Kindle Readers and Authors discussion

Failing to plan how you will promote your book is a guarantee that you plan to fail in selling the book to customers. Unless you’re a dilettante, with only a superficial interest in writing, but like claiming to be an author, you wrote for a serious reason.
Lets face it, all those weeks and months of work weren’t just to see your name on a book jacket were they?
To ensure success, you MUST promote. Other than the stock method of book reviews, what are you doing to promote your books and ensure you make a profit?

Before I answer your question, let me put this out there for those writers freaking out -- One of the great aspects of eBooks (particularly indie published) is that they never go off the shelf. In the tradpub world, you have at best 6 weeks to prove your worth -- at best. Sometimes it can be as little as 2-3 weeks. All your promotion has to be as effective as possible right out of the gate. But that's not true with an ebook. You can work on a slow build. If one promotion fails, you can try again and again because that book will always be there.

Having said that, I have a short story collection coming out June 29th called 10 Bits of My Brain. As a writer for MagicalWords.net and a podcaster for The Eclectic Review, I'm relying on that platform for my initial sales. Since this is my first ebook, I've decided to purposefully NOT do anything more for the first few weeks just to see if my platform is as strong as I think it is. Once the dust settles from that, I'll be pushing out for reviews and such. But I think a big part of indie promotion comes from cross pollination with other authors. Finding authors who you can connect with and share readers makes a huge difference.

As someone published in e-book format, the most comforting words I've read are: 'it takes a least 6 months to build a platform.' And the second most comforting?
That e-books never go off the shelf and that time would appear to definitely be on the author's side (to which I add Time and a good story!)

Stuart/ Pru

Yes, and as has been often pointed out, you can also tweak just about everything in an e-published book to get things right. You can change the cover, the back jacket blurb (aka the product description), correct typos........ Do this as often as you need to hone the appeal of your work (I've done all this and more with my thriller Take No More).

You're not able to do any of this with a print book!