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Some people out in the world wide web may have noticed some new clothes on old books, including a name change for my novel, Loathsome, Dark, and Deep. Yes, I took it to the courthouse, filled out the appropriate paperwork, and now it has a new name: The Forest of Ruined Men. Why? It's a bit more marketable. I think.

Okay. I'm not a marketing genius. I'm not even a writing genius, but I write. And revise. And write some more. And re--well, you gather the general idea. What I know is this: since coming back to writing, all my earnings are going to charity. I used to drop a fair bit in the community pot before, but now all of it--all my sales, Smashwords earnings, KDP sales, etc., goes to help the uninsured of Douglas County receive health care.

This reluctant salesman finds it a whole helluva lot easier to ask folks to spend money if I know that money is going to do something positive. The nickels and dimes for which I begged before mean little to me, but my chosen beneficiary, Health Care Access, can do so much good with my money. Why Health Care Access? Why health care for the uninsured? I thought everyone had insurance now?

No.

Health Care Access does good work here at home. It's a cause in which I believe--and it makes it so much easier to spend time and energy selling books. My nickels and dimes can become diabetes treatment for someone without insurance or the resources to purchase it. My nickels and dimes mean early cancer detection so someone can qualify for state aid and treatment. I believe we have a duty to help everyone access quality health care, and I'm starting in my hometown.

So yes. This is what I'm doing.

And here's more of what I've done to help what I'm doing:




It's like they're a happy family now... a series even... and guess what? I'm laying groundwork for a third "Sons of Chaos" novella. It's going to be a cold one.

And you know what? I'd love it if you bought an ebook or read anything I've written--but sending some love to Health Care Access is beautiful, too, and you don't even need an e-reader.

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I don't know about you, but Twitter intimidates me. Thousands of tweets come from every direction unless you sort them, and if you want to reach a target audience, how do you do it? Other people know much more about Twitter than I do, but as an independent mystery author I am looking for ways to promote my work effectively. Hash tags (#) are a way to assign topics to your messages, and here are some common ones that may be suitable for marketing:

#mysteries
#mystery
#novels
#writing

Can you think of

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Seven Lively Steps to Selling a Kindle or Smashwords/ebooks
                                     by Robert W. Walker
               ...a highly recommended lists of Do’s and Don’ts.

1. Do NOT price your book high thinking you will make more money and more sales at the high end. A $25 hardcover sell of a book in the paper world does not put two dollars in your pocket, whereas a 2.99 Kindle title does. Multiply that by a hundred sales on kindle as opposed to ten hardcovers and you get a glimpse of the new sell through reality in the virtual world.

#1 DO price your ebook at the low end. In fact, the #1 best thing you can do is to make a kindle reader a low-ball offer; it cannot be too low for Kindle readers; they really like FREE books, so go figure LOW. Getting into five and six bucks is HIGH. Almost all of mine are priced at 1.99 or 2.99 but when selling a thousand in a month as I did last month, this is good news that my books are set at low low low prices. It may on the surface appear counter intuitive to slice your price so deeply, but with a book at seven and eight dollars—the same book—it will not MOVE. You might sell one, two, even three books in a given month at this price, maybe. I speak from experience of having several kindle titles with price controlled via the publisher and they have sold a whopping NOTHING. So in essence, gaining a thousand new readers and making a killing at the low pricing is working out just fine as a new business model for this author.

2. Do NOT use a cliched or lame or limp title or cover art of the same nature.

#2. DO work up an interesting title; give it thought and shop it around to friends and ask for suggestions. Work at creating a title that grabs the reader, and as for cover art, get a pro graphic artist working on it and keep it relatively simple and straightforward. Complex seldom works on a book cover.

3. Do NOT ignore getting blurbs and reviews thinking they're unimportant for ebooks, because nothing could be further from the truth.

#3. DO blurbs and reviews of your ebook help sell books? Indeed yes. How do you get blurbs? Reach out to authors who write in your genre; you'd be surprised how many Yes's you can get by putting in the effort of asking. A lot of heavy hitter authors do respond to such requests, espcially if you have met them at a conference or quote from their keynote address~ in short, don't be shy and be passionate about your work, champion it.

4. Do NOT fail to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite your book's description. It is of great importance and not to be skimmed over.

#4. DO by all means make your book description the most important short-short you will ever write, the story about your story. It is so important as the segway to the book itself. Imagine what your dream of the perfect copy on the back of your book must read like. Get in as many of the 5W's as you can: Who, What, Where, When, Why and maybe How as these relate to the story. Name names, use details of character and setting for instance.

5. Do NOT make errors or missteps in your description of the book. If a grammar problem exist in this paragraph of description, readers will imagine the worse about your text.

#5. DO by all means rewrite over and over until it is as polished as a jewel.

6. Do NOT ignore the final formatting on your book; do not assume it is pristine from top to bottom.

#6. DO closely check the formatting after the html conversion and look over your entire book to be certain the reformatting has not thrown in a lot of WingNut stuff. People who buy and read and run into this kind of problem in the midst of the story really detest it, and they talk to their friends. They will talk more ab

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If you’re a children’s author - or if you write books for grownups - you’ll want to attend this special FREE teleseminar tomorrow night when Yvonne Perry will talk about tips for marketing your books online.

Yvonne Perry is the author of a new e-book called Book Marketing in the Digital Age, Online Promotion Made Easy, and tomorrow night she’ll give tips about successful online book promotion. Plus, she’ll answer any questions you might have about marketing your books online.

Register for this exciting FREE teleseminar and ask your question about online book promotion HERE, then take part in the teleseminar tomorrow night to get the answers to your questions.

book marketing, ebook marketing, online book promotion, Yvonne Perry

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