Kate Kelly's Blog, page 8

The Red Rock Promotion Experiment and where I go next.

The results of the Red Rock publicity and promotion experiment are in, and I’ve been analysing the results. Hmmm.

Red Rock was originally published in September 2013 through a traditional publisher and I had all the advantages of having a marketing team and a designated publicist helping me. I have spoken elsewhere on this blog about the promotional activities which we did.

For the re-release I avoided repeating those, although with future books there are definitely options I can pursue. But I did...

Countdown Deal for Earth Day

April the 22nd is Earth Day. A perfect opportunity to promote Red Rock. And also to test out Kindle countdown deals.

So for one week in the run up to Earth day, from the 15th - 22nd April, Red Rock will be available for the reduced price of 99p (UK) and 99c (US).

I will do my best to promote it on social media during this time. Let's see if I get an uptick in sales.

Marketing Red Rock – a plan for promotion

I don’t intend doing a great deal of marketing and promotion for Red Rock. This is a re-release and in my mind it’s already had its day. But rather than simply press publish and leave it there to gather dust, I’ve decided to do a few things to give it a boost. It will be interesting to see which, if any of these, result in an uptick in sales.

1. Author social media accounts, twitter, Instagram, other? In the end I decided to set up an author Instagram account. I then generated a set of promotiona...

Formatting for Kindle and Print: A very simple guide.

 

Here is a very simple checklist for formatting your book for publication using Amazon. This is for both kindle and print. Make sure that before you start this stage that your novel had been fully edited and proofed.

Formatting for Kindle:

•         Clean document:  Ctrl A to select all. Set to ‘normal’ from headings section.

•         Set up title page, copyright etc format to centre set book title to Title, other text to normal.

•         Insert hyperlinks.

•         Inset page break at end of sect...

Red Rock (new) Cover Reveal

 Today I am delighted to share with you - the new cover for Red Rock!

A few tips for generating book cover and promotional artwork on MidJourney

Using MidJourney to generate artwork in support of my forthcoming self-publishing adventures has been a lot of fun. I’ve learned a lot along the way and I’m going to share a few tips with you. I hope, if you’re going to give MidJourney a try, that you find them useful.

1.    Discord channel: Set up your own Discord Channel and then invite the bot to it. This will enable you to keep all your images in one place and to easily find earlier prompts if you decide to generate further variations or upsc...

Artwork for Red Rock using MidJourney

 The self-publishing journey for red Rock continues.

Since Red Rock has already been professionally edited my first major task is to generate artwork and create a cover. There are two cover formats required. One is a simple cover for the kindle edition and the other is the full wrap around cover for the print edition. I also need to generate supporting artwork for use in promotional activities.

To do this I took out a subscription to MidJourney, the AI art generator that runs on Discord. When you ...

Self Publishing Red Rock

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts I now have my rights back for Red Rock and I intend to self publish it. I hope it will be the first of many, and I will be sharing the process with you as I go.

I will be republishing Red Rock under the name Kate Kelly which is how it first appeared. But I also have a second author pen name, KM Kelly under which The Sleepers was published. I intend to keep both these going. Children’s books will join Red Rock under Kate Kelly and my adult fiction will join The ...

Midjourney

I recently discovered the Midjourney bot and have been having much fun playing around with it and using it to try to come up with covers for my books!

If you haven’t already come across it, Midjourney runs on Discord. You give it a text prompt and the bot generates AI artwork based on your prompt. There are a few tricks you can use – setting the aspect ratio or different types of lighting or render to help generate a better and more specific image. And of course lots of self-published authors are...

The Lifecycle of a Book

Today I received my rights back for Red Rock, almost nine years to the week since it was published. For now it is still available on Amazon, but it probably won’t be long before it is taken down. And then it will go back to being unpublished once again.

But this isn’t the end. I have a clean edited copy so at some point in the not too distant future I will self publish it on to Amazon, possibly along with a couple of other titles that I wrote but never sold – books that I believe in, even though ...