Tag: book launches

SFFMP 192: Instagram, Swag, Book Boxes, and Launching Your First Book Without Spending any Money

Author Interview, Podcast

This week, we chatted with YA science fiction author Jessica Pierce who launched her first book, Atlas Fallen, in April of this year. She didn’t spend a lot of money on her launch, relying instead on the fan base and contacts she’d accumulated on Instagram. We talked to her about how to acquire a following and build book buzz on the platform and also about some creative things she’s done with swag and launch boxes.

Here are some more specifics and links from the show:

  • What it’s like starting out as a new author in the YA market right now.
  • Overcoming the challenges of selling books to a young adult audience.
  • Common tropes that might be addressed in YA science fiction (or YA in general)
  • An introduction to book boxes.
  • All the kinds of swag you can make as an author for contests or to help with a book launch.
  • Doing magnetic bookmarks, custom book sleeves, and swag that goes beyond the typical book plates and bookmarks.
  • Hanging out where your target audience is.
  • How Instagram is a huge place to reach teenage/young adult readers.
  • The importance of using the hashtags on Instagram including the popular #bookstagram tag.
  • What to post on Instagram as an author to build buzz.
  • Why Jessica hired artists to do character art for her who happened to also have large Instagram followings.
  • If every author should be on Instagram or if it’s more ideal for those targeting younger readers.
  • Making sure your cover and your blurb are tailored to your target audience.
  • Society6 for creating swag.
  • PackLane.com for creating custom shipping boxes.
  • UPrinting.com for other print-on-demand swag needs.

You can visit Jessica on her website or (of course!) on Instagram. She just enrolled Atlas Fallen in KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited, so you can find the ebook on Amazon.

 

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SFFMP 181: Spreading out Your Advertising Dollars for Effectiveness and Launching Well as a New Author

Author Interview, Podcast

This week, epic fantasy/fantasy romance author Miranda Honfleur joined us on the show. She launched her first series last November and has kept book 1 selling well and sticking in the Amazon fantasy charts while releasing more books in the series. She has three out now with a fourth to follow later this summer. We asked her how she did so well as a new author and how she’s maintaining sales.

Here are some more specifics on what we covered:

  • Miranda’s road to publishing.
  • How she’s balanced writing epic fantasy that’s heavy on romance, something epic fantasy readers aren’t always looking for.
  • What she took away from the Sell More Books Show conference as a new author.
  • How she used Instafreebie to building a mailing list months before she launched her first book.
  • Creating promotions using the King Sumo WordPress app.
  • Tips for getting the most out of Bookbub PPC ads, Amazon ads, and Facebook ads.
  • Whether she’s needed to cull her mailing list, something we just talked about on last week’s show!
  • How she tries to be everywhere with advertising.
  • How much time she’s putting into Amazon ads and other marketing methods to keep her Book 1 selling week in and week out.
  • Whether Instagram may be the next place fantasy authors should have a presence.
  • Marketing to “series-adjacent” genres as part of a larger strategy.

You can find Miranda on her website or on Amazon where her books are currently in Kindle Unlimited. If you’re a fantasy fan, check out her first book, Blade & Rose. If you enjoyed fairy tales, she’s a part of the Of Beasts and Beauties boxed set.

 

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SFFMP 175: The Rapid Release Strategy, Getting Reviews as a New Author, and Where to Spend your Advertising Money

Group Discussion, Podcast

This week, Jo, Jeff, and Lindsay answered listener questions on a variety of topics such as how to spend $1,000 on advertising to get the most out of your launch, how to get reviews as a new author, whether we use review or street teams, and how often to release books if you’re banking them to do a rapid release. We also answer the question Jeff always asks our guests… if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently?

