Find summer reading at the Beach Book Blast!

I’ve blogged before about the 99-cent price point. Yes, I still think it sucks. But what about free?

Have no doubt, I think that free sucks harder. But so does selling nothing, which is what had been happening lately to AOTC. No one is buying because no one knows the title exists. Neither have I had any takers on the book blog circuit, more than likely because over eleven thousand novels a month are uploaded to Amazon and bury my title further into the stack of available reading.

Advertising is a possibility, but advertising costs money, and my objective is to make it instead of spend it. Once I have three or four titles in the marketplace, advertising will be a viable option, but not now. I have one route toward getting the word out, and that is to leverage KDP Select’s free promotion days through Amazon. How many titles are in free promotion at any given time? Thousands.

There’s a optimum strategy to free promotion. Websites exist that cater to letting their readers know about free selections available, and they understandably have quite a lot of them. I have done all that, plus added another element to the marketing push: cross promotion.

Enter the WG2E Street Team, the brainchild of author Alicia Street. In addition to website promotion, we are able to access each other’s Twitter follows and Facebook friends to amplify the reach of our announcements.

I pondered the best time to use my five free promotion days (that are the main benefit of joining KDP Select as an Amazon-exclusive author) when Tamara Ward posted a suggestion on the WG2E Street Team message board about teaming up for a free promotion. I threw in, and so did a bunch of others.

Over a dozen authors (so far) and more than twenty titles are being offered for free (which sucks) or at a reduced 99-cent price (which also sucks). Money is not the objective however. Readers are the objective. Reader’s become fans if what you write is good enough, and I trust the uniform opinions of the six readers who so far have left 5-star reviews on the AOTC feedback page.

The sequel to AOTC, The Britteridge Heresy, is halfway through main edit and is on schedule to be published this summer. God willing, there will be total strangers who have digested AOTC by then and are eager to see “what happens next”. Reviews are another possible benefit. I highlight what reviews can mean to an indie author in the end matter of AOTC, as I will in every novel. More reviews mean more visibility on Amazon, and it appears that in the new publishing paradigm, this is how one obtains them.

So, check out the Beach Book Blast May 23 through the 25th. You will see a variety of titles and genres, and a variety of hopes from authors who work every bit as hard as I do. Help them out if you can. We all deserve it.

Choose to love, -DA