds good doesn’t it? A few weeks ago, I posted about reviews and their impact on ratings and readers. You can see that post here. Today, I want to discuss the elusive BESTSELLER.

When you have achieved bestseller status, it is yours for life. No one can take it away. Conveniently, Amazon changes the rankings hourly. Now, many of you might look at that as a negative but all you need is for your book to hit #1 just one time, and even if it drops out after an hour, you’ve just achieved “bestseller” status.

As with anything in our indie publishing world, you have to know the system before you play the game. First, when you uploaded and published your book, you picked five categories. These have nothing to do with how Amazon ranks your book—they’re used in keyword searches for someone browsing topics. Continue reading “Helping you become a #1 Bestselling Author”

Ed’s Casual Friday: So *that* is why they advertise…

I hate promo.

I really do. And I don’t mean other people’s promo (OPP?), though I’m not a fan of it, either. I mean I hate doing it myself – flogging my book hither, thither, and yon. And yet, it seems to be at least half of the Indie gig, as all the time and energy spent getting the good cover and crafting the effective blurb and gathering reviews, let alone writing and editing a whole book in the first place, won’t matter at all if nobody ever sees it. Not if no one ever visits that listing on Amazon or B&N or the iStore. Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: So *that* is why they advertise…”

What the heck is Pinterest?

Officially, Pinterest is a ‘virtual pinboard’ that lets you pin pictures of all the beautiful, interesting and just plain cool stuff you find on the internet, and waste several glorious hours doing it. I know, I’ve done it. And not regretted a single minute.

On a purely personal level you can use it for your bucket list of places you want to see or things you want to do, you can use it to help design your garden, learn or share recipes or set your style of clothing.

On a professional level you can post inspirational pictures, the images of places you’d like to – or already have – used in your books, while also providing a glimpse of your personality. There’s a section for Your Style that I believe is supposed to be for posting pictures of clothes and shoes, but I use it for the things that say something about me as a person. It’s an interesting way to allow readers to see another side of you, to get a glimpse of the things you like, the things that interest you.

You can also post direct links to your books on it.

All that being said, it’s very easy to use. Continue reading “What the heck is Pinterest?”

Should you have Klout?

I’ll try to make this short and to the point. I’m going to talk briefly about something that is either (A) a worthless timewaster or (B) the next big thing.

As always, I’ll put out my disclaimer— I’m not an expert in Klout. I happen to toy with it and, more or less, actively participate. Behind the scenes here at Indies Unlimited, there were discussions as to what, who, how and why of Klout, so here we go. Continue reading “Should you have Klout?”