Promote Your Writing

Social media is often ineffective in promoting books on Amazon. Using social media such as Facebook and Twitter to help advertise books and ebooks is extremely time-consuming. From my experience, social media is becoming less effective in increasing book sales. When I started using Twitter and Facebook in 2010, there was definitely some benefit. But…

If you are a new self-published author, you may not know that Amazon took a hard line on book reviews some time ago. Why did it do it? Because paid Amazon book reviews are big business, as this article in the New York Times describes in detail. The upshot was that Amazon came down heavily…

Book marketing for self-published authors is challenging, hard work, time-consuming, and can even be dispiriting. Self-publishing is no longer a new phenomenon; it is now an integral part of the publishing industry. However, one component remains a stumbling block – getting your books to sell. If that’s not enough, marketing can also be expensive. Self-publishing…

Does Facebook Ads for books guarantee more book sales? Over the years, I’ve used Facebook promotion a lot. I started with Facebook pay-per-click ads for my teaching business, and it was reasonably successful in attracting new local clients over the long term. But when it comes to using Facebook Ads for books to help sales, I…

Does this look like a candidate for banned book covers to you? Well, it is. Read on to understand why. If you publish with Amazon KDP, one of the benefits is that you have access to Amazon pay-per-click advertising. I have been experimenting with this program, and although it is a bit clunky and clearly…

Do you need to pay for book promotion? Every self-published author asks this question, and the answer should be yes, of course. In any business you can think of, the cost of advertising and promoting your product is your first financial decision to help start generating sales. However, selling ebooks is not easy. Money won’t…

Enrolling your ebooks with Amazon KDP Select exclusivity can definitely increase sales. But after having my ebooks in and out of KDP Select exclusivity many times, I can say that the benefits only last so long. The first 90-day period always results in a sales boost. But for each recurring 9o day enrolment period, sales…

Does PPC work for advertising ebooks? PPC (Pay per click) marketing, or paid search, is the most common form of advertising on the Internet. But how well does it work when it comes to selling ebooks? The leading players in PPC are Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Others, including Goodreads and Amazon AMS service, are both…

When potential book buyers start looking for a new book to read, they often begin by using Amazon search queries. This is why you need to know how to use Amazon keywords. Amazon product search results are based on search keywords and the product description or your book description. You want your keywords to appear…

We live in a world of streams of data. You would think it should be easy to access book sales data to find out where your book sales come from. But the truth is that it is next to impossible. No, I’ll rephrase that. It is impossible to access book sales data apart from raw…