The Empathic Detective is up for pre-order, and everyone who nominated it on Kindle Scout should be getting their e-mail from Amazon detailing how to download their free copy!
If you missed out on nominating the book, you can pre-order a copy for $2.99 by clicking here.
Thanks again for all your support, and please leave a review for the book. It will be released for sale on May 3.
Running an ad campaign on Twitter provides some interesting benefits. If you’ve ever tweeted something out and wondered how successful it was, once you become a Twitter advertiser you’ll get tools that let you see performance stats on all your tweets. That alone is worth the price of admission, in my opinion. Once logged into Twitter, under your Profiles and Settings, click Twitter Ads to get started.
Twitter provides some good info on what people do with your tweets. Under the Analytics page, you can see your most popular tweets, find the number of impressions they made (number of times they showed up for other people), the number of engagements, and the engagement rate percentage. Obviously, those tweets with a higher engagement rate are more successful than others.
Engagements include detail expansions, likes, when a user clicks on your profile from the tweet, retweets other users give you, clicks on links in the tweet, number of people who decided to follow you after reading the tweet, hashtag clicks, and engagement with media linked in the tweet.
Under Promotions, Twitter lets you pay to keep a tweet active. For instance, it can show up in your followers’ tweet streams or stay near the top of a hashtag list. Twitter will offer goals for your tweets, such as link clicks, or additional followers. These vary by price. The more you pay, the longer the tweet stays active, and the greater number of results. Ten dollars is a reasonable sum to play around with to get a feel for what you’re doing.
Twitter ads can easily get expensive, but they do seem to be one way to spread the word about a book. Again, book sales seem to be a numbers game. If a hundred people look at your book’s page online, maybe a few will buy it. Paying too much for people to look at the page will quickly outstrip the royalties received from sales.
Many thanks to all who nominated The Empathic Detective on Kindle Scout. The Kindle Press team has selected it for publication. If you nominated it, Amazon will send details on how to obtain your free copy in the coming weeks.
We’re in the home stretch, and these are the final few days to nominate The Empathic Detective on Kindle Scout. If they publish the book, you’ll get a free Kindle copy! Take a moment to head over to my campaign page and nominate it.
Thanks!
Click the cover!
We’ve left less than two weeks to go for you to nominate The Empathic Detective on Kindle Scout. Remember, if Kindle Press decides to publish the book, those who nominated it will receive a free copy from Amazon.
We’re almost a week into my Kindle Scout campaign for The Empathic Detective. If you haven’t nominated it for publication already, please do so!
While you’re there, here are a couple other books that I think are worthy of nomination, too.
Son of Justice. Welcome to basic training. Year: 2616.
Cheatc0de. Play the game. Play to win. Play to survive.
My latest book, The Empathic Detective: A Mystery Thriller is on Kindle Scout for the next 30 days. If enough people nominate it for publication, it may be picked up by Kindle Press, and those who kept the nomination active until the last day will receive a free copy of the book.
Here’s the summary:
In a world of flying cars and portals to other planets, Detective Gerald Bryce has a rare power: the ability to read emotions. Suspect after suspect falls as he uses his skills and dogged police work to bring justice to his city, until one day he discovers a suspected murderess who shares his gift.
Desiree Lamont is recently widowed, and all evidence points to guilt in the murder of her billionaire husband. She offers Bryce the tantalizing prospect of sharing his life with someone who completely understands him, with someone who can ease his greatest emotional needs.
He soon discovers Desiree is far stronger than he imagined. She can not only read the emotions of others, she can manipulate them as well, making them do her bidding. She can control people even to the point of convincing them to commit murder at her direction.
When Bryce rejects her offer, a battle breaks out between the police and all the forces Desiree can bring to bear.
But other powers are at play as well, and they are far greater than Desiree and Bryce …
It’s easy to do. Just go to this link, sign in to your Amazon account and nominate the book.
https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/231ZRHSVZ156U
Hey if you’d like to pick up a free copy of Redwood: Servant of the State, my highly rated first book, it’s available free on Amazon through this weekend (through October 11). Thousands of copies have already been downloaded. Be sure and download yours today.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OYV3MCY
You sell books on Amazon. It makes sense to advertise on Amazon as well. Amazon Marketing Services lets you create ads that run on Amazon pages. While people are looking for books similar to yours, an ad will display on the page which hopefully entices them to click over to your book.
For an ad campaign I created for Redwood: Servant of the State, I chose to run the ad based on interests. My targeted interests were Teen and Young Adult, and Science Fiction and Fantasy.
I budgeted $125, and limited the time for a month total, running from about mid-May to mid-June. Here’s the stats for the run:
Over 45,000 impressions looks impressive, but out of all those page views you’ll note only 39 people clicked on the ad, and of those only one person bought a book which was selling for $1.35 at the time. While the run didn’t go over the budget by a long shot, ultimately it did cost $23.50 to sell the one book. Here’s what the ad looked like:
While it was fun to have an ad for my book running alongside some other great books on Amazon, the return on investment proved weak. Things that could possibly improve the return might be a better ad. The basic ad only allows two lines of copy above an image of the cover. Perhaps different verbiage would lead to more clicks, and thus more sales.
As an indie author, I have the dilemma shared by others as to how to get the word out about my books. Naturally, I feel I’ve produced good works of fiction, but since I’m starting a “brand” or “business” from scratch featuring my name on these books, I have no ready or apparent avenues with which to support getting the word out.
I know I’m not alone. In my circle of friends, people have dutifully downloaded my books and offered encouragement, support, and advice. A friend of a friend self published a few years ago, and his book has languished online. Our mutual friend put us in contact with one another. His questions: How do you get sales? How do you advertise your books? How do you get the word out about what you’ve written?
In thinking about these questions, I thought it might be useful to record my advertising efforts on this site, for better or worse. Perhaps this might help other new indies facing similar questions about spreading the word regarding their books.
I certainly haven’t found the magic bullet yet, but perhaps my experiences can lead authors toward productive advertising avenues, and maybe help them avoid ones that are not so useful.
So stay tuned, and I’ll share what I’ve discovered so far.