This blog has long been a friendly place to come and learn, and what better way to learn than to ask?
You have questions. Writer stuff, marketing, motivation, you name it.
ASK ME
Your questions. Your challenges. Your issues.
If I don’t know, we’ll put it out to my vast network of author friends and get an answer. Or I’ll make something up.
Many people helped me when I was starting out because I was willing to ask what I needed to know.
That shortened my learning curve substantially.
– Dan Alatorre
Dan Alatorre 
This month I took things seriously, straightened up two scrappy books on Kindle
‘Of Patchwork Warriors’ &
‘A True History of These Isles’
Then took advantage of putting them out as free, each for 3 days.
Thanks to the generosity of Lucy Brazier (tweets) and Audrey Driscoll (4 star review) to date in January these have totalled up 30+ downloads onto Kindles, which I am much pleased about.
In your experience Dan, what would be the best way to benefit from this windfall?
(I’m ignoring any naysayers who would say ‘well it’s free what would they have to lose?’)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think typically what you want to do is try to establish a fair price for the work and then run it on sale occasionally. In my experience, if you can buy a few paid media ads when your book is on sale, you will get a residual effect afterwards. In other words, whether a three dollar book is discounted to $.99 or free, usually after the sale period ends you get a handful of purchases. Hopefully some of those turn into reviews, too.
From there it’s all marketing! Anything and everything you can think of to get the word out. Different things work better for different books.
Probably the three most important things are to have a professional looking cover that fits the genre, a blurb that can get a reader’s interest, and then a good story inside. If any of those three things are off, it will create stumbling blocks for sales.
Then I would advise you to track everything. Track what your daily sales are when you are not doing advertising and what kind of spikes you get when you have some kind of marketing going on. Try to learn what works and do more of it; learn what doesn’t work and try to avoid repeating that. It’s not as easy as it sounds but it’s certainly doable.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you for this useful information Dan, all makes perfect sense.
You’ve given me a great deal to ponder on.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re very welcome.
LikeLiked by 1 person