Three Simple (and Surprisingly Cheap) Ways to Promote Your Book

If you’re an indie author, chances are you spent most of your budget on your proofreader, editor, cover designer and maybe a branding expert. So, if funds are low, how are you going to afford to promote your book?

Have no fear, cheap ways are here, and I’ve tried them all.

I used these techniques and found within six months of trying them all that my monthly income had increased by 300 percent. They all took very little time to set up, and were worth the investment, because they brought me a profit. Before you try any of these, though, I caution you that they will only work if you had your book properly edited by a professional, your cover is eye-catching and designed by someone who recently took a course (cover trends change yearly!) and if you have a website, a Twitter account, and a Facebook Author page set up. Once you’ve done that, you can implement these techniques.

1. Tweet about your book. Use Booklinker.net to set up a universal link to Amazon, so that no matter what country your potential customer is from, it will lead them directly to their Amazon store. You can also add beautiful promotional photos to your tweet with using Canva.com

2. Ask any followers on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to send you photos of themselves with your book. You can offer them a free copy of your next book, or if you aren’t sure when that’s going to happen, a complimentary second copy for their friend. Then post them on your most followed form of social media. Readers love interacting with authors, and this gives you lots of great, free photos to share around the web. You might want to set up a special folder in Pinterest just for these photos. You can integrate this idea with a Rafflecopter (Rafflecopter.com) which engages your Facebook and Twitter followers and gets you new readers to sign up for your mailing list. Mine was the most expensive technique on this list, but I got over 200 new and engaged subscribers in a few weeks.

3. Set up a Kindle Countdown Deal or Free Book Deal and then do a paid promotion to announce the deal via Bargain Booksy or its sister company Freebooksy for your first deal day, and for later days in the deal, Book Sends, Fussy Librarian or, for those in the UK, Book Hippo, which is free!  I know, it seems wrong to put the book you spent so much time writing down to 0.99 or even free. I fought against the concept for months, but when I finally did a free book deal for my first book, and then advertised that it was free using Freebooksy, I made back all the money I’d spent having my second book professionally edited. You do need to spend some money in this business to make money. Once you leap and give it a try (baby steps at first, don’t break the bank!) you’ll be amazed at the results. You’ll have a higher ranking in the Amazon charts for a while, so more readers will learn about your book, buy it, sign up for your mailing list (especially if you’ve mentioned the mailing list at the end of your first and second book) and more reviews, which will result in even more sales. It takes time to build momentum, but it does all work like dominoes once you promote your first book for a low price, or free.

You needn’t put your book in Kindle Unlimited (exclusive to Kindle) just to get it free – there are ways around that so that you can put your books on Kobo, iBooks etc. – and everyone writes about this  (price matching) so I won’t cover it here because it’s a long drawn out process. I am exclusive to Kindle and it’s working very well for me, but you can still put your book to $0 for a few months via price matching, and see if that results in more reviews and sales of your other books.

It’s all an experiment, and the industry is changing every month, and so I would suggest that you spend very little on these simple ideas and on any paid promotions at first, but do dip your toes in the water, and gauge how they perform for you over time.  Then, if you’ve found success, use part of your profits to advertise some more.

Good luck, and don’t forget to keep on writing! Even just 50 words a day is better than nothing.

Heather

 

 

On “Going Commercial” – And Loving It.

I’ve just been invited by Amazon Canada to be an Amazon Influencer. This means that I get my own website at Amazon.ca to display all of my books (finally!) and I can recommend products to you there as well. As one reader put it, “You’re going commercial?”

You bet I am, but I’m not doing anything differently with my online presence than I have been for many years. It’s just that a large corporation finally noticed that what I have to say (of my own volition) to my followers may be useful to them. If that’s what some call “going commercial,” I say bring it on, bring it big or go home broke. I’m not doing anything I’m not proud of; in fact, I’m really excited about this, because I’d already been plugging books and products in my Instagram/ on Twitter and YouTube for two years without even realizing it. Now I’ll just be earning a small percentage per purchase when I point readers to books and products that I already use and love.

I’ve always been a writer for the love of writing, and if I can find ways to do what I’m passionate about every day, stick to my morals, and still make a decent living in the 21st century as an author? Then “going commercial” is something I’m darn proud of.

The best part is, this is one more way that I can prove to those of you who aspire to become authors that, yes, Virginia, we CAN be wealthy writers! Very few can make a living that will sustain a whole family simply by writing books (especially if you don’t have over ten published books out yet). We can, however, make a decent salary for ourselves as writers if we think outside the box and do more than just write books. We have to consider selling those books as ebooks, paperbacks, audiobooks; selling the rights to adapt those books into films; speak about our lives as writers and get paid for that, and use social media to gain more interested readers, which gives us leverage in making business deals with corporations and organizations that we respect.

I started out as a poet, first published at age five, and decided to become a writer then and there. At the time, I didn’t realize I was headed into a profession that would pay me very little (even as a trained journalist) for coming up with fresh ideas and stories out of thin air. It didn’t make sense to me: why are writers so undervalued, when people who catch footballs and run with them earn $5-20M a year?

