Category: Writing and Publishing Tips

Marketing and Outreach – Now what

by Allie P., posted in General Tips and Tricks, Writing and Publishing Tips

Patience has never been my virtue.

Perhaps this is one of the reason I have never followed my husband in his marathon training – I have a difficult time pacing myself. Ok – so my lack of patience is probably the least of my reasons for not running marathons with him, I just can’t get my head around voluntarily running that far when your life didn’t depend upon it.

Since publishing, I’ve launched www.anuncertainfaith.com, been active on goodreads, created a Facebook page, a google+ page, have begun networking in earnest, contacted reviewers, and have even launched a book giveaway contest on goodreads, which you also enter from my events page from this blog. I’ve thrown myself completely into the promotion, promotion, promotion mindset, but will all my efforts be enough?

Unfortunately I won’t find out for sure until the end of the quarter when the retail numbers begin to roll in – a wait that is completely agonizing. I am now having to research ways to de-stress in addition to everything else.

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Gaining Reviews – The Quest Continues

by Allie P., posted in General Tips and Tricks, Writing and Publishing Tips

One of the tips sent to me on soliciting reviews when you are self publishing was to join the author program with www.goodreads.com. Up until very recently I was unaware of this site, but I am happy that other bloggers were helpful enough to suggest it as an option. I have joined the groups and have already gained some traction from interested parties. I have heard that some authors view other writers as the competition, and I have to admit that until I had a project ready to send to an editor I was very nervous about sharing it – worried that I would be discouraged by the success of others. Obviously in storefronts we are competing for limited shelf space, but I am glad to see that there is a huge community out there willing to help offer advice for us newbies.

I am looking forward to a future where I too might be able to help another struggling new author. If the statistics are anything to trust, there should be a fair number of us out there.

 

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My Obsession with Amazon

by Allie P., posted in General Tips and Tricks, Writing and Publishing Tips

Ever since I discovered that Amazon’s SEO was more complicated than merely a word for word keyword match, I have been visiting my book on its virtual shelves daily. I was very happy to see that I now have top billing when searching for my book, at least I have top billing based on my searches. Who knows where I may still rank with other people’s searches, and that unknown keeps bringing me back to Amazon day in and day out as if Amazon would suddenly take pity on me and say, yeah we know you are interested in this product. We’ll sell it for you if only so that you move onto other product pages and start buying those as well. Of course if they did come out and say that directly to me, I would turn around and sign up for a multi-year prime membership. I hear that is only mildly less addictive.

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Searchability In Amazon

by Allie P., posted in General Tips and Tricks, Writing and Publishing Tips

As previously mentioned, my recently published debut novel entitled, An Uncertain Faith, was recently picked up by Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. I was understandably excited and wanted to promote this event within my network of family and friends. When they went to search for it by title, however, it didn’t appear in the results. I also conducted the same search with similar results, however searching by author’s name found my novel instantly. I thought surely there must be a mistake somewhere and contacted Amazon’s customer service. I was told that there is more to their search algorithm than merely matching keywords word for word and that even though I was looking up a specific title verbatim the search might return results it thinks I want more and hide the direct match. I would have thought the word for word match would have at least appeared towards the bottom of my search results rather than stripped out altogether. Now I am wondering if there might be a whole world of other products and services I am unaware of just because a computer came to the conclusion that it knows better than me what I want. This is not necessarily a complaint, just an observation, and I was able to search by book by title shortly after my discussion with customer service.

I would like to repost an article on the subject as I do not seem to be the first who learned the hard way that there are ways to optimize searches on platforms other than the big search engines

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