I just published my first, on Kindle. Lots of web pages say that the author should get a Twitter account, Facebook page, etc., but they haven't got much to say about what to put on the various accounts. I have them, I just have no idea what to do with them. Call me a social media flunkie, if you want.

Any ideas that worked would be good for discussion.

Look at other successful ebook authors...

Emulate them.

You're not planning to be here very long, are you?

Plain and simple, its a bitch.

You'll end up annoying everyone with spamming every site imaginable with good intentioned posts but its the best way to let people know about it. The only facebook Friends or twitter followers you'll have are the ones that have already read your stuff; you can submit it for independent review for review sites that nobody reads or pays attention to. Most people say to get "active" on places like Goodreads which I dont think has done much for me personally, or pay for ad space but the only stuff that is affordable to self publishing authors is at places that no one pays attention to. You can also pay to enter writing competitions to get some notoriety but my personal writing I know is not award winning, It was never meant to be. So that pretty much leaves you making friends with other authors or big names in the industry (subject matter's industry)  that might hopefully throw you a bone and recommend to their readers that they check out your stuff but I myself would find it pretty tacky to say "Hey Larry, mind giving me a plug to your millions of followers?"

That is the plight of the self published author. Its a long haul thing for not much "pay off", whatever you see the payoff being (money, educating the masses, self accomplishment...)

Its also a two sided bitch being that once you self publish, most publishers wont look at your work, and make no mistake, that is the way to get your book popular.

I blog a bit to build the overall "brand" but mostly because its fun. Free days/giveaways on amazon do help get it noticed some. There are algorithms set in amazon to where your book wont show up on peoples  "also recommended" or "like subject matter" lists until they've moved (sold or given away) a certain number of copies. Dont do the KDP select imo. While its only like 5% of the market, Smashwords distributes to a lot of other places that Amazon does not have the contract for and limits you too much.

That has been my experience so far and may be different for others (not from what I find in my research though). I look into it all the time to see if anyone has found the magic formula yet, but so far, nadda.

I'm a self-published author. You need twitter and use hash tags and if you find someone that is famous using a work you can use to promote your book with a hash tag use it. Facebook author page is another great place to just keep people up to date on your current book and future work.

I would also suggest going over to GoodReads.com and making an account there. Blog away on there and do a self promotion of a free book or two give away. I just did it and it was neat to see how many people wanted to read it. I also posted in the book section and the zombie section of ARFcom and gave away two or three free books. I went onto a couple of other sites and did the same thing. I have two books coming up in a few months that I will be doing the same thing for again.

Make sure to setup your author profile on amazon and it also has a place you can post updates on writing and news about your book. I think there is also a place to have questions and let the fans answer them.

I also setup an email account so readers could email me. I have not had any just as of yet email me but it is still a neat way for the reader and audience contact you. I just did a KiK account that I think I may put in my next projects so people may contact me that way. Being self-published its about how many people you can reach. I know a few authors who are with big time publishers right now and they are still self promoting their work.

Best advice given to me when I first started out was "Don't go looking to get rich on writing because it may never happen. Do it because you enjoy it" and for me it is because I enjoy it. Remember when it stops being fun you will no longer want to do it.

Call Books-A-Million they have a line that you can talk with sales reps and see about having your book put into local stores. I would say Barns & Nobel is the same way but I have not checked with them.

If you already have twitter find someone who will re-tweet you and who will tweet about your book. I was lucky that mine was a zombie book and two guys saw a tweet of mine (they both have over 500K followers each) and they re-tweet me a lot. I also get a few Walking Dead fans tweeting about my stuff once in a while. So look around twitter for someone who is a fan of the type of book you just wrote and message them.

Doing a blog separate from all of the other places I mentioned above is a great idea too. Join a lot of writer groups on Facebook. Nanowriters group is a good one. Try local media and see what happens. I have not tried radio or local news yet because I just didn't feel this book was one I wanted to take to them. I do want to look at doing this in the future.

You can also buy copies of your books and if they do large yard sales in your area put them out there for sale and sign books as you sell them. I have even while out eating just asked the waitress or waiter if they like to read and if they say yes I tell them what I wrote and if it something they would like to read I give them a link or take a book into them once in a while. I know one waiter didn't believe me and looked it up on his phone and everyone in the restaurant in the back come out asking me about the book because they were fans of the walking dead. So just any where you can think of to work things into a conversation will help you out.

Oh and do sample chapters on blogs, websites and make sure you have the book on amazon with the sample chapters.

