vaneluzimoura:

By Anne Hill:

Authors have come a long way in the past few years. We understand that we have to be marketers as well as writers. We know that the best book marketing involves two-way communication with readers and not just sales pitches. Some of us even enjoy it.

But while blogs and social media have made those conversations easier to have, selling books through Amazon and other online retailers prevents us from connecting with readers at the critical moment of sale. Amazon knows more about who buys our books than we do, by design.

We get sales figures, but we don’t know anything about who bought our books. And the more we know about where our books are being sold and to whom, the better all our marketing can be.

The solution is to sell books directly from author websites—and I don’t mean linking to your book listing on Amazon. Through direct sales, we learn where our readers are geographically, what brought them to the site, and most importantly […]

I’ll probably be setting up a dedicated website pretty soon, one with the first book in my series being offered free…this is useful.