THE BIG BOYS ON THE BLOCK:
I have advertised with Freebooksy and have had a good experience. The cost to advertise runs approximately $100 to 110. Occasionally, they do have a special, but generally, it is a $100.00 cost. I’ve had over 2,000 downloads with them, so I consider them the best that I have tried.
I have also used The Fussy Librarian and I’ve also had a good result. Their prices range from $49 to $80. They have less of a reach, but I have had 300 or 400 downloads and I still consider that a good result.
THE NEW KID ON THE BLOCK:
I decided to try some of the newer kids on the block to see what kind of results I would get for less of an investment. The first one I’m trying is Manybooks.net.
You can see a snapshot of their website to the left. The website is for readers, of course, and they have a search where the readers can browse through all the books or by genre.
AUTHOR SERVICES:
In order to find the author services, you need to scroll all the way to the bottom and look for a link for Author Services. I took a snapshot of it above.
THE REQUIREMENTS TO ADVERTISE:
Above you will see the conditions that I took a snapshot of from their website. The book has to be marked down at least 50%. You need a minimum of 5 reviews on Amazon and you need to have a 4-star rating or higher. More on this below.
MY OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCE:
I tried the $29 package, shown abaove, to see what kind of results I would get. Because they required a 4-star rating, I had to choose Book 4 from my Newport Vampire Series. It’s always harder to market for a Book 4, so I had pretty realistic expectations going into this.
The first book in this series, Darius, A Vampire Story, is permafree on Amazon.
Besides the two permafree books I have, all my other books are in Kindle Select. So I set Distrust to be free on February 26th and February 27th. I only purchased the one promotion on 02/26/24. I signed up and these were my results:
02/26/24 – Distrust – 135 downloads and Darius (Book 1) had 21 downloads
02/27/24 – Distrust – 132 downloads and Darius (Book 1) had 19 downloads
I was very happy with the results. First of all, having 135 downloads for a Book 4 in a series is good. Darius also received 21 downloads. Now, Darius gets downloads everyday on its own, but I attributed all the downloads to the promotion just for ease of keeping the records.
The bigger surprise was that I had the same amount of downloads on the 27th. I only paid for one promotion but I count all of these downloads as results of the paid promotion.
Next time I will try Murder in the Sanctuary which is a Book 1 in a series but not permafree and see what kind of results I get. I will do a follow-up blog and video.
I am also planning to try another book, Groomed for Marriage which is permafree with the second $39 package. I’ll write about that one when I do it. The third package had to do with more of an editorial package. It seemed a little bit involved, an author interview, and working with their staff. I wasn’t interested in that one at this time, but for anyone who is looking for something like that, their price seems very reasonable and their staff, pictured below, seems friendly enough!
Below is a video I made going over the website and showing you where everything is. Sometimes it’s helpful to see it live.
Now that you have a generic marketing calendar, it's time to assemble your toolbox. These are the things you will want to have close by when it's time to dedicate an hour or two to marketing.
First into the toolbox is a graphics program. I used to use Photoshop, but since I retired from work, I now use Gimp because it's free. I try to do everything as free as I can because I devote all monies spent on producing my books on an editor and paid book ads that work. I say 'ads that work' because many of them don't. More on that in the next few blog posts.
I used to use Hootsuite, but it got too expensive and I couldn't see enough in their desktop area. I switched to using a Microsoft Excel sheet. This allows me to continue to just Right-click and add a row above, so it is easy to build out the calendar. Within 6 months, I had about 4 to 6 daily marketing ads to post everyday. I find this the easiest.
Along with the 72 dpi book cover, you will need short blurbs about your book or books. Starting at about 150 words, keep whittling the blurb down until you have several blurbs with the last one being about one sentence (for Amazon ads).
Copy and paste any and all purchase links for your book. Be sure to keep track of which merchant each link belongs to. Besides the purchase links, you may want to keep the paperback and hardcover links handy -- you never know!
Most younger people know what hashtags are. If you're a boomer like me (hee hee), you may need to brush up on what hashtags are. Go to YouTube and search out videos explaining hashtags. Someone will explain them to you.
