David Meredith's Blog - Posts Tagged "technique"
How to Get Picked Up By Quality Book Promotion Sites & Scoring Those Early Reviews Using Twitter
First of all a disclaimer: I was not paid for these comments by any of the entities mentioned, nor was I provided any good or service of monetary value in exchange for my comments. The opinions expressed below are my own.
I ran a free KDP promotion for my book, Aaru back at the end of March. It was a three day promotion, and I offered my Kindle eBook on consecutive days through Book Cave, Book Sends, and Books Read Freely as well as a Facebook ad campaign through my FB writing website. I'll say in advance, I have always been skeptical of paid services for anything IndyPub related because there are so many bogus promotion sites out there that just want to take your money without much demonstrable benefit. However, these sites came highly recommended, so I was willing to give them a try just to see if any or all of them were worth my time.
Over the course of the promotion I got just under 3,000 downloads and the novel hit #2 for Kindle New Adult & College Fantasy, #4 for Kindle SciFi, #4 for Kindle Paranormal/Urban Fantasy, and it peaked at #93 among all Kindle Books. Also, I'm still getting a pretty steady stream of KENP reads every day since, which was not the case before this promotion.
Needless to say I was pleased with the results, so good on the above sites for actually delivering on their promises! However, I was further impressed, because even though these are paid services, it appears they are also legitimately selective about which works they choose for promotion. The service they provide is not actually targeted toward authors. Instead, their business model is focused on building membership among readers by providing quality eBooks at a heavily discounted rate or for free. This is great for authors in the sense that if your book is selected, you are likely to see some rather robust download activity on Amazon (especially if the eBook is free) and increase your exposure and readership. However, the downside then is that it is also fairly competitive to get picked up. After reading a large number of comments on Goodreads regarding authors' struggles with getting accepted to these types of services, I think what I did most right (without any conscious planning or skill at all before hand to be perfectly honest - Huzzah for stupid, dumb luck and happenstance!) was I didn't try to run the promotion the day, the week, or even the month the book came out. The result was it had many more than the above sites' minimum of required positive reviews.
Aaru came out in July 2017. The promotion was March 2018, so I had eight months to promote on my own and get reviews. By the time I submitted to the above sites, I already had over 80 reviews on Goodreads and in the 40s on Amazon (with star-ratings of 3.84 and 4.2 respectively). All three of the companies mentioned got back to me with approval within less than an hour of submitting, and I think their excitement was based upon the book's preexisting appeal demonstrated through a fairly large number of positive reviews. So just get a bunch of reviews first. Easy right?
I know getting reviews is a major challenge for many authors. Goodreads is inundated with Indy authors begging people to review their work, and I would guess from personal experience, begging not very successfully. Book Review blogs can be a great resource, but Googling individual blogs is time consuming. The blogs that pop up on the first few search pages are deluged with review requests so unlikely to take on many new volumes, and a large number are inactive. Even when you can find lists of review blogs, they are often out of date and suffer from the same problems already mentioned. So, what to do?
Let me now outline a method for scoring reviews I have heavily used for my first two books with what I think is a fair degree of success, (Aaru has over 100 GR reviews and ratings and my first book The Reflections of Queen Snow White has over 350). If you stick with this method for the long haul and do it regularly, it will save you time, frustration, and (assuming your work is actually good and publisher ready - vitally important caveat) you will achieve much better results. I have done some advertising for Aaru on FB with mixed results, but the bulk of my returns in terms of getting those initial reviews was probably 95% or better through the use of Twitter and E-mail.
First, make sure your query is tight (concise request with vital book statistics, professional sounding blurb). Have a standard query letter for the book you want reviewed that you can copy, paste, and send quickly. Once you get in a rhythm you can get quite a few queries out in a relatively short period of time. Then log into Twitter. (NOTE: I prefer doing this on my laptop where I can have multiple windows open at the same time.).
On Twitter, search for bookish terms (for example "book reviewer," "Book blog," "Book Reviews", "vlog", "book blogger" or anything else similar). Then click on the "Latest" tab and scroll down the list of recent book review posts. By clicking on the links to new book reviews, it will take you to the reviewer's website or blog. Virtually all of them have submission guidelines and contact info (usally an e-mail address, contact form, or link to other social media) listed on their sites. This will then allow you to send requests to the reviewers who are most likely to accept your work AND to those you know are still active because they are posting review links to Twitter in real time, which cuts out virtually all the orphan blogs and prevents wasting time sending queries to inactive reviewers. Do this every day or two for a couple of hours - maybe send a dozen/couple dozen requests a day or more. If you do this regularly, and your work is good, you will also get a fairly steady stream of reviewers interested in checking it out.