Here are a few of the more specific topics we covered:

  • Writing and publishing in multiple sub-genres at once, yay or nay?
  • Advertising strategies for a book launch.
  • Street teams and whether we use them.
  • Amazon closing its submissions to Kindle Scout.
  • Selling boxed sets at more than $9.99 and still getting a 70% royalty at Kobo.
  • Doing hard cover omnibuses and large print editions of your books.
  • Going wide with audiobooks or staying exclusive with Audible.
  • Jo’s experience with Kindle Worlds since they started including KW stories in Kindle Unlimited.
  • Whether it’s worth maintaining an author presence on Facebook even if you’re not planning to spend money on ads.
  • When you’re doing a rapid release strategy for a series, how often you should get those first few books out there.
  • Where to invest $1,000 on advertising for the launch of a new series.
  • How long to let Amazon AMS ads run.
  • Our previous podcast on Amazon AMS ads with Tom Corson-Knowles.
  • Will people do newsletter swaps with you if your list is small?
  • Finding fantasy and science fiction authors to swap with via the SF/F Cross Promo Bulletin Board Facebook group.
  • Whether single-author boxed sets are still useful to put together.

If you have better answers to any of the questions than our venerable but not infallible hosts had, feel free to chime in below!

 

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SFFMP 163: Successfully Launching as a New Author and Is Kindle Worlds Worth It?

Author Interview, Podcast

Science fiction and superhero author, Jeffery H. Haskell, joined us this week to talk about his experiences with Kindle Scout, writing in two different Kindle Worlds, and launching his superhero series last summer as a relatively new author.

Here are some of the specifics of what we covered:

  • How Jeff honed his writing skills by ghostwriting on Upwork.
  • How his experience with Kindle Scout went (he published urban fantasy under a pen name).
  • Why he decided to try writing in a couple of different Kindle Worlds, including Lindsay’s Fallen Empire world.
  • Whether Kindle Worlds was useful in gaining readers that would check out his other work.
  • How his passion for comics led him to publish in the superhero genre.
  • How doing a monthly giveaway on Amazon, using their giveway program (scroll to the bottom of most books, and you can find the option to host a giveaway) helped him gather followers on Amazon, some of whom turned into buyers for his books. This turned out to be a very inexpensive form of advertising for him.
  • Why he went with a full-price book launch for his Book 1 and how he kept things rolling over the following months until Book 2 came out.
  • Whether a “publishing coach” is ever a good idea.
  • What we should be doing to maintain a lifelong writing career.
  • Suggestions for new authors starting out now.

You can visit Jeff on his website, where he’s happy to answer questions, and you can check out his first superhero novel, Arsenal, at Amazon.

If you’re in need of cover art, you can also check out Vivid Covers, which is run by Jeff’s wife, Rebekah.

 

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SFFMP 156: Finding Success with a Cross-Genre Book Launch with Chris Fox

Author Interview, Podcast

One of our favorite guests, Chris Fox, returns this week so we can grill him about the success he had with his space-fantasy launch, Tech Mage.

Here’s some of what we covered:

  • What made Chris, the Write to Market guy, decide to take on a new cross-genre series that he wasn’t positive would sell well.
  • How you choose what to emphasize on the cover when your novel crosses multiple genres and could fit in a number of categories.
  • How Chris quietly put up a pre-order without mentioning it to fans, then used Facebook ads to see which ads and tag lines on the product page resulted in the highest conversion.
  • Choosing different audiences to target (via Facebook ads) for subsequent launches in a cross-genre series.
  • Whether anything different needs to be done with a launch for a book that spans multiple genres and isn’t necessarily written to market.
  • Advice for newer authors who don’t have a list already built that they can rely upon for early sales.
  • Keeping cover design simple, and whether it matters if you have a specific scene from the book illustrated for it.
  • For the first time, Chris registered a domain name and put up a lot of bonus content for his new series: https://www.magitechchronicles.com/
  • Why Chris plans to write ten books in this series rather than sticking to trilogies or smaller series as he’s often done in the past.
  • Who should consider relaunching a series.
  • Why Chris likes omnibuses as a way to kickstart a flagging series without redoing covers on all the original books.

You can buy or borrow Tech Mage on Amazon, or check out Chris’s Relaunch Your Novel for some tips on breathing life into a series that you felt underperformed initially.