YouTube. Make a YouTube channel for yourself under your name as an author and talk about your book. Talk about writing and future projects or other peoples work that you like. It will not only help them but help you. I have a YouTube page but have yet to do a video but I will be Vloging a lot very soon.

If I can think of anything else I will let you know. What is the name of the book? I will tweet it out.

Several folks I've liked started as moderators, or had an online presence before they announced their book.

Marko Kloos (munchkinwrangler.com) has been noted as someone using blogs/twitter wisely. (I read it on the internet!)

Peter Grant said he'd built his blog, partially as an exercise to force himself to write daily, partly to establish a place to practice writing. (Go see for your self - bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com). (My interpretation of his words.)

Larry Correia was a moderator at one of the gunboards - TFL or THR, I forget which. Then he built an audience by posting a chapter a week. Monster Hunter International has a lot of 'fan service' (aka gun detail) because that was where his audience was. It grew from there.

There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays hitting it big in writing, and every single one of them is right!

Good Luck!

I'm traditionally published by Thomas and Mercer and 47 North-six novels and a few short stories, novel seven will be out in October-and in my experience blog tours and PR of that sort sells very little books. I tend to avoid social media, but have met several authors that have managed to sell a ton of books by getting on Twitter and sticking with it. I'm not sure I have that in me, but it works for some. From what I've seen, ads on Amazon sell more books than anything else, and ads on Kindle devices are pretty great too.

Thank you. The book - novella, really - is The Hitman. I will IM the link to you so the board won't accuse me of trying to sell it here.

It's priced at $1.50 since it's only 75 pages long. It doesn't qualify for Amazon's 70% royalty at that price and I thought that Kindle Select might give me a few advantages with promotions. I since learned that I can upload it to Barnes and Noble, set their price at $0.00, and have Amazon do a price match to promote it for free whenever I want. Somebody grabbed the name of the book as a domain name nine days before I finished the story. Rats. The pen name I used is still available, though. It's a simple name and easy to remember. I'm waiting for a check this week. As soon as I deposit it, I'll register the name and start work on the site.

I like the YouTube suggestion. I'm buying a D7 from my friend, so that will have to wait until I have the camera. I could use the one in my laptop, but I don't think it's very good. Besides, I dont' know what to say. I don't like self-promotion. It makes me feel like I'm being a braggart.

I know what you mean (about promotions) but if you don't brag on yourself, who will?

You might also check out kriswrites.com. She had some wonderful columns on writing as a business, and getting the word out about your Great American Novel.

John D Brown has had several columns recently about self-publishing. I'd check them out, also. johndbrown.com

Good Luck!

Well, somebody bought one.

M. Hillman?


Has to be you as thebeekeeper did a review.

Too Jewish?

To me a name is a name. I will be reading it this evening.


Will give you an honest review.

Well, I can't claim any great success.

Some authors swear by a youtube book trailer.

I thought I would give it a shot.

I got my self a model, and dressed her up like my main character, and took some pictures.



I have done a few interviews, and that helped for a while.

Facebook works, a little.

I have a few peeps on twitter that push my work.

Nothing really helps.

I'm at $5.90 for sales in the last 30 days.

Most of the FREE promotion sites are scams. You spend an hour filling out the form, then they ask for money.

warriorforum

 

Don't let that post above stop you from publishing. The whole thing of tweeting, Facebook, and using Goodrads.com will lead readers to you and to you quickly. Also when you sell through amazon.com you get an author page and you can run a blog on there just as you can on GoodReads.

When you use Twitter find words that are using hash tags and fit them into your tweets about the book. If you do an youtube channel just talk about the book and about writing. The world of self publishing is tough but so isn't traditional style publishing.

The main thing to always remember if it is no longer fun to write and it feels more and more like a job than it is time to stop. Just have fun, go for it and enjoy it. The one thing I wouldn't do is pay all these companies (even amazon) the 1000-1500 to do a book. Get your own editor (I have been using Garrett Cook) and if you can do the cover artwork yourself you will save a lot of money. When you start sinking money into a project it is hard to get it back.

I've been writing for decades. Sometimes, people even paid me to do it.

Now I have to figure out how to promote myself on Goodreads. I saw a significant number of complaints about the site. They said that there were cliques who would hate on anything that didn't immediately appeal to them, not read the books, and trash them. It sounds kind of like GD.

I put the book on Select so I could use the freebie days, which may have been a mistake. There's a dodge to set the price at $0.00 by also loading it to Barnes and Noble, which will let you set a zero price, and then setting Kindle for price match. The price of this one isn't high enough to get the 70% royalty anyway, so now I have to learn the system and experiment. I also joined the Free Kindle Books group on Facebook. I gave out 168 copies over the weekend. Not one @&$%#^! review. I have two days left. I'll save that for Labor Day weekend. I'll have to ask a few other people to review it.

