SFFMP 203: Staying Motivated, Advertising, and How to Market a Stand-Alone Novel
This week, the guys answered a couple of questions about staying motivated and finishing projects, even when your oh-so-appealing sink full of dishes is distracting you. They talked a bit about their adventures with Amazon advertising and what’s actually working for them now in 2018. They also discussed marketing a stand-alone novel, since Lindsay recently released Fractured Stars, a new space adventure story unrelated to her other series. She shared her numbers and what she did for the launch.
Here are a few of the specifics from their discussion:
- Difficulties with piracy and copyright issues.
- Using CoverVault.com to create your own 3D boxed set covers.
- Getting personalized video shoutouts from celebrities through Cameo.com.
- Jo’s jump into Patreon and what he’s offering for subscribers.
- Getting the reviews from old editions of books on Amazon when republishing all-new versions.
- Tips for keeping yourself from getting distracted when you work from home.
- Write or Die software and writing sprints.
- What to do when the story seems boring or bad or just isn’t coming together.
- The challenges of making Amazon advertising work.
- Scaling AMS ads once you do get them to work.
- Why the guys are still big fans of running promos on free Book 1s in long series.
- How to price a stand-alone novel and whether to try KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited or start out wide.
- Deciding on cover art when your book wasn’t written to any particular market so there aren’t a lot of examples.
- Writing a free tie-in short story or novella and publishing it at the same time as your stand-alone novel.
- When and how the guys use boosted posts on Facebook.
- Using newsletter bonuses to encourage sign-ups at the end of your novel (even a stand-alone novel) so you’re not starting from scratch with the next book.
- Why the mailing list trumps all when it comes to advertising and marketing and is the most valuable asset you can build.
If you want to support Jo on Patreon, you can find his page here.
Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on iTunes.
Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on YouTube.
Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast via RSS.
Jo mentioned providing audio books to Patreon subscribers from a dropbox folder. I support a couple of podcasters on Patreon that have a subscriber-only podcast feed through Patreon. E.g., Joanna Penn does a monthly Q&A podcast that’s only available to subscribers and the feed has a Patreon.com URL with a username/password for access. Could you host MP3s of your audiobooks as a podcast feed?
In theory, you could, but you would want to set it up so people could listen to each chapter in their podcast app, rather than having to sit on their fannies at their computer with your webpage open (I think you can only listen to Joanna’s secret Q&A shows on her website). And I’m not sure how you would password protect it then. I guess you could give them the option to download the episodes from your password protected website, but that’s probably more work than a Dropbox folder share (easy to snag all the files at once from Dropbox and dump them in a folder on your computer).
I feel like we’re still waiting for something better here.
I listen to Joanna’s Patreon Q&A shows on my iPhone the same way I listen to all podcasts (including the awesome SFFMP). The URL she provides is a regular podcast RSS feed. The podcast app I use (iCatcher!) has an option to enter a username/password with the feed URL when you subscribe, but maybe not all podcast apps do.
Thanks, Michael. I’ll see if I can do that with the iPhone podcasts app.
I can hardly wait for these “only you” episodes…
Thanks so much,
Blessings,
Ethan
I’m glad you find them helpful, Ethan! (I think I said that exact thing last time, but it’s still true!)