trends – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

Patty Jansen Talks Selling on Kobo, Google Play, and Networking with Other Authors

January 6, 2015 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

For the second time in the history of the podcast, we had a guest on tonight (we’ll be having guests on a lot more often, so if there’s someone you would like to see — who might actually deign to talk to us — let us know). Australian science fiction and fantasy author Patty Jansen came on to talk to us about self-publishing, marketing fads, and how she has ended up selling well on the non-Amazon platforms, especially Kobo.

Here are a few of the topics we covered:

Patty’s publication history (including a Writers of the Future win) and why she opted for self publishing
The benefits of belonging to an online workshop
If there are any specific challenges to selling science fiction and fantasy, as opposed to other genres
What’s helping her to sell on Kobo and some of the other platforms where many authors struggle to gain traction
Some tips for selling books on Google Play
Is it worth following the trends and trying to write what’s popular?
Organizing multi-author promotions and why you would want to
Is it still a good time to be an indie author, even if things may be getting tougher, and it’s not as easy to break in?

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You can visit Patty on Twitter or on her website. She sometimes blogs about self publishing on her site (check out her recent post,”Kindle Unlimited: a few observations“). The first book in her Icefire Trilogy is currently free on Amazon.

google play, marketing, marketing ebooks, marketing fantasy, marketing science fiction, patty jansen, selling on kobo, social media, trends

Marketing and E-Publishing Predictions for 2015 — what we believe will still work and what won’t

December 30, 2014 SFFpodcast Group Discussion, Podcast

We have guests scheduled for January, so this should be the last show with just the three of us for a while. We discussed whether marketing and selling books got harder for indie authors in 2014 and, since there are only a couple of days left in the year, we gave some publishing predictions and some marketing trends that we believe could come to pass in 2015. At the end, we also shared a few of our own writing/publishing resolutions for next year.

Here’s a look at some of the topics we covered:

How has Kindle Unlimited effected us and will authors continue to have to deal with subscription services (possibly more of them from Amazon competitors) as time goes on?
Are things getting tougher, and was it indeed the year of the quitter, as discussed in Kris Rusch’s Things Indie Writers Learned in 2014?
How networking and collaboration on projects and marketing may become even more important to authors in the future
Will multi-author bundles still be popular, or will they be replaced by something else?
We might see more co-authoring, shared worlds, and pen names where multiple authors write under the name to increase the number of annual releases
Pre-orders, are they useful now and how might one take advantage of the benefits in the future?
How Lindsay started a new pen name in October of 2014 and did well with it, even as a completely “new” (anonymous) author: Pen Name Launch 1 (results after 1 month) & Pen Name Launch 2 (results after 10 weeks)