Reality sunk in quite quickly in my twenties when I began sending out story ideas to magazines and learned I’d be paid two to forty cents a word for my work ($1/word for the top magazines) and that the average author in Canada makes $6,000 a year. For some crazy reason, though, I kept on writing. I think the reason is called passion.

I’ve since made it my mission to be transparent with followers who tell me that they want to be authors, too. I try to remind you that it’s going to be challenging, but not impossible, to make a living doing this. I only started making a good profit at writing fiction two years ago. It started out as what I called “skate money” to buy my daughter skates, but soon my earnings became “vacation money,” and I was able to buy a $500 daybed for our backyard, several lovely vacations for our family and I paid many bills (or as my husband Bill likes to joke about it, “Pay Bill.”). While my book income continues to grow, I wouldn’t be able to handle the mortgage payments on my own, plus saving for University for our daughter, plus all of our yearly expenses, without the help of my spouse’s income. I can’t sustain my family in 2018 on my author earnings. Yet.

And that’s why I’m going commercial. Plus, I love online shopping. I love avoiding traffic and crowds and shopping in my luxurious grey robe. Now, when I’m not writing my next novel or working on getting the last one adapted into a movie, I get to buy dresses, purses and shoes and tell you what I think about them? Yes, please!

Check out my new Amazon Influencer Link and please use it whenever you want to buy one of my books or audio books. It will be much appreciated.

Thanks for taking this journey with me,
Heather

Shopping online is my second favourite way of doing it. I most love shopping at outdoor markets, buying flowers and hand-crafted decorations for our home.

Back To You

Hey.

I know it’s been a while. I hope you still remember my name.

I’ve been a terrible blogger for the last few years. It’s been challenging to find time to write my novels, market my novels, teach others how to do that via YouTube and social media, and spend time with my family. Blogging had to be left behind.

But blogging poems and blogging about writing are how I got pulled away from journalism and onto this career path back in 2007. I started this blog as “Where the Butterflies Go,” you all commented on my poetry, encouraged me to turn the posts into a book, and … […]<<< a whole lot of stuff happened! and here I am today, a published author, with four novels, five poetry books, a screenplay book and a kids’ book of poems under her belt. I never could have imagined I’d still be doing this more than a decade later.

I don’t think I’d be here if I hadn’t started that blog and had such great feedback from you readers. Thank you.

I miss that interaction, don’t you? Social media certainly makes it easier to comment (no logging in…I’ll see what I can do about that btw) but you don’t always have the same “clan” coming back. I miss my bloggyland tribe.

I’ve learned so much since my first novel was published. Here are a few of those lessons:

1) Take risks. If you don’t risk, you don’t grow. I know it’s scary, especially for so many of us introverted artist types (surprise, yes, I’m in fact an introvert who had to come out of her shell through drama as a teenager when she realized that’s how artists grow). I have had such an interesting life because of a few brave moments.

2) You have to put yourself out there as an author. No one else, not even your publicist, knows your product like you do. You have to go to the book signings and the speaking engagements, tweet about stuff that really matters to you, and risk looking like a fool (see #1) if you want the right readers to find you. In time, many of those readers will become your friends. Cool right? It’s not all about making money…but…

3) You have to spend money to make money. I didn’t like this one very much. You mean you have to spend money to advertise that your heart and soul of a book is FREE for a few days? Yes, you do. You don’t have to do that until the end of time. Just until you gain a reader base. It sounds wrong, but it’s right. I didn’t start making a profit as an author until I started spending money directing traffic to my books.

4) Give back. I feel this one strongly. I like to encourage and teach aspiring authors, because I remember how maddening it can be to feel like you’re getting absolutely nowhere. I still have those days, trust me, but that’s because I’m trying new things every day (audiobooks, TV deals) so I’m still learning what works and what doesn’t work. There are tens of thousands of new authors out there who are struggling to find their audience in this ever-changing book industry. I just want to encourage them before they decide to call it quits. Speaking of calling it quits…

5) Don’t quit. Success if probably just around the corner, or at least the corner after that. Keep on going, dreaming, risking, believing. Don’t put a second mortgage on your home, mind you, please be smart about it, but do everything you can to get your book seen. You have to keep on going, especially if you have a strong “knowing” about it. If you know it’s supposed to be, it will be. It’s just a matter of time.

I’m so happy to be back. I’ll try to do this weekly!

Heather 🙂

 

Now You Can Listen to Pete and Allie in the Car, on the Train, in the Sun, in the Rain ;)

Visit this link to hear a sample clip and learn more about The Ticket audiobook from its publisher: https://tantor.com/the-ticket-heather-grace-stewart.html OR get it discounted as a preorder item from Audible on Amazon: Get it Free on Amazon

 

The Wealthy Writer: Five Fast Tips for Writing Dialogue

Do you struggle with coming up with realistic dialogue in your fiction? Here are

five tips which can help you every time. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube

channel for writing wealth and wellness tips every week.