Chris also has some great videos for writers on his YouTube channel. Of course, he’s on the web too at Chris Fox Writes.

Also, if you haven’t listened to them, check out the other episodes where Chris was a guest:

 

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SFFMP 152: Pricing, Category Stuffing, Launching with Three Books, and Marketing Cross-Genre Novels

Group Discussion, Podcast

This week, we answered some listener questions that had been piling up. We touched on a variety of topics, such as…

  • Should you try to put your books in as many categories as possible, and what can we do about books that shouldn’t be there knocking us out of our Top 100s on Amazon?
  • Amazon’s page of keywords for getting into unlisted categories: Selecting Browse Categories.
  • How many downloads a day can you expect from permafree titles?
  • Is it worth trying to sell English novels in countries where English isn’t the primary language?
  • How can trad publishers get away with charging 9.99 or more for ebooks, and can indies do this if their books are well edited and professionally done?
  • How do you market cross-genre books that fall into more than one category?
  • How do you guys feel about killing characters, and does it ever get easier?
  • How does your plotting process work?
  • Has anyone tried Kobo Plus yet and gotten results?
  • Where you can advertise as a newer author with less than twenty reviews on your book? Here are the links to the spreadsheets Lindsay mentioned (that C. Gockel maintains). We’re not sure if they’re up to date though, so let us know if you know of a good and recent resource. Where to Advertise Free Ebooks | Where to Advertise 99 Cent Ebooks.
  • How did Lindsay relaunch her pen name successfully after a long gap between releases?
  • If you want to write three books before launching any of them, can you use novellas as part of the plan?

Jeff and Lindsay are working on new projects, but Jo has some links if you want to check out what he’s up to right now. Here’s his serial-in-progress: The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy. Also, he’s recently done a series of “How I Write” blog posts, which cover his plotting process, among other things.

 

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SFFMP 127: Book Launch Tips, Mistakes People Make with Amazon Algorithms, and Writing a Trilogy in 12 Weeks

Author Interview, Podcast

Today, Chris Fox joined us to talk about book launches, book RE-launches, reasons why the Amazon algorithms may not be plugging your book, and writing a trilogy in twelve weeks. The author of non-fiction titles such as 5,000 Words Per Hour and Writing to Market, he’s joined us twice before on previous episodes:

Writing 5,000 Words an Hour and Selling Zombies and Werewolves

Selling More by Writing to Market + A Novel in 21 Days

Here’s some of what we covered today:

  • What Chris has been up to since finishing his Void Wraith Trilogy, the military SF he wrote to market last year, and how it ended up doing overall.
  • Why he’s writing a trilogy in 12 weeks and planning to release the books in rapid succession.
  • Some of the benefits of writing more than the first novel in a series before publishing any of them.
  • The importance of taking time off and taking time for passion projects.
  • Strategies for launching into crowded niches.
  • Whether Chris will do 99 cents for his launch of Book 1.
  • Using Facebook and Amazon ads to find a target audience and whether they’re proving effective (and affordable) right now.
  • Why it’s worthwhile to think about your character names instead of just throwing things out there.
  • Accountability tricks for sticking to one’s goals.
  • Launching a novel when you haven’t built up a list yet.
  • Why you might not want to tell everyone you know about your new novel — the confusing effect that can have on Amazon’s algorithms.
  • Relaunching a novel or series that didn’t do well out of the blocks.

You can find Chris and his video series on his site or on his YouTube channel. You can order Write to Market and Six-Figure Author on Amazon, and his new book, Relaunch Your Novel, will be out in May. You can also check out his fiction, starting with Destroyer or No Such Thing as Werewolves.

 

 

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SFFMP 89: Launching Books to Stick, Amazon Algorithms, and When Advertising Is Worth it with Chris Fox

Author Interview, Podcast

Today, we talked about launching books, writing to market, taking advantage of Amazon algorithms, and when advertising is (and isn’t) worth it with return guest Chris Fox.