I wish you well with your work and hope this helps!
Follow me on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/DavidMeredith...
or Goodreads!
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
I ran a free KDP promotion for my book, Aaru back at the end of March. It was a three day promotion, and I offered my Kindle eBook on consecutive days through Book Cave, Book Sends, and Books Read Freely as well as a Facebook ad campaign through my FB writing website. I'll say in advance, I have always been skeptical of paid services for anything IndyPub related because there are so many bogus promotion sites out there that just want to take your money without much demonstrable benefit. However, these sites came highly recommended, so I was willing to give them a try just to see if any or all of them were worth my time.
Over the course of the promotion I got just under 3,000 downloads and the novel hit #2 for Kindle New Adult & College Fantasy, #4 for Kindle SciFi, #4 for Kindle Paranormal/Urban Fantasy, and it peaked at #93 among all Kindle Books. Also, I'm still getting a pretty steady stream of KENP reads every day since, which was not the case before this promotion.
Needless to say I was pleased with the results, so good on the above sites for actually delivering on their promises! However, I was further impressed, because even though these are paid services, it appears they are also legitimately selective about which works they choose for promotion. The service they provide is not actually targeted toward authors. Instead, their business model is focused on building membership among readers by providing quality eBooks at a heavily discounted rate or for free. This is great for authors in the sense that if your book is selected, you are likely to see some rather robust download activity on Amazon (especially if the eBook is free) and increase your exposure and readership. However, the downside then is that it is also fairly competitive to get picked up. After reading a large number of comments on Goodreads regarding authors' struggles with getting accepted to these types of services, I think what I did most right (without any conscious planning or skill at all before hand to be perfectly honest - Huzzah for stupid, dumb luck and happenstance!) was I didn't try to run the promotion the day, the week, or even the month the book came out. The result was it had many more than the above sites' minimum of required positive reviews.
Aaru came out in July 2017. The promotion was March 2018, so I had eight months to promote on my own and get reviews. By the time I submitted to the above sites, I already had over 80 reviews on Goodreads and in the 40s on Amazon (with star-ratings of 3.84 and 4.2 respectively). All three of the companies mentioned got back to me with approval within less than an hour of submitting, and I think their excitement was based upon the book's preexisting appeal demonstrated through a fairly large number of positive reviews. So just get a bunch of reviews first. Easy right?
I know getting reviews is a major challenge for many authors. Goodreads is inundated with Indy authors begging people to review their work, and I would guess from personal experience, begging not very successfully. Book Review blogs can be a great resource, but Googling individual blogs is time consuming. The blogs that pop up on the first few search pages are deluged with review requests so unlikely to take on many new volumes, and a large number are inactive. Even when you can find lists of review blogs, they are often out of date and suffer from the same problems already mentioned. So, what to do?
Let me now outline a method for scoring reviews I have heavily used for my first two books with what I think is a fair degree of success, (Aaru has over 100 GR reviews and ratings and my first book The Reflections of Queen Snow White has over 350). If you stick with this method for the long haul and do it regularly, it will save you time, frustration, and (assuming your work is actually good and publisher ready - vitally important caveat) you will achieve much better results. I have done some advertising for Aaru on FB with mixed results, but the bulk of my returns in terms of getting those initial reviews was probably 95% or better through the use of Twitter and E-mail.
First, make sure your query is tight (concise request with vital book statistics, professional sounding blurb). Have a standard query letter for the book you want reviewed that you can copy, paste, and send quickly. Once you get in a rhythm you can get quite a few queries out in a relatively short period of time. Then log into Twitter. (NOTE: I prefer doing this on my laptop where I can have multiple windows open at the same time.).
On Twitter, search for bookish terms (for example "book reviewer," "Book blog," "Book Reviews", "vlog", "book blogger" or anything else similar). Then click on the "Latest" tab and scroll down the list of recent book review posts. By clicking on the links to new book reviews, it will take you to the reviewer's website or blog. Virtually all of them have submission guidelines and contact info (usally an e-mail address, contact form, or link to other social media) listed on their sites. This will then allow you to send requests to the reviewers who are most likely to accept your work AND to those you know are still active because they are posting review links to Twitter in real time, which cuts out virtually all the orphan blogs and prevents wasting time sending queries to inactive reviewers. Do this every day or two for a couple of hours - maybe send a dozen/couple dozen requests a day or more. If you do this regularly, and your work is good, you will also get a fairly steady stream of reviewers interested in checking it out.
I wish you well with your work and hope this helps!
Follow me on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/DavidMeredith...
or Goodreads!
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
