SFFMP 71: Blurbs That Sell, 99-Cent Price Points, and Military SF with Amy J. Murphy

Debut military science fiction author Amy J. Murphy joins us to talk about how she had a great run with her first novel (and she’s still having it more than five months later).

Here’s a little of what we discussed:

Funding a Kickstarter campaign as a new author
Getting a start with fan-fiction
Whether she had any challenges publishing military science fiction as a female author
Some of the pitfalls of letting someone else handle your formatting and uploading your books into the various stores
Choosing to go exclusive with Amazon KDP Select as a new author
Using a 99-cent price point on Book 1 to make it easier for readers to try you out and get them locked into the rest of your series
Combatting the infamous 30/90-Day Cliff on Amazon with drip campaigns (periodically doing an advertising promotion)
Using TV show names (Farscape meets Firefly with some Indiana Jones thrown in) in the blurb to give people an idea of what they’re getting right away.
Whether or not sticking keywords in the blurb makes sense and can be done without detrimental results
Using Kindle Samurai to scope out keywords on Amazon

If you enjoyed the show, please visit Amy on her site or check out her first book on Amazon: Allies and Enemies: Fallen. She’s also on Twitter.

If you’re interested, Amy’s editor is Pat Dobie, and her cover artist is Alex Winkler.