Neil D. Ostroff's Blog, page 27

To sell millions!

That is the goal of most novelists. Not so much because of the greed factor, but that money affords the life of being a writer. Indie publishing can make it happen! That said, here are the final results of my relatively expensive blog ad campaign. I got maybe twenty extra sales because of it. So my advice would be only to place ads that are cheap and give great exposure. My mistake was that I jumped right in with the $40 ads instead of doing more research and finding numerous little ads for $5 which is what ended up happening. Google: cheap blog ads, and you should find a few. Though like I said, those little ads are great exposure but I don’t know how they affect sales. If you’ve been following my hits counter you can see that it’s still going up steadily. I believe that is the result of all this exposure I’ve given myself. My Facebook “likes” have also gone up. I think it’s at about 5,000 now. That’s pretty sweet. I just finished my last rewrite of SILENT INVASION. I wrote the first draft of this book back in 1996. Over the years, the manuscript got me two agents and several reads at big publishing houses. Even though I’m sending this one through the agent ringer, I’m still having my cover artist Judy Bullard design a cover. I want to be ready to publish the book if there’s no takers in New York, which judging by the current publishing climate seems to be about one book in a million. I’ll give it until mid-Feb. and if nothing happens in NY, I’ll sell it through Kindle and Smashwords. By then, my other publicity campaigns should be in full force and my exposure to the world should be awesome! Today, I’m researching more blog sites that offer free listings and cheap ads, and I’m also going to post my blog site on the dozens of forums that I keep track of. It’s not spam because these are forums who invite you to post. If you go to http://www.bookblogs.com and check out their forum area you’ll find dozens of places to post you site and books for sale. Also, now that my latest is complete, it’s back to work on IMAGINATION. My brain’s been itching to explore the possibilities of our existence.
http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com

Hello, New York!

Since my website and blog pages are getting so much attention I’ve decided to submit SILENT INVASION to try and get an agent, again. Though, as I said before, it’s more of an ego thing than anything else. I figure with my sites getting so much traffic I can use that info in my query as a great platform. Since most agents won’t even look at an author unless he’s got the basic WWW promotion down, at least I might spark someone’s attention. Although I’ve made money from my books, it would be nice to get an advance, even a little one. Anyway, I’ll post the query I’m going to use once I finish it. As far as the viral thing goes… it’s still happening and you can check my page stats daily to prove it. I’m looking forward to the next month since it’s quiet at my work and I will have a lot of time to write and market. I’m going to get back writing IMAGINATION, and may tinker with my YA hardcore literary, WASTED. I’m probably going to try some more cheap blog ads just for the exposure and I’m still waiting for Kindle Nation and Substance books to start their promotions. Who knows, maybe someone important will see my efforts and sign me without having to write all those queries. Oh, and one other thing. I’m involved in a lot of threads that offer to promote your book or blog. Don’t take those too seriously and put too much effort into posting constantly. Maybe one post a week on each thread. I’ve discovered that so many people post their sites that it really is just a matter of luck and interest, not volume that will get people to your site.

http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com

Ah… sales!

Yeah! Sales are increasing! My blog is now averaging about 75-100 hits an hour. My Facebook Fan page has almost 3,500 “likes” and my Authors Den profile is averaging 100 hits a day. So, here’s the breakdown of all my promotional and marketing efforts so far. The newspaper article scheme did nothing for sales but probably exposed me to a few new people. I would recommend against it. The ads I paid good money for, like the Litopia and YA Reads.com did almost nothing for sales. Perhaps, I got a dozen from them. They’re still running for another week so I guess we’ll see. The programmers I hired to code in my blog, well, you can see the results on my stats bar. I have a few really big promotions coming up. First, is my online publicist’s promotion, which starts in two weeks. This should blast sales according to her. I also have a few interviews coming out that I’ll announce. And the biggest plan of all is the one causing me the most trouble. I’m trying to place an ad campaign on Kindle Nation Daily, and bought the space, but it’s nearly impossible to get a hold of them because they have been swamped with authors after a national story on them exposed how powerful a sales tool the site is. They said I’d be in sometime in the next month. An ad on Kindle Nation Daily does wonders for sales and Amazon ranking, so it’s worth the wait. Also, most of my back link encryptions won’t affect sales for a few weeks. So, as it goes with my available books, things are definitely moving. As for books in progress. I’ve paused on IMAGINATION after 20,000 words written. The book is getting very ethereal and complicated, and I need the quiet of January to concentrate on it. Until then, I’ve been doing a final read on SILENT INVASION, the final book in a series and an updated rewrite of my 2003 release TIM MADISON GALACTIC WARRIOR. I’ve been thinking that the book is so good (in my biased opinion) and my author’s platform getting so much attention, that I might try and get another agent with it. Getting an agent is purely for my ego, I could probably make more money doing the book myself. We’ll see. Here’s the links to my latest ad’s that only cost me five dollars each to place. As I’ve said before, blog ads are a great, and inexpensive way to get exposure.
http://www.vaughnonmovies.com/
http://hollywoodteenonline.com/2011/1...

