Saturday, 10 January 2015

How To Market Your Kindle eBook: 30 Marketing Tips

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Having published my first whitepaper for Kindle, enrolling it in KDP Select and ran the 5 day "For Free" campaign, twittering like crazy, creating a facebook page (like it!) the paper did reach #1 in one category (vocational guidance) and did well in the category "Job Hunting". Nonetheless it is clear to me that in terms of marketing I am as green as they come. The slideshow should help you a bit



Loads of material available on the net, but I really the slides from AmyDeb who runs http://amydebcreations.com/ I have gone over multiple presentations, blog posts and I am getting a good feel for what is required.

One of the issues is the question of time. Marketing takes time and determination. Let's see how I will do in the coming months. I will update you daily anyways! 


Friday, 9 January 2015

eBooks Your Cover Is EveryThing: Here Is The Data Proving It!

Great books, have great covers. Some of them are just amazing. As starting writing and self publishing you read a lot about book cover designers. I am starting to see that book cover art is important. Its your storefront.
But thing is that I am stubborn and like to get my hands dirty.
In order to get dirty hands I have been orientating myself and have found a few ways that I am going to share with you.

Way #1 Have Your eBook Cover Designed By A Pro
Depending on your budget your can have your cover designed via:
- www.fiverr.com and check out this guy.. nice
- www.bookcoverpro.com very expensive but offers software tools as well. Website out of the air..

One of my favorites is this guy http://goonwrite.com/ produces some nice materials and talks like a normal human being not like a preprogrammed Corporate America writer. Reasonable prices as well.
Pricing can be anything varying from $30 to $900 for a cover, depending on what you what ofcourse.
Take into account the cost of additional ISBN number and barcode, the cheapest book you can get is about $200 excluding marketing etc.

Way #2 DYI
selfpublishingwriter.blogspot.comDepending on what you are writing if you know your way around Photoshop you will be able to create bookcovers. If you dont know your way around Photoshop, dont bother learning unless you are naturally gifted, try MS Powerpoint. It might not always be perfect but for 60% of ebooks it will work.
The one I have attached as reference is a result of 10 minutes work.

Is it perfect? Far from, point being is that the secret of a good book cover lays in the balance between art and font type (including book title) and that is something for very creative people to balance.

A lot is being said and written about book cover design, data shows that nothing is more true than that

  • The fact that 90% of the readers that buy a book do not finish the first chapter of a book, 
  •  10% of readers makes it past the first chapter
  •  60% of readers does not make it till the end of the book
  •  4% of readers finishes a book that they opened, a shocking 96% doesn't! 
I am not making it up, read in a book from Tony Robbins


The conclusion: It is hard to get people to buy your book, it is even harder to get them to finish it.
Therefore the combination of book cover, marketing skills seem to be more important then your content.

Lets put that into real day life.  My little whitepaper #1 in some category has had 215 downloads, applying the above data it means 8 people finished it. Depressing? Yes! Especially because that cover was crap!!

Not sure if you agree, leave your comments!

A KDP Key Word Challenge


In my previous post I was pretty happy publishing my first white paper. Previous I had read all about finding your niche blabla.One of the limitations of publishing via Amazon's KDP program is that you SEO tools are relatively limited. You can select your categories and add a total of 7 keywords, separated by comma's so in my example the term "credit management" seems to count as one word. Interesting in some way yes! It opens an opportunity.

After I published I suddenly realized I could have put in "careers in credit management for middle aged color blind men" and if my understanding is correct that would be counted as one word..
I am not sure about it, feel free to correct me!
Much to my surprise my white paper had been categorized as follows

Look for Similar Items by Category


Some pretty serious categories! Right? Yep indeed and again to my surprise my paper ranked well, not sure if it is high or low. I can see about 5,428 papers and books rank better, earlier in the day though my rank was #4027. Welcome to ABSR stock exchange... The #1 spot in Vocational Guidance was and is a surprise

I have to be honest it was only me and three others in the free category ... Haha but nobody will remember that one in ten years time 

Thursday, 8 January 2015

Proud To Have Launched My First Kindle White Paper

One of the things I found very difficult was to find a topic to write about. I have a million ideas, how do I organize that much choas? Simple I realized that I wanted to publish one "test" whitepaper in the KindleStore.
One Million Ideas suddenly became one idea.

theselfpublishingwriter.blogspot.com
Kindle Edition
Taken a good look at myself I realized that one of the topics I would be able to write about easily, is how to get into a job in credit management. Yes the people who review your company financials when your business wants to buy product and if you don't pay the ones who chase you for money.
It is my actual profession, I only ended up in it by chance about 15 years ago.
That made me think and realize that there might be loads of people (either students or jobhunters) who maybe are considering a career in Credit and Collections, but simply need a bit of information, not from a recruiter but somebody like me, who has years of experience both in the operations and management. It is important for anybody to know what you can expect from a job and that organizations in general are not copy-paste factories

Click on the above cover to  "Get A Job In Credit Management....What You Need To Know To Kick Off Your Career"

Like any writer, I always think I can do better job, so don't hesitate to comment