Here are some of the specifics that we covered:

  • How Amazon works to push new releases (that show potential) with its algorithms, newsletters, and also-boughts system
  • How important being in KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited is right now to stick on Amazon with a new book
  • Whether to list a book for pre-order
  • Whether it makes sense to use Facebook and Amazon ads (available for those in KDP Select) during a book launch or afterward, to keep the momentum going
  • Relaunching a series that had a lackluster original launch
  • How much pricing figures into a book launch and whether starting at 99 cents is a good idea to gain momentum
  • Using a prequel to grow a mailing list

Check out Chris’s first military science fiction novel, Destroyer, on Amazon, or pick up his latest non-fiction title, Launch to Market.

You can also visit his YouTube channel for some inspiring and helpful videos.

 

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SFFMP 83: Using the Slow Burn Launch Strategy to Stick on Amazon and the Pitfalls of Genre Hopping

Group Discussion, Podcast

The guys chatted about their recent experiences with book launches and also how their genre hopping adventures are going. In addition, they discussed the slow-burn launch strategy that a lot of indie authors have been using to great success.

Here are a few more details of what they covered:

  • How does their launch strategy differ now than from when they were first starting out?
  • Using three books to launch into a new genre or a new pen name, or at least committing to writing and publishing three before giving up.
  • The challenges of genre hopping (even within the umbrella of science fiction and fantasy) and whether or not it’s going to be a career killer.
  • How they’ve gone about finding beta readers to use before sending a manuscript off to an editor for a final pass.
  • Critique groups Lindsay has used for science fiction/fantasy: The SFF Online Writing Workshop and Critters.org.
  • How KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited are playing into most successful book launches now.
  • When pre-orders make sense and if one should consider selling at a lower price during the pre-order.
  • How just launching your book and sending out an announcement to your newsletter subscribers probably won’t be enough to make your book “stick” on Amazon.
  • Segmenting and staggering your newsletter so it goes out to different groups of subscribers over multiple days to fight against the “Bookbub Effect.”
  • Booking “new release” ad slots on sponsorship sites and how many of them are offering that now.
  • Kboards thread referenced in the show: Slow burn launch for stickiness by Aimee Easterling [includes links to many of the siates that will book new releases]
  • Another one: A mini-guide to launch promo services by Nicholas Erik

 

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SFFMP 47: Our Book Launch Processes and Author Websites (what to do and what not to do)

Group Discussion, Podcast

This evening, the three of us shared what we do to launch new books, and then Lindsay went through the list she’s making for when she gets a new website designed (by no later than 2017, really!). Here are some of the highlights of the conversation:

  • Newsletters and social media announcements, staggering for launches
  • Recruiting reviewers before the book is released
  • Possibly getting more sales by using pre-orders
  • Updating back matter in earlier books with links to new books
  • Sharing preview materials with readers
  • Facebook boosted posts (the only advertising we do for launches)
  • Updating Goodreads and Shelfari when you release books, especially if you’re a new author — nobody’s going to do it for you!
  • Making sure you have an Author Central profile at Amazon and then claiming new books.
  • Domain names: your author name vs. your world/universe/book series name
  • Using WordPress as the backbone to your website
  • Getting author websites up and running inexpensively
  • Putting newsletter sign-up forms “above the fold” so people don’t have to scroll
  • Having a “new readers start here” kind of section for people who visit your site for the first time
  • Static home pages versus having your blog on there with the latest updates
  • Some of Lindsay’s WordPress plug-ins: Shareaholic (makes your blog posts easily shareable on social media sites), ContactForm, Google Analytics (tracking stats to the nth level), PrettyLink (free version — shortens and tracks links), Subscribe to Comments (lets those who comment get notified when people respond), WP-Polls (poll your readers in a blog post), WP-Postviews (at a glance, see how many times your posts have been read)
  • Avoiding too much clutter, making it hard for people to find the links to check out your books, using ads on author websites, forgetting to have links to all stores, not having a list of your books, and getting into posting schemes with other authors

 

 

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