David Gaughran's Blog, page 7
November 1, 2018
7 Ways To Market Books For Children
When I discovered self-publishing back in 2010 it was, as for many, a dream come true after the familiar cycle of sending out manuscripts only to get a rejection six or seven weeks later. At last I would be able to get my children’s stories out and take the world by storm!
Except, of course, it doesn’t work like that…
As we all know, books don’t sell themselves and Amazon and the other platforms (not to mention bricks and mortar bookshops) won’t sell our books without our help. Of course, a g...
October 9, 2018
Kindle Unlimited – A Cheater Magnet
For a month or two, though, things improved. The charts cleaned up. Real, actual authors — not faceless book stuffers powered by ghostwriters — started surfacing again. Readers were saying that it was easier to find good books in the charts. I noticed the difference myself in July when helping someone with a launch; it seemed to take less of a push to get in the Top 100. I stopped paying attention to what the scammers were doing. Life was good.
It seems like Amazon stopped paying attention to...
October 6, 2018
Click Here For Success
Think And Grow Lich is the only automated system on the market today for those who want to create their own course about how to sell your course on how to market a course. This blog post is a one-time only SPECIAL OFFER: for 100% off the regular price of $5,000 you can get all the secrets without making those twelve easy payments!
Have you been slaving away without much reward? Are you sick of putting in all the time and effort to learn something when you could have just skipped that step? Yo...
September 19, 2018
How To Advertise And Sell More Books
I have a wonderful guest post today from author Nicholas Erik - a skilled marketer with a keen analytical mind, who will show you how to analyze the profitability of your paid ads, so you can sell more books. It's easily the longest post we've had here - over 4,000 words - but it's worth settling in for this excellent, comprehensive guide which will have something useful for all self-publishers, from beginners to experts. Here's Nick with more:
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As the title might suggest, this guide is al...
August 28, 2018
CreateSpace Closing – It’s Official
It’s official! Amazon is closing CreateSpace “in a few weeks” and seems to be nudging people to move now. More on that below, including how the process has been simplified further – significantly in fact, especially for those with large catalogs who can now move the whole lot at once.
As I said in my post two weeks ago, it’s probably wise to get ahead of the big migration in a few weeks. Amazon has 2m titles to move; stuff is bound to go wrong. And my own experience with KDP Print customer se...
August 24, 2018
Elm Hill Books: Another HarperCollins Vanity Press
HarperCollins now has another Christian vanity press subsidiary with five-figure publishing packages, but this time the Big 5 publisher is also pimping out its sales reps and distribution network to sell the idea to novice authors. Elm Hill Books was launched last year and is the brainchild of Pete Nikolai – the longtime Director of Publishing Services at HarperCollins Christian Publishing. And both have form when it comes to exploiting writers.
In 2009, Pete Nikolai was working for HarperCol...
August 16, 2018
How To Switch From Createspace to KDP Print
Ever since the launch of KDP Print, it has been rumored that Createspace is closing – after all, it doesn’t make sense to maintain a second, off-brand POD service, especially one where the architecture is creaking and security issues are multiplying.
I spoke to one of the senior Createspace people at NINC last year, and he explained that the two services have been slowly folding together at the back end for quite some time, and that they were now working out of the same building. What we’ve s...
July 31, 2018
Vanity and The Media
Experienced authors tend to chastise vanity press victims for not doing sufficient research, but the murky web of vanity partnerships — and the uncritical coverage which invariably accompanies same — makes it exceedingly difficult for newer writers to chart a safe path.
Some vanity presses are very good at crafting a veneer of legitimacy, one which can be very convincing to those starting out. Infamous vanity press conglomerate Author Solutions figured this out very early on, creating partner...
July 21, 2018
How To (Ethically) Hack Amazon Categories
I get so many emails about Amazon categories and keywords that I thought it would be useful to dig into all the opportunities at your fingertips, and clear up some confusion out there too. Useful for me, that is. Now I'll have something to point people to! Should be useful for you too, even the old timers, because I bet there's a least one hack in here you didn't know about, and smart use of the category system can greatly increase your visibility on Amazon — critical for all authors, doubly...
July 10, 2018
The Amazon Algorithm Myth
A problematic feature of the world in 2018 is that the social networks we have built seem to spread misinformation faster and wider than its more accurate counterpart, and this can lead authors to make decisions counter to their interests. One of the enduring myths surrounds “The Amazon Algorithm.”
That phrase alone is a red flag to me because anyone who has a good idea about how Amazon works knows there is more than one algorithm — for example there are separate algorithms which determine ho...
