stand alone novels – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

SFFMP 105: A Successful Stand Alone YA Fantasy Novel Launch and Building a Big Mailing List

November 1, 2016 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

This week, we chatted with Megan Crewe, a YA author who shifted from traditional publishing to self-publishing for her latest release, a contemporary YA fantasy with Asian flare, A Mortal Song. She was launching this as a stand alone, with no future series planned, so we asked her how she went about having a good launch with a single title.

** Note, we had a tech problem with Google Hangouts cutting the show out early. Sorry about that. It’s just the last few minutes that are missing.

Here are a few more details on what we covered:

Whether Asian-inspired fantasy is challenging to market since it’s a smaller niche.
The challenges of launching a stand alone novel versus a Book 1 in a new series.
Pricing strategies for launch.
Building up a big mailing list quickly with giveaways.
Doing mailing list swaps with other authors in your genre.
Megan’s KBoards thread about her launch and the sponsorship sites she booked.
Marketing for traditionally published books versus indie books.
Genre hopping under the science fiction and fantasy umbrella.
Pre-orders when launching a book that’s exclusive with Amazon (KDP Select), yay or nay?
Publishing a paperback ahead of time to enable early reviews on your Kindle book page.
Strategies for getting early reviews.

Interested in learning more about Megan or checking out her books? Visit her on her website or check her out on Amazon. You can also find A Mortal Song on Amazon.

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asian fantasy, giveaways, mailing list, mailing list swap, megan crewe, novel launch, stand alone novels, ya fantasy

SFFMP 58: Marketing Stand Alone Novels and Different Types of Series

December 1, 2015 SFFpodcast Group Discussion, Podcast

Today, we answered some reader questions/comments about bank accounts for your self-publishing business and making your author site mobile friendly, and then we jumped into discussing marketing strategies for stand alone novels, as well as several different types of series.

The main types of series we discussed are:

Series with continuing characters where each novel is a complete story
Series where there is an overarching storyline with multiple plot threads that only get wrapped up in the final book
Series with major romance elements that have different characters and happily ever afters in each novel.

Naturally, we spoke of everything in a science fiction and fantasy context. Even though some of these series types are more popular in other genres, there are definitely plenty of examples in SF & F. We talked about the pros and cons when it comes to marketing each.

Here are the links that listener Will Norman gave us for checking to see if your website is mobile-friendly (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/) and also for getting pop-up newsletter forms to add to your website: https://sumome.com/

Don’t forget to check out Jo’s first book… in German!