Blog:
http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com

Facebook Fan Page:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Face...

Excited to wake!!

As some of you may have noticed the counter for my blog has exploded. For the last week, I’ve been averaging about 600 hits a day and it’s going up. Yesterday, I got 1,700. It seams the search engine optimization is kicking in after all, and it will only get better over time. It’s a bit overwhelming to think that so many people are reading my posts and checking out the kinds of books I write. Every morning I jump from bed, come down to my office, and check my stats on my various sites. It’s all very exciting, but… truth be told, sales are not nearly increasing like my traffic. They have gone up a little, but not in comparison to the amount of traffic my blog and other sites are suddenly getting. I guess when you optimize you’re getting everyone in the world to take a look at you; readers, non-readers, people who don’t know how to read. Very few will actually make a purchase. I’m assuming as the months roll by that the number of people visiting my sites will be so large that even if just a very small percentage buy a book, and an even smaller percentage write a review or tell their friends, I’ll still be in business doing what I love. My advice to novelists is to get your books search optimized, and then throw a few cheap blog ads out there, along with getting on some book forums and commenting. If you’ve followed this blog you know what I’ve done to start getting these kinds of numbers. Please feel free to check my blog hits daily and keep track of what’s happening. And hopefully these will translate into sales.

my blog:
http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com

Please “like” my Facebook fan page.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Face...

Come on readers!

The first ads of my winter campaign are live. The combined cost for both was $100. They will run for the next two weeks right on the home pages of these sites. This should give the ads about 100,000 views at least.
http://litopia.com/
http://www.yareads.com/
Now, I’m not expecting to sell 250 books because of these ads, which is what I’d need to break even, what I’m looking for now is exposure, plain and simple. As I begin to place ads all over blogs and writers sites, I’m hoping my covers will become familiar and sales will increase steadily as a result. I’ve got more ads coming and several interviews which I will post. I’ve also been hiring programmers on that great site Fiverr.com that I had mentioned in a previous post. Each task is $5 and I haven’t been disappointed yet. I even had one auto-program a response every time someone follows me on twitter. Give it a try: https://twitter.com/NeilOstroff
If everything they’ve done is true (and they show you links to verify their work) then in about three months I’m going to be receiving tens of thousand of hits a day on my blog and Author’s Den site. I’ve hired about thirty of these programmers at a cost of $150, who do everything from setting up search engine optimization, to pinging, to programming tens of thousands of back links, and seo links, and placing my URL’s into directories… I don’t even know what the heck they’re doing, but supposedly, I should get crazy traffic in a few months. All I know, is that there are a lot of out-of-work programming geniuses out there with nothing to do all day but code.
I feel very set for success and I am already getting impatient for the results. This should be a very interesting year ahead. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com

Starting now!

It’s done! I’ve just put money into promotion. A pretty good chunk, actually. I’m starting with Kindle Nation Daily site. I’ve done some research and heard a lot of positive things about this site and what it can do for your sales. They even have a statistics page that shows you all the books whose ranking went down after placing ads. I signed up for two campaigns. One, the bigger one, won’t start until March, which is fine because hopefully there’ll be many more Kindle owners by then. The second should hit sometime next week. I’ll announce it. I also bought my first fiverr.com promotion. For five bucks this guy says he’ll place my blog link on his sites and utube channels that have 50,000 followers. I mean, for five bucks why not. I’ll know instantly if my page views go up. Next up, is contacting Substance books and getting that search engine optimization underway. Then, if off to update and work on my Facebook author page and Amazon Central page. Gotta get all the new reviews and descriptions in. I also bought three ads on the Goodreads pay-per-click. We’ll see how that works out. I was also thinking of contacting a newspaper to see if they’d like to do an article on all this I’m doing. Who knows? So, my credit card is a little hot right now, but my soul feels good. If this doesn’t work out at least I can say I tried my best in the golden age of indie publishing.
Just a quick update. I’m at 12,500 words for IMAGINATION. And here’s a link to a review that I discovered it by accident. It’s not too bad.
http://rt19writers.blogspot.com/2011/...

my blog:
http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com

Going for it!!

