Self-publishing Author Advice about reaching readers, author platform, discoverability, book marketing and book promotion
So, Are you good at selling your books online? Take the test and find out, says Nick Atkinson. [from the FutureBook Blog] 1. Choose your book. Pick something that’s been released for at least a couple of weeks but it doesn’t matter whether it’s frontlist or backlist. Arguably a backlist title should perform better in this test […]
Marketeers say the key to promoting a book is to take off your writer’s hat. But, argues Orna Ross, that makes indie authors vulnerable to crass self-promotion. The key, she says, is to connect your reach-out to readers with your deepest motives for writing the book in the first place. As soon as Michael came […]
Trying to get readers to write a review is like getting your two-year-old child to take a horrible-tasting medicine, says ALLi member and regular contributor, Giacomo (Jim) Giammatteo. But it is possible and it is worth it. In the first of a three-part series on reviews, he explains how he gets more than twenty reviews a […]
Self publishing is at the cutting edge of the most interesting, radical and provocative writing that’s happening right now. Dan Holloway comes up from writing his own great work to overground some others. Underground, Overground… No, whilst they were a central part of my childhood, I’m not talking about the Wombles. In my last post here […]
We had a wide-ranging discussion on the ALLi Member-Only Facebook Page recently about book promotion and how to reach readers, that deserves a wider audience. It started when Susanne Lakin (see below) posted one of her great links, to Russell Blake’s exploration of Amazon’s KDP algorithms and free days. And then, as is wont to […]
GUEST POST: By Ben Cameron of Smith Publicity. For publicity purposes, there are essentially two kinds of blogs, those that are an offshoot of another form of media, such as a newspaper, magazine or radio show; and those that are independent stand-alones. Either way, they are usually written by a single individual or a small group […]
In an over-crowded marketplace, we assume it’s reviews that sell books and, predictably, it’s now possible to buy “honest reviews”. Could paid-for reviews be a good investment? Possibly, but I think we should be asking ourselves a different question—how do books find their readers? Or, to put it another way, what makes a book visible […]
On its website, Boston-based search engine optimisation (SEO) and marketing firm ‘Brandignity’ says: “Always write for humans first”. For those who don’t have much experience on the web, this may sound like an odd piece of advice, but I’m sure a lot of you know how out of whack web copy used to be. Users were […]
We’ve been having a debate about self-promotion on our Alliance of Independent Authors’ member-only Facebook group. And one of our members, Richard Bunning, came up with a great idea to get around this perennial problem for self-publishers and the forums they hang out on. Like most great ideas, it’s simple. Naturally, as writers, we want […]
This post originally appeared on Jane Friedman’s blog. Platform is one of the most difficult concepts to explain, partly because everyone defines it a little differently. So let’s break down this thing called platform a (more…)