Inspired by @jo zebedee 's wonderful paid promotion site breakdown, I thought I'd offer my own free e-book promotion incident as a case study in case anyone can find anything useful here.
First off, I'm trying to avoid shameless self promotion, but a little background is in order to understand this post. So let me get it out of the way now: My book is in the historical/ steampunk/ gunpowder fantasy genre and is put out on KDP. I have intentionally not included a link to it because this is just meant as background (though I am aware I have a link in my signature).
Being completely oblivious to and avoidant of marketing, and without any web presence whatsoever (facebook/ twitter), I at first watched the MSWL twitter handle/ site (here). I won't get into this site too much, but they have a "pub tip" tab which led me down a rabbit hole of blogs where I was advised numerous times to have a website. So I built one via Wix.
That complete and my marketing knowledge now utterly expended, I turned to google with a "ebook promotion" search. The two results I paid the most attention to were "How to get an eBook to #1 on Amazon" and "79+ Free Book Promotion Sites..."
You can read those two links if you'd like, but my major takeaways were I needed to find a sub-genre in Amazon I could break into the top 100 on by selecting on that was not too popular (from the first link) and to use as many free ebook promotion sites as possible (second link).
Finding a sub-genre to break into was not too difficult since my book fits into Historical Fantasy (I told you it was pertinent info), so that was the first one I picked. Though my protag could be considered Young Adult, after looking over those top 100 and seeing their sales rank (explained in that first of the two links), I decided my second sub-genre should be Epic. Yes, that put me up against GoT and LOTR, but it kept me from competing with Harry Potter, which I can only hope was the right decision.
My sub-genres picked, I then added "steampunk," "historical fantasy" and "gunpowder fantasy" to my search terms. Note: Two weeks later, after discovering this forum and reading up on better search terms (sorry, too lazy to go back and look up that thread) I have since added "strong female," "western," and "new."
And now, because this post is already WAY too long, I'll continue my story below in an answer to my own post. Because I firmly believe too much text cuts down on people actually wanting to read what I write.
First off, I'm trying to avoid shameless self promotion, but a little background is in order to understand this post. So let me get it out of the way now: My book is in the historical/ steampunk/ gunpowder fantasy genre and is put out on KDP. I have intentionally not included a link to it because this is just meant as background (though I am aware I have a link in my signature).
Being completely oblivious to and avoidant of marketing, and without any web presence whatsoever (facebook/ twitter), I at first watched the MSWL twitter handle/ site (here). I won't get into this site too much, but they have a "pub tip" tab which led me down a rabbit hole of blogs where I was advised numerous times to have a website. So I built one via Wix.
That complete and my marketing knowledge now utterly expended, I turned to google with a "ebook promotion" search. The two results I paid the most attention to were "How to get an eBook to #1 on Amazon" and "79+ Free Book Promotion Sites..."
You can read those two links if you'd like, but my major takeaways were I needed to find a sub-genre in Amazon I could break into the top 100 on by selecting on that was not too popular (from the first link) and to use as many free ebook promotion sites as possible (second link).
Finding a sub-genre to break into was not too difficult since my book fits into Historical Fantasy (I told you it was pertinent info), so that was the first one I picked. Though my protag could be considered Young Adult, after looking over those top 100 and seeing their sales rank (explained in that first of the two links), I decided my second sub-genre should be Epic. Yes, that put me up against GoT and LOTR, but it kept me from competing with Harry Potter, which I can only hope was the right decision.
My sub-genres picked, I then added "steampunk," "historical fantasy" and "gunpowder fantasy" to my search terms. Note: Two weeks later, after discovering this forum and reading up on better search terms (sorry, too lazy to go back and look up that thread) I have since added "strong female," "western," and "new."
And now, because this post is already WAY too long, I'll continue my story below in an answer to my own post. Because I firmly believe too much text cuts down on people actually wanting to read what I write.
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