My brother sent me an article the other day that inspired me beyond belief. I’ll attach it at the end of this post. Basically, it’s the story of a self-published success. I know, I know, I’ve read a thousand of them, also. But this one struck me different, mainly because this author did everything I have done to market and promote with one exception. She used the pay promotion on her sites and I have not. See, I’ve been mistakenly foolish with my numbers. I was putting book sales in perspective to an advertising budget, stupidly thinking I’d have to sell a Hell of a lot of books to recoup my investment. And that is a true fact. I’m gonna need a lot of sales. However, and even more important, I didn’t think about exposure and what that exposure could do to my sales in the long run. So, I’ve decided to ‘go for it!” and put a pretty large chunk of money into my promotional efforts. I feel I’m in a good place for this investment with eight novels available for sale and a strong network of author sites that I belong to. I’m ready to explode. I’ve decided to go with three different programs to begin right after Christmas when everyone has a new Kindle. The first is Goodreads click advertising. The exposure is huge with Goodreads since they have over 6,600,000 members. They will place your ad on appropriate genre pages and expose you to @ 150,000 readers. The drawback is that it costs per click. We’ll see how this goes. I’m going to invest a few hundred in it. The next is Substance Books. They have to accept your work to begin promoting it. I’m not sure exactly what they do because it has to do with search engine optimization and getting your book found on the internet. I research them heavily and discovered that they’ve been around for more than ten years and I found no negative comments. So, they must be doing something right. The last thing is a site I recently discovered call fiverr.com. It’s a mega list of people that provide services for $5. I’ve never used it, but for a hundred bucks I can get twenty services. These include people putting hundreds of likes on a book or Facebook page, writing reviews, and posting your links to hundreds of people. This is more a novelty of ‘see-what-happens’. My experiment with the article hasn’t shown any significant results. I’m still getting about fifty hits a day on Author’s Den and my blog hasn’t acquired any mass numbers, either. There’s still a few days left of its circulation so we’ll see what happens. And as for my latest novel IMAGINATION, I hit the 10,000 word mark and the story is beginning to write itself. Love when that happens.
Here’s the article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001...
my blog
http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
my site
http://www.authorsden.com/neilostroff

Love the interview!

Been doing the interview thing a lot lately and I think it’s starting to pay off. Not only does my name come up more often in search engines but I’m noticing visits to my blog and website are increasing. Of course, this could also be the result of my article experiment, which I’m waiting for the final stats. Speaking of my Author’s Den website, I recently signed on with GoDaddy to build a website myself that I can update, and let me tell you, it’s not nearly as easy as they claim. I spent several hours putting together something that remotely looks like a site, but doesn’t compare to what I have now. A call to customer service is in order.
One thing happened yesterday that I think is a little strange. I check Kindle sales daily and I noticed yesterday that someone bought AFTER on Kindle and then returned it. I find this a little unsettling. For all my books, you can read the summary or look inside the book and read the first few pages. If it entices than you must spend $1.25, that’s right, a whole $1.25 to read the book! Why would someone go through the trouble of buying it and then the hassle of returning it when they have every opportunity to sample for free and then decide? I just hope it doesn’t the book suck, because I’ve had some pretty good reviews so far.
Anyway, here’s my latest interview. Hope you enjoy it and take a look at my books.

http://alilofdisndat.blogspot.com/201...

Writing is easy

Do you know if you write a page a day that within one year you will have written a book? How many times have I heard that one? If that one book takes a year to write then the revision process would have to take many years. Truth is, writing a first draft is the easy part. I can usually belt one out in a few months. But the revision; forgetta’bout it. That’s the time consuming stuff, though I am getting better at it as I get older (and hopefully wiser). I’m also getting better as a writer. Ideas come more easily after so many years of living in my ideas and the process of getting them on paper is less time-consuming. For my new novel, I’m finding the plot twists are coming naturally and I’ve had quite a few ‘aha!’ moments in the last few days. Here’s a little secret about starting a new novel. Don’t worry about the perfect first chapter or getting that perfect first line. Just start jotting down a story. Through most of my books, I’ve completed about half of the novel when I usually go back and write new intro’s that incorporate the original intro’s, if that makes any sense. For instance, I thought I had the perfect intro for my latest. A shocking, get-right-into-the-action first chapter, when a few hours ago I came up with a much better start. One that the reader won’t be able to not turn the page. My original beginning is now chapter two. But, that intro catapulted me into the story so I could build a base. As of this post, I hit the 10,000 word mark and have a pile of notes about how the novel will progress. But since I don’t outline, I’m not sure what exactly will happen. The fun of this project is that with IMAGINATION anything can.

my blog:
http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com

Getting it done

Hit 6,000 words today on my new novel. It's an easy and exciting write because anything can happen in a world that isn't real. I see the book getting a little deep in the philosophical area once the characters begin to realize the nature of their existences and how it all could just disappear. We'll see where the story takes me. Right now, I'm still developing characters and relationships and setting the scene for a wild ride through the possible and impossible.