Kindle Select

The book I read to research this post was How To Run A Free Kindle Select Promotion by Michael Andrade which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is only around 20 pages so quite short. It is about promoting your e-book on kindle. There are quite a few ways of promoting it. Kindle Select lets you put an e-book on their site for free for 5 days out of 90. The other days you can charge people to buy it. This means kindle promote it for 5 days kickstarting your sales and if it gets in one of the free e-books charts a portion of those sales  can be transferred to sales of buying it. This means those sales are listed on the chart but the Amazon algorithm is a secret. You can use Kindle Prime where people can borrow your book and Amazon keep a pot of money that is divided among people who take part in this scheme at the end of each month. Remember the more you promote your book and the more sales you get the more Amazon promotes it in things like search results. Also when someone buys an e-book they list a few similiar books they might be interested in. When you add a book to kindle you can add upto 7 search terms. Many authors also promote there books on Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter you can tweet an advertisement and use a hashtag like #free. On Facebook there are authors groups who work together to promote each other. Request that people give you reviews especially if you are giving the book away but don’t go over the top doing it. You can also give copies away to sites like blogs to review it. There is also a site http://bookbub.com that can promote it for a fee. Apparently they are the holy grail of book promotion sites and 90 % of books submitted are rejected. I did quite enjoy this book and do recommend it.

Kindle Publishing

The book I read to research this post was Kindle Publishing by Jason Bracht which is a very good book that I read at kindle unlimited. This is a book that looks at the trials and tribulations of selling your e-book on kindle in quite a general way. There is around just 90 pages so it is quite short. I think I’d have preferred a book that wrote about the individual steps in more detail. In another book I read something quite relevant that if you are an author just starting out you are better off focusing on doing radio, magazine and newspaper interviews if possible. It takes time to build a blog or social media followers from scratch. In this book it does suggest getting a hash tag on Twitter for your book so people can discuss it which seems good. There are also services on kindle like daily deal, kindle unlimited and giving your book away for a limited period. With daily deal kindle lets you keep 70 % of the purchase price although it is offered at a very low price for a period. This does give you lots of free publicity and many people are much more likely to download a daily deal. With kindle unlimited Amazon keeps a pot of money that is shared out among the authors whose books have been read by subscribers. At least 10 % of the book has to be read to be read to qualify. I think it particularly suits short books. I did enjoy reading this book and do recommend it.

Social Media Marketing Your Products

The book I read to research this post was Social Media Frenzy by J Steve Miller which is a very good book that I think I downloaded for free on kindle. This book is a shortened version of another book you have to buy. The book basically looks at whether your social media is right and whether you should even be using social media to market or product. Social media works best when it is a high value product that has scope for repeat business. If you only have one product it might be better to have a short blog detailing who has interviewed you and concentrate on getting interviews on mediums like radio and magazines and also doing guest posts on other people’s blogs. You have to look at the amount of work you are expending and how many you are selling. Having a blog is often free with the exception of a personalized URL. If you are tempted to do a blog it may require 3 posts a week to encourage followers, with authors that is time you could spend writing a book. Also bear in mind that is 150 posts a year and you are good at very narrow niche that may be too many. Don’t forget each post has to fuel people’s interest. In the long term and as you add your products to your repoiture social media and blogging is good but you do have to look at the immediate results. In a lot of cases someone writing a review on a site like Amazon is better so it probably is best to give some review copies in electronic form. Also if someone raves about your book ask them to write a review. I may very well get the expanded version of this book as it is an interesting topic. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and of course definitely recommend it.

 

Scrivener

The book I read to research this post was Scrivener For Dummies by Gwen Hernandez which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. Scrivener is a writing software initially released for the Apple Macintosh and particularly for the OS X Lion operating system and I think the version in this book is a previous version which at the time had a cut down Windows version although in future both versions will have similar features. I did look on Google to see how much this software is and it is free for 30 days and $40 thereafter. The company that make it is literature and latte. It is particularly suited to writers as they can keep all there work in one place which it does with folders and subfolders. It also allows you to do e-books particularly in pdf and you can import your work including notes and annotations into Microsoft Word. There is a kind of add on at http://crowl.info which is a word counter useful for editing for things like magazines and newspapers. The book does a decent job of explaining how to use it although this software has been superceded by Scrivener 2 which hopefully there will be a follow up book on. The book explains where there are differences between the windows and mac versions although in the later version the features in the windows version are comparable. I really enjoyed reading it and think the price of the software does sound quite reasonable. I’d never heard of this software prior to reading this book and apparently the word scrivener is a fancy word meaning writer. It’s an interesting book.

Quark Xpress 8

The book I read to research this post was Quark Xpress 8 Essential Skills by John Cruise et al which is a very good book which I bought from Amazon. Quark Xpress started out as a desktop publishing but has gradually also become a website design & ebook generating package. This book is quite old & I’m not sure what the latest version is but it’s still interesting. If you are using Quark Xpress to create a website you can incorporate flash files & pdf files into your site. One thing I can’t understand is they’ve got rid of the polygon tool in version 8, now you have to draw it from scratch, it was introduced in version & was a good feature. One interesting feature is ligatures which are pairs of characters or letters which are joined up for aesthetic reasons, an example being in the word final you might have the fi joined up. In Quark you should never have to create anything from scratch more than once as there are quite a lot of features like cut & paste, & also duplicate & special duplicate which let you save & reuse something easily & even let you easily modify it.