Getting the word out
Publicity isn’t easy. Thousands of new eBooks come out every month and poking your head out of that crowd takes effort and a huge amount of luck.
The first major blocker to gaining traction might be a lack of review on Amazon. People use reviews as a gauge of quality, and quite rightly. I’d think twice about buying an unreviewed book. You might think “I know, I’ll get all my friends and family to review it”and this might help in terms of numbers, just a few gushing reviews raises suspicions for many potential buyers. Additionally I’ve heard, but not seen, that reviews from people in your social circle can be removed by the great Amazon machine.
The best route is honest reviews, but these can be trickier to get as they will generally come from people you don’t know and this is where, at first at least, you might have to go begging. My first step was to start contacting bloggers. This is time consuming and a lot won’t get back to you. Additionally many of them have huge wait lists for reviews, but it’s worth it as you’ll generally get a good, in depth review that’s posted to Amazon, Goodreads and social media. Based on various sources I’ve pulled together a list of about 200 blog sites that I’m working through to get in touch with. Each one has received an offer of a free copy of Entangled Earth and a KU link in case they want to use that (helpful for page reads!).
So far I’ve had 4 reviews come out of that work, which is a lot better than nothing!
The holy grail is natural reviews from random people who’ve bought the book. This will take a while, and from what I’ve read you might get one review from every 1000 downloads. This is where the KDP free days is helpful. Every 90 days I set the price of Entangled Earth to free for 5 days and, alongside a huge publicity drive on all the “free ebook deals” websites I can find, I see a huge spike in downloads (over 400 on my last weekend). The main aim of this is to get the book in people’s hands and hopefully drive some good word of mouth and eventually reviews.
The long term goal is to get to 30 and then 50 reviews on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. This is where Entangled Earth will start being promoted naturally by Amazon (apparently). At time of writing I’m sat at 1 review on Amazon.com and 4 on Amazon.co.uk, so we’re still a way away, but all those blogger e-mails will start to pay off eventually… I hope.
So, in conclusion, if you read a book, give it a quick review on Amazon. It helps massively and I for one would love you even more than I do now.
