Secrets of Self-publishing and eBook promotion – Part 2

In the first part of this article, I shared a little of my own limited experience in the world of Indie-publishing and explained how, no matter how good your book may be, like any product, its success (unless you are exceptionally lucky) will depend on how effectively you market and promote it. With this in mind, two weeks ago I published via twitter, Facebook and a few other on-line forums, the link to a quick anonymous Author Survey. Since then, I have had responses from 33 authors, 26 of whom are self-published. 12 of the 33 respondents have sold over 5000 books, 5 have sold over 10,000, 2 over 50,000 and just 1 over 100,000. Statisticians among you will no doubt point out that this may not necessarily be a representative sample and of course there are many different ways in which the following data could be interpreted, but I feel it provides some useful insights nonetheless. It should come as no surprise that almost all of the respondents have published their work in Amazon Kindle format. Just over half also offer other eBook formats and a whopping 71% have also published in paperback, although this may have been for earlier books – over half of the respondents published their first books over a year ago and 5 of them over 4 years ago. I then presented a number of marketing channels which are open to authors and asked them to rate the relative effectiveness of each. Now, one thing that’s important to note here...