Nick Stephenson's Blog, page 7

Promo Power for Authors – free book giveaways, price reductions, and targeted advertising. What works?

March was an absolutely wild month for me. Not only did I (finally) publish my first novel in the Leopold Blake series of thrillers, but I watched in abject stupor as it catapulted up the sales rankings to hit the top 500 books on the planet. For those of you who don’t think that’s a big deal, I’ll put it this way: for 24 glorious hours, I was outselling several James Patterson, James Rollins, Patricia Cornwell, and Kathy Reichs books. That’s seriously just insane.

However, like most seriously...

Find your Zen – the art of sublime writing with author Robert Crawford

“Apollo is smiling down on us tonight. He’s gotten with the times and has traded his lyre for a plugged-in Strat. He’s playing through me, through all of us, pleasingly pounding the marrow in our bones. It’s that kind of night when even chaotic feedback is exploitable and my vibrating skeleton recycles that energy through my fingers. Maybe Apollo had a hand in helping Jimi Hendrix control and incorporate feedback. But he and perhaps all the gods are on our side tonight.” Robert Crawford, from...

The Power of the Freebie – Why Authors should give away their work

Okay, before I get caught in a maelstrom of hate mail, let me clarify: for those authors who sell their work on Amazon’s Kindle platform, Bezos the Great and Powerful (founder of the site) allows writers to offer each of their titles for free, for up to five days, every three months. In return, the author must agree to offer those freebie titles exclusively to Amazon in digital format for the duration of those ninety days. After that, the author can opt out. This program is called “KDP Select...

Magic, Mysticism, and Marketing – success stories with author Leeland Artra

Today, we’ve got quite a treat in store for all you literature fans, fellow authors, and those of you who stumbled across the site by accident while searching for cheap prescription medicine and articles about Justin Bieber (there, I got those keywords in). Don’t go anywhere, you’ll want to read this: Leeland Artra, author of the mind-bogglingly successful Golden Threads trilogy (book one, Thread Slivers is available now) is joining us to tell us a little bit about his book, and the tactics h...

Departed – Leopold Blake #2, Cover Art Revealed

First of all, thanks to all of you who signed up for my email list, and who downloaded a copy of Panic (book #1 in the Leopold Blake series). I hope you all enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it (that’s a lot, by the way). Panic is now up for sale at Amazon, and I’ll be running another free giveaway between March 9 – March 13th, so if you didn’t get a chance to pick up a free copy this time round, you’ve got another opportunity to take a look.

You can check out the book on Amazon...

Indecent Exposure – get your name out there and promote, promote, promote!

So, the first book in the Leopold Blake series of thrillers is all done – you can get a free copy here – and I’ve had my marketing hat on for a week or so, putting all the puzzle pieces together and making my puppets dance in a suitably sinister fashion. The pay off? Well, we’re nowhere near done yet, but so far in the last 24 hours:

Panic has been featured on the front page of scribd.com – a content-sharing website with over 4 million daily viewers:

I’ve been interviewed over at www.kelseyketc...

The Joy of the One-Liner

After a particularly merciless evening with the delete key (and a sorrowful glass of whisky) I find myself with a more astute respect for that ever-long staple of the movie and literature world – the one-liner. From Bond to Balzac, the best films (and books) revel in a sense of the slightly absurd, and never take themselves too seriously. That being said, here are a few choice zingers from my current work in progress that have now been (thankfully) removed, and sent kicking and screaming to t...

Make your book stand out: it’s a big, scary world out there.

A quick and dirty look at the State of the Union on Amazon’s kindle platform and what bestsellers have in common. Data taken from Amazon.com, anIDATE study on ebook trends from 2012-2015 and a report on sales ranking interpretations from writersguidetopublishing.com and figures are correct as of January 2013. Here we go:

I’d love to dig deeper into the relationship between customer reviews, quality covers, blurbs and their effect on a book’s sales ranking, but Amazon doesn’t make all this info...

Interview with David VanDyke: Author, Editor, and Trained Killing Machine

Hi David – thanks for joining us today for a quick peek into your work, and I’m sure some scandalous details about your personal life…

Thanks, Nick, great to be here. All my scandals are deeply buried in my younger days before social media, thank God, so as Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) once said, “I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it and you can’t prove a thing.” Or was that Bart Simpson?

No salacious secrets you want to share with the world? Oh well, it was worth a shot. On to the real questions, t...

Promotional Marketing – increase your odds of success

Having read the previous post, you will now have a potential bestseller available for sale. But nobody’s going to buy it unless they know it exists – so how do you maximise your chances of selling once you’ve published? Let’s take a look….

Promotion.This is the tricky bit. Getting your book page in front of as many potential readers as possible, to maximise the number of purchases you will get. Easier said than done, especially when nobody has any “magic formula” and trends shift as often as t...