Why Kindle Promo?
The hard work was complete. My book; The Stratford Fiasco was written. I had it critiqued by two different professionals along the way. I had the final version back from the editor I had employed. I had designed my own cover. I had decided to go it alone and self publish. Finally I was holding the first hard copy of the real book. Fantasic!
What next – who on the earth was going to buy it? How would they know it existed? Sure I could tap up all my friends – that worked and I sold about 200 copies – now what?
I was sceptical about the social media sides of things, so I went to my local Waterstones and they agreed to stock it. I called up the local newspapers and got my photo in the local press. I called up a couple of the national newspapers to place an ad. Well the £4,000 fee put me off. Making a pound a book meant selling 4,000 copies to break even. Not likely!
I had a website for the book, so turned to twitter. I decided to open two twitter accounts, one as myself and one promoting indie authors in general. I figured if I was willing to tweet for others, they in turn would tweet for me and collectively we could reach a wider audience.
It kind of took off to a far greater extent than I imagined. My twitter account @kindle_promo has become inundated with tweets for me to retweet. I also have a couple of generous friends with twitter accounts that would also retweet my tweets and so the following grew. Due to the retweeting it is not uncommon for the tweets to go to over 100,000 twitterers. Now that would be expensive on ebay so not bad for free!
February 14th I started a Facebook page. Within a month it had over 200 likes and people regularly posting there. This would be OK if it would also attract readers. So to measure this I decided to start a website. www.kindlepromo.com was launched March 14th.
The initial idea was to have a place where other authors could place their books for free and try to spread the word about the site.
In two weeks I have been contacted by a large amount of people with varying requests that I am now considering and many also want me to list their books. I am trying my best to list as many as possible and in a couple of months I will meet with some true web design gurus to see how I can make the site more user friendly and work on the SEO. So far it is all my own work and I am by no means any kind of web design expert – far from it.
I set up google ads on the site, hoping for some click through revenue and became an amazon affiliate. The goal was to try to cover the costs of setting up and running the site. I am not sure this will ever happen unless it really takes off or people all of a sudden go ‘click mad’! But I will stick with it until I come up with a better idea. With Amazon affiliates the site gets 5% of books sold. Seeming as most kindle books are a pound or so, you can do the math. 5% of a pound, several times, doesn’t add up to a fortune!
The traffic has been steadily growing which is encouraging.
The current challenge is to come up with a strategy and direction to take the site in, now I have proved the initial phase was what I would consider a success. I am working on plans of how I want it to look in the future and what content it will contain.
So stop by the site and feel free to contact me with any ideas, comments, critiques, requests or complaints!
Many thanks
David
A special thank you to David for being the very first to guest blog on my site! If you'd like to guest blog please contact me by email: contact@jaynemariebarker.com
Thank you, J-M
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