How to Boost Book Sales in Slow Seasons

The general rule for indie authors is: publish often. With each new book release, there’s a considerable uptick in sales, not just for the new book, but for others in the series. If an author can manage to stay relevant in Amazon’s algorithm, that is, stay high on author or genre rankings, they can capitalize on that success for longer.

Simply put: consistent releases lead to consistent sales. Ultimately, if you want to make money as an author, this is what you have to do.

But what about those long stretches of time when authors are unable to release fast enough?

I am currently going through a period like that. My latest release was months ago. With two completed novels in the editing stage and three stories in the writing stage, I have a lot in the pipeline, but nothing coming out just now. Hopefully I can get two releases in the next couple of months – and ideally two more after that before 2017 ends, but that’s still a ways off.

The question is: how do I make money now?

Small pushes help. Getting indie reviewers or bloggers to share something about the book never hurts. It’ll give you a little push, but bloggers may not always make their push on a timetable that works to your benefit. Sometimes it takes bloggers months to get to you, if even at all.

Freelance writing also provides a small boost. You won’t get rich from freelancing – and often these are one-time paid gigs (rather than pay for every unit sold, like books), but it’ll help give you a bit more cash for the time-being. Often freelance writing is easy and pays promptly. For more information on that, I wrote a brief piece about magazine writing here on this blog: HOW TO WRITE FOR MAGAZINES AND GET PAID.

Another great trick is to get your work in collected editions. If you can get your books into boxes sets or collections, you can get a huge boost, not just from direct sales of the collection, but from additional exposure to your work. Unfortunately, these opportunities do not always arise. Finding other authors to join in a boxed set is heavily dependent on your own ability to network with other writers and find those opportunities, which may or may not even be available at that time.

So what works best?

The real trick, from my experience, is in short sales. Put your book out there for $0.99 or even free for a brief time like a weekend, a three day period, or a holiday. Small price reductions or free releases will increase your sales by a huge margin in a short period of time.

Granted, you won’t make any money directly from putting your book out there for free. But if you have series, putting out the first book for free is a great way to sell the second. In fact, many authors put their first books out for $0.99 for that exact reason. It’s the same reason I permanently have my preview collection available for free on Smashwords. Free stuff sells paid stuff. It’s as easy as that.

Sites like BKnights or, to an extent, Thunderclap or Headtalker, are a great way to promote these sales (especially BKnights). Thunderclap and Headtalker are a bit more difficult, as a lot of the promo work relies on you and your networking efforts, whereas BKnights does most of the work for you for a low price.

Coupling a promo site like the ones listed above with a price reduction, even for a brief time, can give you a boost that may last several days longer than the sale itself. It won’t get you into new release territory. Nothing will. New releases are still the best way for authors to make money. But sales like these are better than nothing, especially in long stretches of “dead zone”.