In this short episode, Jo and Lindsay jump on the bandwagon and share some of their marketing and publishing (but mostly marketing!) predictions for 2019.
Will Amazon ads expand and offer more opportunities? Or will authors get fed up with the high cost of clicks and flock to something else? Is the mailing list swap dead? Will group promotions become more sophisticated?
Lindsay got to meet lots of cool authors at the 20Books conference in Las Vegas this fall, and today’s guest was one of those people. Urban fantasy author Ramy Vance was involved in the traditional publishing world for years, but when it came time to publish his fiction, he decided to go indie. He’s written a number of novels and started a new series this past summer, Mortality Bites, where he’s had some of his best success yet. We asked him about it and what he did right and wrong to start selling a significant number of books in the urban fantasy genre.
Here are a few of the specifics that we talked about:
How Ramy was first involved in the traditional publishing world and what it taught him about the business.
The logistics of getting into libraries and how subsidiary rights trading works.
Tools you can use to do your own public relations if you’re hoping for attention from the traditional world (he mentioned SimilarWeb as a resource for analyzing those business’s websites but also said it’s expensive and that our time, as indie authors, may be better invested in writing the next book).
Whether it’s worth jumping into urban fantasy as a newer author or if it’s tough to gain traction since it’s so competitive.
Making use of some of the popular tropes to attract regular genre readers but then doing fun and creative stuff on the side.
Ramy’s experience with going exclusive with Amazon for this series and how advertising and tactics can be different whether one is only selling books or whether selling is secondary to getting borrows and page reads in Kindle Unlimited.
How he experimented with adding a sample chapter at the end of his books and found that sales/borrows of the subsequent books were better when he took that out.
How different advertising platforms sent different types of traffic (i.e. he got more sales from Facebook and more Kindle Unlimited borrows from AMS ads).
His mailing list versus his Facebook group and what he’s prioritizing right now.
Experimenting with Instagram.
How writing six books before releasing the first one helped him to rapid release and get a leg up.
How he approached more than a dozen big-name authors in the genre and found many willing to support him at launch time.
Plans for audiobooks through Podium Publishing.
Whether to invest in advertising to direct people to your back-list books or to focus on selling the new stuff.
Our guest this week launched her first novel in April of 2017 to great success. Amanda Milo’s science fiction romance, Stolen by an Alien, stuck in the Top 250 overall in the Amazon store for months and remained near the top of the scifi romance Top 100 too. She’s since published two more novels in the series for the rabid fanbase that she’s already established.
We brought her on to ask about how she launched to such success, why she’s continued to launch her books at 99 cents, and how she used some atypical (for the genre) cover art to find her target audience.
Here’s some of what we covered in more detail:
How Amanda launched her novel without professional editing or a cover that she loved but made it work anyway.
Combining 99 cents, Kindle Unlimited, and a story written for a niche audience to find success.
What level of sex readers are looking for in the science fiction romance category.
Some popular story types in the genre.
What readers expect from the alien abduction trope.
The challenges of writing strong female characters and balancing them with some of the romance tropes of rescues or abductions.
Using the cover, especially in romance genres, to signal to the reader what to expect as far as heat level, in particular.
Why Amanda has stuck with 99 cents so long for her books.
Whether novellas and shorter stories can work in scifi romance.
Using a Facebook page and Facebook groups to connect with readers.
YA fantasy author Katie Cross joins us this week to discuss how she’s published eleven books while working and raising a family, and how she’s sold a lot of those books too!
Here’s a closer look at some of the topics we covered:
Finding time to write when you have a job and a family.
Whether YA ebooks do well and some of the challenges of self-publishing for that audience.
Some of the defining features of young adult fiction.
Keeping books selling when you’re not able to publish super frequently.
Selling well in the YA market.
Using Wattpad as a platform to gain readers and potentially get recognition.
Getting invited to the Wattpad advertising program and how much authors can make.
Getting more interaction and reads on Wattpad by asking questions at the end of installments and posting regularly (Katie was posting M/W/F for one of her books).
Tips for getting a Bookbub ad.
Facebook marketing and Facebook groups.
Determining which marketing is worth your time when your time is limited.
Note: Katie realized she had her numbers a little off in our chat about her Bookbub ad, so she sent me this correction to post here:
“In the podcast I share my BookBub numbers several times and mention selling 3,500 books on Amazon with my recent ad, but I checked back on those numbers and it was close to 3,000 books WIDE on all distributors including paperback and audiobooks (which are also affected by BookBubs) and includes all sales overall (including spillover into the other books in my series). <— This encompasses just the first week.
So it was not just my BookBub ad book that reached those numbers. I wish! Historically, however, by the end of the month, it’s likely I will reach 4,000—or beyond it—in sales from the BookBub tail. I have in the past seen upwards of those numbers from BookBub ads.
So sorry for that mess up! Transparency is really important to me so I wanted to add that caveat here. 🙂“
Today’s show is dedicated to Facebook marketing. How do you use the popular social media platform to sell more books and keep current readers engaged? We took turns answering questions, based on our experiences. We may not be gurus, but we’ve all been on Facebook as authors for 2-4 years, and we had quite a bit to say!
Here’s a little of what we covered:
Separate author page or personal page, what’s best?
One page or one for every series?
How do you get readers to find you and like your page?
How important is interaction, and how do you get people to engage with you?
Facebook advertising, pay-per-click and boosted posts, are they ever worth it?
Groups, can they help with anything?
What about events?
Has there been a decline in the effectiveness of Facebook over the years?
What’s the future going to bring, and how will it impact authors?