Going for it!!

My brother sent me an article the other day that inspired me beyond belief. I’ll attach it at the end of this post. Basically, it’s the story of a self-published success. I know, I know, I’ve read a thousand of them, also. But this one struck me different, mainly because this author did everything I have done to market and promote with one exception. She used the pay promotion on her sites and I have not. See, I’ve been mistakenly foolish with my numbers. I was putting book sales in perspective to an advertising budget, stupidly thinking I’d have to sell a Hell of a lot of books to recoup my investment. And that is a true fact. I’m gonna need a lot of sales. However, and even more important, I didn’t think about exposure and what that exposure could do to my sales in the long run. So, I’ve decided to ‘go for it!” and put a pretty large chunk of money into my promotional efforts. I feel I’m in a good place for this investment with eight novels available for sale and a strong network of author sites that I belong to. I’m ready to explode. I’ve decided to go with three different programs to begin right after Christmas when everyone has a new Kindle. The first is Goodreads click advertising. The exposure is huge with Goodreads since they have over 6,600,000 members. They will place your ad on appropriate genre pages and expose you to @ 150,000 readers. The drawback is that it costs per click. We’ll see how this goes. I’m going to invest a few hundred in it. The next is Substance Books. They have to accept your work to begin promoting it. I’m not sure exactly what they do because it has to do with search engine optimization and getting your book found on the internet. I research them heavily and discovered that they’ve been around for more than ten years and I found no negative comments. So, they must be doing something right. The last thing is a site I recently discovered call fiverr.com. It’s a mega list of people that provide services for $5. I’ve never used it, but for a hundred bucks I can get twenty services. These include people putting hundreds of likes on a book or Facebook page, writing reviews, and posting your links to hundreds of people. This is more a novelty of ‘see-what-happens’. My experiment with the article hasn’t shown any significant results. I’m still getting about fifty hits a day on Author’s Den and my blog hasn’t acquired any mass numbers, either. There’s still a few days left of its circulation so we’ll see what happens. And as for my latest novel IMAGINATION, I hit the 10,000 word mark and the story is beginning to write itself. Love when that happens.

Here’s the article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204770404577082303350815824.html

my site

http://www.authorsden.com/neilostroff