The Time Bubble

I'm preparing to embark on the biggest ever promotional push I've run on any of my books. My Tomorrow Your Yesterday is going on to Kindle Countdown Deal for the second time on June 15th. The first time was back in the spring, soon after launch when it was a lot less established than it is now. Even so, I was very pleased with the results. Despite very little promotion on my part, sales soared during the week it was reduced, and have continued at a very nice level ever since. This time, I've decided to go in all guns blazing and invest some serious money in the promotion to get the word out there. This is not as straightforward as it sounds. It is very easy to spend a lot of money on book promotion and not get results - there are literally hundreds of advertising options out there which can be quite daunting for an inexperienced author. How can we make sure we are investing our money wisely? Something that might only cost $5 might not seem much of a risk but is it reall...

People write and self-publish for many reasons. For some, it is purely for the sense of achievement. They want to leave their mark on the world and aren't worried if they don’t sell any copies. The fact that they've written the book is fulfilment enough. Others dream of writing a best-seller that they’ll load up to Kindle and will take the charts by storm. In reality it seldom works out like that. I have seen statistics which say that the vast majority of self-published books will never sell more than 100 copies. It’s fair to say that the quality of work out there is variable. Some people will load up poorly written books, riddled with errors that probably don’t deserve to sell. But what about those who have written brilliant well-crafted books that deserve to succeed, yet sit unloved on Amazon’s virtual shelves? How do the authors of these books feel, knowing they've written a fantastic piece of work that nobody is buying? Pretty demoralised, I would imagine. Ther...

As a new author I found it quite daunting when first venturing into the realm of selling Kindle books. How would I get noticed? How would I get reviews? And many other questions. Coming in as a complete novice with my first book almost a year ago I certainly made a few mistakes. But I've learnt a lot since then, both from experience and reading as much as I could from other writers in the form of blogs, message boards, and simply by talking to them. Quite early on, I realised there were two hurdles to overcome. It was hard to make sales without any reviews. And it's hard to get reviews if no-one has bought your book. It is all very well putting a book on to Amazon and hoping people will buy it, but this is not the equivalent of having it on display in the front window of Waterstones. In fact you have about as much chance of it being spotted as you'd have in Waterstones if they agreed to stock it, took one copy and then hid it behind the cistern in the staff toilets. W...