BTW, it was edited in GD.

Give GoodReads a try so far I have not had anything negative happen or have not seen anything. It is just a great place to do a free blog and a few other things to promote. I have given out books and gotten no reviews too it is the nature of the beast lol.

I'm working on releasing two new books this summer and I have not a clue how to promote these in the same way I promoted my first book. I stepped outside of writing zombies book and I just need to find a way of tweeting to get the same fan base I had.

The KDP (select) is a half crock. Freebies are the hands down best way to get reviews and ranking, but it limits you to only selling on amazon... which does have like 98% of the market in my total sales records so its really not all that bad. Book bomb it. Hit up reviewers and similar subject matter authors for reviews on their own sites. Thats all I did and it was slow going but still topped 30 sales a day at the height of my first book (sales, not freebies) before I knew anything about anything.

Shoot, I'll read and review it for you. If its good i'll post the review on my blog and facebook, if not, I wont say a word lol

IM your email address and I'll send you a .pdf.

My sales are petering off a little but I'm averaging about one a day. I'm a no-name who just published my first novel.

I have tried the social networking thing to promote my books, but I really haven't noticed any results from it.  I think I have like 3-4 people outside friends and family following my Duty, Honor, Planet Facebook page.
The key, at least in my experience, is to have a good blurb and a cheap book.  If you can grab people's attention with a 99 cent book, they'll take a chance on it.  They might not at even $1.99, but at under a buck, they will.
That's only 35 cents a purchase to you, but it adds up and it can get you noticed.  
I may have been very lucky, but my first two self-published e-books did very well and built a following that will buy the sequels.  The sequels to Duty, Honor, Planet are not, of course, selling as well as the original because they cost more and you have to have read and LIKED the first book to buy the sequels.  
Another thing you might consider is, if you're an author who can churn out a book in a few months (I'm not and wish I were) get a couple sequels up.  The more books you have out, the more attention you get.  Also, beg for reviews, however you can get them.  The more reviews you have, the more attention your book gets.  
Sorry I can't be of more help...I wish Larry Correia or John Ringo would mention MY books on their facebook or twitter accounts.  

I lowered the price to $0.99. Where does one go to beg for reviews?

How many reviews do you have?



 

Post a link to your book here, would ya?

Never mind, I found it.  I bought it and I'll leave a review.

He has 2 currently.
I think part of the problem is the length. It's a very short novella and a lot of people don't want to buy and read something that short.

Hey sigp226, I think if you plan to write a bunch more novellas using the same characters, you should combine them into a larger book.  There's not a huge market for individual novellas on Kindle.

This.



The only time I'd ever consider a novella is to keep readers interested in between a pair of novels, particularly if your writing takes a LONG time to turn out, like mine. My first novel took me 10 years to finalize and publish and if it looks like it's going to take that long for the sequel to drop, I'd definitely put out one or two chapters as a small novella.



 

Even dropping it free like on a webpage.  But not as something stand-alone to buy.

I don't agree with that. Cheap, short fiction is always popular. How many of you bought Omni because of the short stories?

I'm looking for something that doesn't require a lot of commitment from the buyers in money and in time spent hoping that it's good. When there are enough of them, I will make a compilation and, hopefully, charge more for it.

Thank you for buying it, RikWriter, but please don't.

If anyone wants to read it, send me an IM with your email address and I'll send you a .pdf. They'll be freebies for site members.

It's 99 cents, man...it ain't gonna break me!  
Also, since I intend to leave a review, it's better if I buy it. Then I'll have the "verified purchase" next to my review so it doesn't look like you went out and got friends and family to review it for you.
The thing about Omni and Starlog and Analog is, there were a lot of short stories per magazine and they were usually by established writers.  Self-publishing is a whole different game.

I think that will change. There is a market for good fiction. There always will be, and a lot of the stuff on Kindle is 300 pages of absolute crap. Somebody else bought it and reviewed it yesterday. I found it interesting that the reader couldn't tell which voice was supposed to be speaking. I started writing it in first person and switched to third omniscient midway through. I thought I caught all of that and fixed it. Perhaps not. I was also confused by the critic's complaint of typos. It was written in Word, then edited in GD. There shouldn't be any. I'll have to take another look at it.
Click To View Spoiler

I need an editor.

