wattpad advertising – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

SFFMP 136: Successfully Indie Publishing and Marketing While Running a Family

June 13, 2017 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

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.
What Katie’s typical launch strategy looks like.

Visit Katie on her website or on Facebook and check out her YA fantasy books. You can also join her “indie author life” Facebook group for advice on self-publishing and marketing.

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. 🙂“