Okay, I read it and left you a five star review.
Now my REAL review.
First of all, I like it.  I like the main character and the other cops he deals with.  I like the atmosphere of the Miami setting.  I like the bad guys:  they seemed real.

What I didn't like:
1)You need to work on grammar.  Agreement of tenses, run-on sentences and improper punctuation were all present, though they didn't jar me too badly.  Your grammar is better than 90% of self-published books, but with such a short story, you should be able to check it better.
2)It felt like part of a story rather than the whole story.  If you're planning on a lot more stories with Nick, you should package at least two together, more preferably three if they're going to be that length.
3)If you're going to use limited 3rd person POV, that is using the point of view of one character per scene but done in the third person rather than the first person, you need to maintain that POV through the whole scene.  It took me a while to get that, and I screwed it up in parts of my first two books.  It's not a dealbreaker for a good book, but it's something to work on.  I've managed to avoid making that error in my last couple books and I always have to keep an eye on myself.

Now get to work and write some more!  

God, I wish I could sleep tonight.  I got insomnia bad tonight for some reason.

All good points.



I'm a grammar Nazi and I apply that to EVERYTHING I do: emails, texts, typing on an open forum (like ARFcom), writing books, etc. etc. I also read a lot and believe me, it all helps me become better at simple shit like punctuation and proper grammar.



Perfect example is Cormac McCarthy; that bastard LOVES to write outside the punctuation norm and I simply can't handle it. He doesn't use quotes or commas with dialogue and I find it absolutely ridiculous; I simply can't read his novels. It's too distracting.



Same thing can most certainly be said with POV continuity; whatever voice you're writing in MUST be carried through the entire story. Otherwise you'll confuse your readers and it draws them out of the story. My novel is written in a third person narrative but there are scenes where the main character is speaking to himself in his head, where the reader is essentially able to know EXACTLY what his thoughts are. I offset those sentences by making them new paragraphs and putting them in italics. It lets the reader know this is a unique paragraph and sets it apart from the rest of the narration and dialogue.



 

What I'm talking about where I made the mistake and where I noticed it once or twice in sig's story is when you're seeing a scene through the POV of one character, even though it's written in third person, and then you state something from the POV of another character in the scene.
Kinda like this for example:

Dave stalked into the room seething, still enraged by what he'd seen on the news.  He saw Karen sitting at her computer, pecking fitfully at the keyboard.
"What are you working on?"  he asked, sounding angry without intending to.
"Oh, not much," she replied noncommittally.  She didn't like to talk to Dave when he was angry...it usually started an argument.


Okay, so we go into that scene seeing things from Dave's limited third person POV, but at the end, we get something from Karen's limited third person POV.  That's a no-no in writing.  If you're telling things from a limited third person POV, you can't jump around like that.  You'd have to say something like this instead:

"Oh, not much," she replied noncommittally.  Dave knew she didn't like talking to him when he was angry.  He knew he usually wound up starting an argument at times like these and Karen didn't like to argue.

Hey sigp226 check with Garrett Cook. He has been editing my work and giving me feedback. I published my zombie book against his advice and (my writing) was ripped apart by reviewers but there was also positive reviews. My writing style has changed a lot since that book. Garrett Cook is working on two novels right now of mine. I'm writing a third novel now with maybe a fourth one that will be going to him this year.

I think his pricing is listed on the link above. He also good at working with you on that. I took his advice from the critique he gave me on my zombie book and really put it to use for all of my next projects. I also wrote my zombie book right after having a stroke so I knew it wasn't that strong of a piece.

That makes sense. It's hard to imagine your own work outside of your own perspective. It's one of the reasons I need an editor. I know what's happening, what are you readers a bunch of idiots or something? I also speak very expressively. I used to act. I forget that it's very difficult to get tone to translate to paper.

I need an editor.

Tense agreement is a problem due to my grammatical laziness. I know I do it and I thought I'd caught all of it, but it appears that I didn't. I also like long sentences, which these days are perceived as run-ons. Douglas Adams is one of my favorite writers. I try to emulate copy the rhythms he used. Perhaps it didn't work.

I need an editor.

Thank you for the review.

I hope I didn't sound too harsh, because I did really like the characters, especially Nick's Lieutenant and I like your writing style.  I just wanted it to be longer.

If any of you want something to read in a different vein, I'm about to publish a script I wrote on Kindle because, why not?

A Bargain At Half The Price is a comedy about a car dealership that hires Satan as a salesman, but they fire him because he's not enough of a scumbag.

IM your email and I'll send you a .pdf of it.

I sent you my email address.  I'd like to read it.